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.
