CornoColombia: Days 8-10

Our last days working in Colombia were spent at the National University's conservatory.  I worked with a variety of students through two afternoons.  On the first day, we warmed up together, and completed various technical exercises, such as on articulation, scales and arpeggios, and other standard concepts.  Then two student ensembles played for me.
First, a fairly advanced group sight-read a quartet.  We discussed together what could be done to improve the performance and then after some work on having the same articulations and intonation, they gave a mini-performance.  In addition to discussing how to fix these things in this situation (as in, in a rehearsal setting), we also talked about how to fix things in the context of an orchestral rehearsal in which you don't know the other players in the section and don't have the opportunity to rehearse independently from the ensemble.  So we discussed how to adjust your intonation to match other people's, and how to make the same stylistic choices without having to discuss anything verbally.  Watch this video of their second reading!

Next, a group of less advanced students played.  They told me they are the basic level, which I believe means they were in kind of a conservatory training program for older teenagers who weren't yet ready to enter the university.  In this group there was a huge range of levels, from some who could only play a few notes to students nearly on the level of the university players.  They played an easy quartet for me, and then we practiced making the note lengths the same across all parts and registers.

Coaching the intermediate group

To finish the day's work, a number of students then played for me in a master class format.  I tried to give general comments, however, so the students observing the class could also benefit from the ideas that I presented.  The horn professors at the University were watching my class and asked that I continue discussion of two specific ideas in my class the following day.
The second day, I worked with all the students on these two ideas.  First, there is an exercise that my teacher loves called Path, which aids you to find the center of the note and play with more stability, without missing notes.  It also allows you more flexibility, since it develops smooth transitions between registers.  This easily segued into the second idea, about adjustments in mouthpiece angling between registers.  The teacher asked that I work on these ideas because he was not familiar with these exercises, though of course he had been working on the problem with his students in other ways.  At the end of the class, I answered lots of questions from the students, about everything from my personal warm-up routine to who my favorite horn players are, and what I think about different alternate fingerings.
With the work in Colombia concluded, we were able to embrace Colombian culture by going out on the town that night. The next day we traveled back to our respective countries.
I am extremely grateful for the opportunities doing this project presented for me.  I feel like I was able to help a variety of students in this country, not just by teaching, but also by just sharing my ideas with them as a contrasting viewpoint to what they had been exposed to before.  I was also able to bring many books about horn playing to them that they had never seen before, or that were nearly impossible to find there.
I learned that in the first two programs I worked for, the main problems are difficult family situations, which make it difficult for the students to focus on their music making; and an inadequate student/teacher ratio, so that some students had major technical problems that had not yet been addressed on a personal level.  At the Universidad Nacional, the students were not publicly funded so some of them had difficulties buying things like oils to maintain their instruments.  Overall, however, the biggest problem was the lack of access to sheet music and high quality recordings.  Everywhere I went, everyone was amazed by the music that I brought and begged for the chance to copy them, even some books that were entirely in English.  The most popular books were the horn ensembles; Yuli, my host, told me that it's nearly impossible to find good arrangements for horn ensemble in Colombia.
I hope that I can continue my work for CornoColombia in the future.  I will seek further grant funding to buy books and other materials to send to these programs and the teachers that I met there, and possibly to return to Colombia to work more with all of these programs.  While I was there, I also learned about an international horn festival that will be taking place in Bogota this September or October.  They will invite a variety of international faculty members and guest soloists and I hope that I might be able to attend!