Piano & Horn
Wednesday, January 31, 2024 by Billy Roberts | Vision
When I first considered giving private lessons on a regular basis, my goal was to focus on French horn and voice. When I decided to offer piano lessons too, I printed business cards for Roberts Horn & Voice, which stated “Beginning to early advanced lessons in piano, French horn, and voice.” However, I recognized pretty quickly that I was selling myself short as a piano teacher. As I sorted out my priorities, it became clear that piano needed to be in the name of the business, but I took my time to process this change because I wanted to see how keeping piano and horn primary would affect my musical aspirations in general. I am not just swapping voice for piano as a secondary instrument behind horn. I have chosen to make horn and piano dual primary instruments. The piano is more useful to me in many ways, and I do feel energized after my arms and my mind have had a workout at the keys. However, the horn routine exercises my breathing and posture in ways that the piano cannot.
Although piano is the word that comes first, I am not playing horn any less. Although I do not do a daily routine with horn, I do have two to three days per week that I rest completely from piano practice to focus on the horn. Instead of struggling to balance time for horn, piano, and voice, this arrangement of priorities helps me to be better able to keep in touch with the skills necessary for both teaching and performing with the horn. Vocal work is limited to a short daily routine during the week and choir participation. Settling on a business name that leaves out “voice” has actually been very freeing, enabling me to enjoy singing simply for the joy of singing, whenever time allows. My goal is to maintain the highest level of professionalism in terms of balancing teaching and performing with my responsibilities to family, work outside of music, and other activities. Not only will this help me to enjoy teaching and performing more, it will ultimately allow me to better understand and meet the needs of each individual student. I’m looking forward to the opportunities that this renewed focus will bring.
Horn and Piano Win Out
Friday, June 30, 2023 by Billy Roberts | Vision
The past few months have helped me to gain a clear picture of where I’m headed moving forward with horn, voice and piano. As the school year came to a close, I envisioned myself spending more and more time with the horn and putting piano on the back burner. However, I really enjoyed the daily routine that I had developed with piano. At the beginning of June I attended a state conference for music teachers that helped to set my course for this month. I determined not to let piano go, even for just the summer. Since then, I’ve enjoyed learning new pieces, helping my kids with their piano lessons, and working with a beginning piano student that I started teaching several weeks ago. It’s also been rewarding to dust off music that I haven’t looked at in years. Nevertheless, I felt that horn should still have a prominent place in my musical pursuits.
As I wrestled over whether horn or piano should be my primary instrument, it became clear that I needed to rethink my approach to singing. For much of the past decade, I’ve felt the need to use vocalises or other daily exercises on a regular basis to keep my voice in shape. However, my thoughts changed a couple of weeks ago after I was asked how I would teach a young, beginning voice student. Simple melodies are the easiest way to get any student started in music, whether they are a vocal or instrumental student. I remembered how I used to sing for fun in the car, doing chores, or other times when I was by myself. I realized that if I could just lighten up on my approach to singing, I could have plenty of teaching opportunities focusing on horn and piano. Those two instruments are a handful in themselves.
Over the next couple of weeks, various appointments and meetings in the afternoon made it impossible to practice horn more than every other day. That was short term, but as I realized that I could be happy with just three full one-hour sessions of horn practice per week, I felt that I should continue keeping piano my primary instrument indefinitely. The horn blog that I wrote two months ago was very helpful for me, because I do use the Warburton Buzzard for ten to twenty minutes every day now, and it definitely keeps me from having to have the extra time warming up that I use to experience when I skipped a day of horn practice. Three sessions per week with the actual horn seems to be enough to keep me at a level I can enjoy it. Consciously limiting my time with the horn enables me to set aside the hours I need for family and other things that are important to me.
I’ve never been successful at consistently practicing more than two instruments at a time, but the most musically productive periods of my life have come when horn and piano were both primary. I’m content to let horn fill the niche that voice used to have in my life. Daily piano practice energizes me, keeps my fingers and arms in shape, and even helps my breathing, body, and mind. I’m finally accepting that, although singing is essential for me, I don’t have to do daily vocal work or make it harder than it has to be. Although the mechanics are a bit different, horn playing provides good breathing exercise and seems to help the body in the same ways that singing does. When all is going well, I feel like I’m singing through the horn and it’s an extension of my body. In the juggle between horn, piano, and voice, one thing is clear to me at this stage of life: horn and piano win out.
Competing Priorities
Monday, March 20, 2023 by Billy Roberts | Vision
Eleven months ago, I wrote that singing helps my horn playing, and vice versa. In the past year, as I’ve juggled competing priorities, I’ve gone back and forth on whether voice or French horn should be my primary musical pursuit. A couple of months ago, as I was mulling over a David Crenshaw online course that helped me to sort out priorities, I realized that piano was a more valuable asset in terms of how marketable it would make me and how it could help me grow as a musician. As I prayed over this and sought direction, I soon found an opportunity to begin accompanying again. I have greatly enjoyed being back in a classroom setting with a choir.
Since that time, I’ve gained new appreciation for the role that piano has had throughout my life as a basis for all of my other musical endeavors. Now it is no big deal for me to set aside potential time with the French horn or voice in order to get extra practice time with the piano. I spend at least twenty minutes a day on piano fundamentals at the beginning of my lunch hour. When I started putting piano first in my music practice routines, I began to get clearer direction as to how to proceed with horn and voice. Although French horn has been getting the most attention for most of the past two years, I realized that returning to a short daily vocal routine makes more sense than trying to do a longer session with horn one day and voice the next day.
When I gave up the horn thirteen years ago to focus on voice, I felt that the French horn by nature demanded priority over other instruments, and that I could not play at a level I was happy with unless it was my only instrument. Since returning to the horn two years ago, I have come to a point in life where, for practical purposes, I can put piano first, voice second, French horn third and actually enjoy all three. Piano is the foundation, singing is essential, and the horn is a luxury, but regaining familiarity with the French horn has definitely enriched all of my other musical endeavors. Just as I’ve found ways to work my voice when I only have twenty minutes or so to spare, I’ve found similar ways to help my horn embouchure, which I will write about in a future blog.
After nearly a year of focusing on my day job and keeping music teaching in the back of my mind, my wife and I finally cleaned out our home studio this February so that I could teach the first adult student in our home. I had worked with high school students in a school setting, but having an adult student with a bit more musical experience than I was used to working with motivated me to examine my competing priorities. I thoroughly enjoyed the lesson, and it was confirmation that teaching private lessons is something that I want to do a lot more of. I’m thankful for how this past month of personal reflection has helped me to prioritize piano, French horn, and vocal work so that I can adequately practice each instrument on a regular basis.
