The Value of Hurdles: French horn as "Hardest" Instrument

This post is for Tom Tucker. Tom was a high school cohort and friend (cousin of my sweetheart at the time, but that post would be much harder to write), and excellent French horn player. The high school orchestra that was definitely a cut above the rest. We tackled difficult pieces (I'll never forget sight reading the first violin part for Brahms' Academic Festival Overture). In retrospect, such challenges and the exhilaration of feeling we occasionally glimpsed the greatness of the masters, were the highlight of those troubled years.

On Kurt Anderson's Studio 360 this week, WNYC returned to the subject of Jasper Rees' A Devil to Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument. In finding one's way through the perils of competence-seeking, those of us with modest plodding talent needed help -- unique ways of seeing the challenges. One method entails ordering instruments from the most to the least difficult. At the time, I was certain that violin was at the top of that list. Just look at this Paganini piece, I'd say. There was animated argument over this; the orchestra's oboeist Larry made a convincing case for that instrument.

Years later when I confidently suggested trumpet to my youngest son, I learned the hard way -- accompanying him to every lesson -- that trumpet was "up there" somewhere, despite our first trumpet Dean Wallraff's making it look easy years before, when he played the solo trumpet parts from Bizet's L'Arlésienne suite. I thought clarinet to be easier at the time, but John Snavely would be the first to say otherwise.

Even host Kurt Anderson reported trying to switch to French horn from trumpet and finding that difficult, a transition that Rees confirms both in the interview and book.

Tom went on to considerable success playing in top ensembles in Los Angeles and elsewhere before moving east. When I saw him last year, he rued the fact that he had not been mentored, or had not been lucky enough, to break through to the very top (i.e., the L.A. Phil). I was sympathetic, but, in truth, much more interested in what it was like to play in the brass section for the beginning of Janacek's Sinfonietta. I am probably one of a few people on the planet who has attempted to use a snip of the introduction as a ring tone. Which was my way of saying that I had become disenchanted with the notion of overcoming instrument difficulty as a measure of success. Even a mediocre composer can make any instrument into a monster of unplayability through tempo, register switches, range, selection of key.

Rees' treatise on this subject, which rightly should merit only a short essay in the New Yorker rather than than a book length project, is a reminder that Tom's (pictured here in the early 70's) achievements are not to be so easily overlooked.

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The Value of Hurdles: French horn as "Hardest" Instrument