Name: Isabelle Roelofs Main subject: Master Natural Horn Research supervisor: Daniel Salbert Title: How (not) to write a Bb French Horn beginners method book Research question: How (not) to write a Bb French Horn beginners method book Summary of the results: As a horn teacher, I realize that the existing Dutch method books seem not to be written from the perspective of a beginning, young horn player. They show little consideration for the specific physical abilities of children at a young age when learning to play the horn, probably because those methods are mostly not written by a horn player. Therefore, I have researched the do's and don'ts behind writing a method book. If playing the exercises in a method is not physically feasible, it can lead to frustration for the student, which, in my opinion, is detrimental to the learning process. I have always learned that moments of success are crucial for the development and maintenance of motivation. I find these moments of success lacking in existing Dutch-language horn methods. I also believe that they progress too quickly to emphasize reading notation. I notice that my own students often prioritize correctness over musicality. I have critically examined and compared the available Dutch horn method books. Additionally, I interviewed fellow horn teachers to gather their perspectives. Furthermore, I attended a lesson for young horn players at BASIS (Royal Conservatory of the Hague) where auditory learning takes precedence. I am not the first to consider writing my own method. Other horn teachers have embarked on this journey, each with their unique motivations. My research has revealed that I am not the only one who has critical thoughts about the existing horn method books. A significant part of the interviewed teachers also emphasized this same point. Based on the obtained results, I have outlined the initial steps that, in my opinion, are necessary for a starting young horn player, along with the corresponding range of tones. Biography: Isabelle Roelofs, an accomplished horn player and dedicated music teacher, earned degrees in French Horn and Music Education from Codarts University. Graduating with honors from the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp, she is currently pursuing a Master's in Natural Horn at The Hague Conservatory with Teunis van der Zwart. Isabelle is the founder of Belle Musique (2018), where she imparts her musical knowledge through personalized horn lessons, shaping the future of horn players step by step.

Chapter 7: Playing without sheet music

I personally feel that the method books start with reading notation too quickly, combined with a whole lot of more theoretical information. Students are required to read musical notes before they have even played their first note on the horn.  Horn teacher Jeffrey Agrell says: Since the arrival of the conservatory and the written method book at the end of the 18th century (Paris, 1795), music pedagogy has centered around the written world and printed note. So much so, in fact, that we (the institution of music education) have largely forgotten the power of learning aurally - without printed material''. 1

Agrell says that the most effective way for beginners to learn to play an instrument is "sound before symbol."2

Reading music can certainly be a helpful tool, but I think that maybe we start reading notes too early. Or can it be that we start using a method book too early?

I asked Sarah Brien what her approch is in a first lesson and when her students start reading notes.

Brien: ''So, generally the first lesson I like to start on the mouthpiece only. And doing sort of exercises that are just getting the kids used to blowing and getting their muscles working and getting the lips to start making a noise. We often start before that actually doing just trying to get the mouth, practicing the shape and practicing the buzz itself without the mouthpiece being on the lips. And then try and practice them blowing through the mouthpiece and doing blowing exercises and then turning the mouthpiece around to the actual end and trying to buzz through the mouthpiece. And then I do not actually start doing pitches really with the kids until like the second lesson. And even then I do not say this is an E. I say like let us try and copy what i am playing and try and buzz this note back at me. And I say to them during the week. So, say the homework for the week is just to try and buzz on the mouthpiece basically at home. And just to get used to the feeling of what it is like to make a noise.''

In my view, learning an instrument is also about the process and not just the outcome. I seem to share these thoughts with Williams, who studied a lot of things to do with musicians' learning processes. Williams: ''Exactly. So we need to find ways to help not only children, any learner, to actually enjoy the process. So enjoy the doing of it. And that is particularly hard for brass instruments when you start to play one because just getting a note out takes a long time or can take a while. And to make it more, that it is reliable each time, it can be quite frustrating. So to make that interesting and fun is the challenge. How can we make it interesting and fun?''3

You can learn new things by doing and experiencing rather than solely from explanations. I think that learning to read musical notes too fast can lead to a focus that is too much on the technical aspects of playing, potentially neglecting the expressive elements of music. It is important to find a balance between technique and expression.

As I mentioned earlier, rarely has a student asked me if I found their playing beautiful. They seem to think in terms of right or wrong and often ask me if what they did was ''correct''.

In an interview Williams told me that lot of even young people are really fixated on not making mistakes. Williams: "Yeah, because people do not want to make mistakes, so they are focused on what they do not want. So we need to encourage them to think, 'What do we want?'''

In my opinion, learning to read musical notation too quickly places too much focus on the technical aspect of horn playing, leaving less attention to focus on producing aquality sound. Also, I think it can lead to stress and performance pressure, as children may feel that what they do is either right or wrong. Additionally, I believe it can limit children's creativity, as adhering strictly to what is written on paper leaves little room for personal input; they may feel dependent on what is notated.

How could this be different? Perhaps by playing by ear or even by improvising. Williams says: ''Many classical musicians do not often improvise, but improvisation activates brain areas tied to motivation, fostering spontaneity. Results from brain scans suggest that improvising activates areas in the brain associated with intrinsic motivation and inhibits areas associated with analysis and judgment.

• Start with one or two notes.

• ‘Play around’ with simple patterns and stylistic devices. • Imitate something that you heard.
• Try playing a phrase in different styles/keys/modes.''

I think especially the first tip is very useful for beginner students. It is a nice extra that it also seems to improve motivation.4 During an interview, I asked her how she would approach this. Williams: ''I just take a few notes, and we play them in different ways. Or I play it, and they play it back. Or even, I play a question, they play an answer, and we play around with a few notes just to warm up. It is a nice way of warming up. And I think also, this by ear is important, that we are not, especially with children, reading too much. That you are just playing sound, you do not care which it is. And some people can play quite high notes, but they do not know it is high, right? But they are just doing it. You just start there, you know, and you play with them and play around with the music. Even if it is very simple things, you say, "I only have a few, can only play a few notes." Then you play, you can play all kinds of and play games with it. Now we are going to play these few notes as if it is a little mouse, and now we are going to play them as if it is a big elephant, and now we are going to play them as, you know, in a dancey way, now we are going to play in a whispery way, right? So, they are already associating sound with music and meaning, okay, right? Even if they are going to play two notes, it is still music, right? So, I think because as soon as something is about meaning, the attention is there. If it is just about executing the right note, this is very technical.''

I asked her if this is also the way she would start, so without reading notes. Williams: "Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. So, just like Edwin Gordon, who was an American pedagogue and he talked about a thing called audiation. He said that when a child learns to talk, they first listen and then they start making babbling sounds as if they are talking, and then they start to formulate real words and sentences. And then they start to learn to read, and then they start to learn to write. And he suggests that we teach the way we teach music is often they start with reading, 'Yes, it is a G, it is there, yes, right?' So, rather than, 'let us just make a noise on our instrument or in our mouthpiece and now in the instrument,' and, 'You know, let us buzz around on our mouthpiece and now let us go make some elephant noises with our instrument to get them to feel the instrument and get them to—' and then you play a note, they play a note, and then, you know, and afterwards you say, 'Well, that is called a C, but it does not matter if you know that. They first are listening and with their body trying to find that themselves, and that is really liberating. that is much quicker than if they are learning notes from reading on a page. Reading is a different brain function than the motor learning of making a movement to make a sound, right? So, as soon as you start reading, you start thinking." [...]
So, imitation is the best way for children. They can see you do it, and you do it, and then they do it, and then you go along with that with whatever their capacities are. And then you play around with wherever they are, so they... and then you pull them up a bit. So, do not even tell. Too many words in Western teaching of music, we use too many words because learning to play music is not something that you do intellectually, you do it with your body. You learn by doing. So, we need to do, do, do, and make it fun.''

You can listen to or read the entire interview here

Jeffrey Agrell also writes about music, stating that it is supposed to be an aural art. Agrell: ''Music is supposed to be an aural art [...] Beginners start, for instance, with C major, and then add a flat or a sharp and go for F or G major which makes sense only graphically. [...] These keys are, in fact, the worst choices of the next keys for a beginning horn player because they are either too high or too low. If you think about that, what makes the most sense for the keys following C are either D-flat or B. If C is the most comfortable key, the next key should be right next to C. If you are teaching visually, D-flat has an appalling number of flats, and ditto for B with sharps. If you teach aurally, you learn everything first by ear and by kinesthetic feel, not by how it looks on the page. D-flat major is just as comfortable for the beginner as C; it just has some different fingerings. And D-flat minor is just as comfortable as D-flat major if played sans notation. The reason keys like D-flat and B are "difficult" is because we have exiled them for their visual complexity. They are not in fact difficult, just less familiar. The result is our current visually-based order of learning. [...] We limit beginners to only a few notes of the scale to start. [...] Instrumental music teaching has a number of traditions that, when examined closely, do not make a lot of sense. Why do something that either does not work or does not work very well? Two answers: 1. Tradition. We have always done it this way. [...] 2. Lack of imagination.''5

Agrell also recommends improvisation. Agrell says: "Improvisation simply means making your own decisions about what to play. After spending most of your practice time on music by someone else, it is very enjoyable to explore your own musicianship, technique, and emotions by creating your own."6

Klaske de Haan has written a research paper on aural horn teaching titled 'From Aural Teaching to Musical Literacy in the Elementary Horn Class: First steps to a Kodály-inspired horn method.'

On January 30th, I spent an afternoon observing her horn lessons during the first-year lesson of ''BASIS voor blazers'' at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. I was very curious to see how she teaches young horn players without any use of the traditional sheet music.

I would describe the approach as follows.

The lesson started without instruments, involving singing, clapping, and moving to music. The children were aware of the different rhythms in the songs and could distinguish between a rhythm and a heartbeat. Although no sheet music was used, a connection was made to how these rhythms appear in musical notation. Quarter notes and eighth notes were placed on circles (indicating the heartbeat), and the children could walk over these circles in time while singing the song.

Photo: ''muziekprogramma BASIS voor blazers'', royal conservatory of The Hague

Something I do not want to delve too deeply into, but have heard before, is that physical movement makes learning easier. I observed this aspect in the lesson as well. Exercises involved call-and-response, singing on relative solmisation. I noticed that most children seemed to have a good ear and could sing this accurately. I believe that the ability to sing is also beneficial for playing the horn. Envisioning how something should sound is essential on the horn. Various horn teachers have told me that singing is the purest form of making music and is, therefore, very helpful for horn players to sing through their pieces.

After this warm-up, the lesson continued with the French horns. Exercises were conducted where the teacher played a musical question on her horn, and the children were encouraged to respond. What I appreciate about such exercises is that there isn't really a right or wrong, allowing for various possibilities, and children can contribute with their own input. This involves a bit of self-discovery learning, where students are actively engaged in the learning process, and a bit of autonomy as they make their own choices in how they finish the song. I believe that such exercises foster engagement in the learning process.

Then, songs were played that had been sung earlier this afternoon. The children already knew how the song should sound; they were familiar with the rhythms and pitches. The pieces were played using different pitches. The children had, as Klaske herself calls it, 'tonal understanding' and seemed to have no difficulty with the (notated) F#. (My experience is that many students find playing flats and sharps difficult because they have to press different fingers and often do not think about it in time)

Then each child received a sheet with dots in different colors. They learned that red represents a Do, orange a Re, and blue an Mi. Each child had their card consisting of 4 tones. These were played consecutively in a circle.

Photo: ''muziekprogramma BASIS voor blazers'', royal conservatory of The Hague

What have I learned from this?

Teaching the basics of horn playing to children without sheet music is definitely possible.
The approach contributes to the development of a musical ear, making music less of a mathematical concept and more about listening and achieving a good sound.
Emphasizing playing by ear allows horn players to cultivate improvisation skills and feel more liberated to experiment, as there is no strict right or wrong. Sheet music often implies there is only one correct way.
Sudden sharps or flats in sheet music may appear 'different' and challenging when you are not used to them, but understanding them as part of a key becomes easier with a grasp of scales and note relationships.
Incorporating game elements, like the use of cards, offers diverse ways to explore the same notes. This versatility is applicable not only in group lessons, as demonstrated, but also in individual lessons. For instance, a child could receive 8 different cards, put them in a specific order, and play them.

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Isabelle Roelofs - How (not) to write a B♭ french horn beginners method book - 2024

Chapter 7: Playing without sheet music