One of the oldest instruments and one of the most beloved has to be the horn! Chandra Cervantes, one of the most in-demand horn players in the DC area, tells all about its development and use in music, plus, she plays for us some iconic music on the horn. You can find videos and recordings of her playing on the show notes page at classicalbreakdown.org.
Show Notes
Chandra Cervantes
Listen to several albums that Chandra has appeared on here. Below are performances of her with Barclay Brass and Washington Symphonic Brass, her bio, plus something extra!
Learn more about Chandra Cervantes
A graduate of both Northwestern University and San Francisco Conservatory, Chandra Cervantes has held positions with The United States Army Field Band, Tulsa Philharmonic, Shanghai Broadcasting Symphony, and Civic Orchestra of Chicago. Now an active freelance musician in the Washington, DC/Baltimore area, she is a member of the Maryland Symphony Orchestra, American Pops Orchestra, Barclay Brass, Washington Symphonic Brass, and Inscape, a Grammy nominated chamber ensemble committed to presenting emerging American composers. Chandra also performs regularly with Wolf Trap Orchestra, Washington National Opera, Post Classical Ensemble, Baltimore Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, and as a Guest Artist with Seraph Brass and the Little River Band.
Chandra has been involved in several shows in the DC area including a production of Anastasia and Sunset Boulevard at the John F. Kennedy Center, Into the Woods at Ford’s Theater, Signature Theatre and the Kennedy Center, and She Loves Me and Ragtime at Signature Theatre. With the National Symphony Orchestra she has played on three international tours, performing across Europe, Poland, South America, Mexico, Trinidad, and Oman. Since 2020 Chandra has played and spoken at the Wintergreen Music Festival, collaborating with musicians from around the country.
While maintaining a private home studio, Chandra is also Professor of Horn at University of Maryland Baltimore County, Montgomery College, and Instructor of Horn at the Levine School of Music. She coached the DC Youth Orchestra’s top two orchestra’s sectionals for many years and was an instructor at MATS, a summer camp for adult musicians.
Her recordings include four with the Washington Symphonic Brass: The Edge, Classic Rock for Brass, Home for the Holidays and Trumpets Ring! Voices Sing!. In December of 2013 she recorded Marcos Galvany’s internationally successful opera Oh My Son. She is heard on the album Redes, a world premiere recording of the full Revuelatas score, with PostClassical Ensemble. With Maryland Symphony Orchestra she recorded for Sharon Isbin’s Affinity. Chandra has recorded three albums with Inscape: a new arrangement of Petrushka, released in 2015, an exciting collaboration with Phillip Glass, The Fall of the House of Usher, and an upcoming album including Barber’s Medea, recorded in November, 2021. Two pieces by Florence Price are available on YouTube, recorded with Barclay Brass, and with special permission.
During the pandemic Chandra pursued two additional degrees in both Psychology and Business Administration.
She regularly performs with orchestras and chamber ensembles, but as we see in the performance below, Chandra plays all styles!
Transcript
00:00:00
John Banther: I'm John Banther, and this is Classical Breakdown. From WETA Classical in Washington, we are your guide to classical music. In this episode, I'm joined by in- demand DC area horn player, Chandra Cervantes. She's held positions with the United States Army Field Band and the Shanghai Broadcasting Symphony among others. She's also performed extensively with the National Symphony Orchestra, the Washington National Opera and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and she's currently a member of the Maryland Symphony Orchestra and Inscape. She also teaches at the University of Maryland Baltimore College. She tells us all about the horn, how it evolved over the centuries, the different sounds composers have embraced over time, and she plays for us some iconic music for the horn you don't want to miss. Welcome, Chandra. Thank you so much for coming in. I am so excited to learn everything about the horn that I think I've just been too afraid to ask.
00:00:59
Chandra Cervantes: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be on a podcast.
00:01:03
John Banther: Yes. Well, let's start with a question I like to ask I think in recent times, and that is, how would you describe your instrument, the horn, to someone who has never seen it before? Maybe they've never been to a concert of yours, they've never heard a great soundtrack to a movie, I don't know, how would you describe it?
00:01:21
Chandra Cervantes: Oh, wow. I was going to reference a movie soundtrack right away, because I think that's the moment when most people have heard a horn, whether they know they're hearing it or not. It's that instrument way in the back of an ensemble that's a really twisty, a brass instrument and often used as a decoration around the holidays. You've seen one, whether you know it or not.
00:01:45
John Banther: That's true. They tend to pop up around the holidays as ornaments or decorations.
00:01:51
Chandra Cervantes: Yes.
00:01:53
John Banther: Take us back in time then. When does the horn come about? Because as I've been thinking about this, it seems like it really is one of the oldest, one of the most original instruments.
00:02:03
Chandra Cervantes: Absolutely. It has a really ancient and beyond history, sort of evolved from playing on a shell, a conch shell or an animal horn all the way back into the shofar and eventually evolved into something of a brass instrument as a hunting horn, and then eventually to the form we see now.
00:02:31
John Banther: I heard that some of the original uses going to closer to our society in the last thousand years are, as these hunting horns to call and give directions to the other hunters, even the dogs could learn some of these, I guess, calls on the horn. Some of the first music we see written down is different shapes to mimic a horn call. I guess, yeah, if you're falling off your horse or getting off a lot, you might break this big animal horn, but if it's made out of a metal-
00:02:57
Chandra Cervantes: Out of metal, right. Then, they're able to sort of shape it in a way that makes it easier to carry.
00:03:03
John Banther: You're not stuck with the literal shape of however the animal grew their horn.
00:03:07
Chandra Cervantes: Exactly, right. That would be difficult to fall on.
00:03:10
John Banther: How does it make a sound? I imagine all other brass instruments, you're buzzing into a mouthpiece?
00:03:16
Chandra Cervantes: Yes. We have a mouthpiece like all the other brass instruments. It's a little bit different shape, a little smaller, but yes, same sort of concept of lots of air over vibrating lips.
00:03:31
John Banther: The mouthpiece shape, I'm not even totally familiar. I think you said it's shaped a little bit different. It's more funnel- shaped?
00:03:37
Chandra Cervantes: That's right, yes.
00:03:37
John Banther: Yeah, and for us, like trombone, trumpet, tuba, more of a bowl shape like a cereal bowl.
00:03:42
Chandra Cervantes: Exactly, yes.
00:03:44
John Banther: That probably contributes to the sound in some way, because I also notice on the mouthpiece, yours is so much smaller, the end of it. I guess you call it the throat or the boar. You can stick your mouthpiece, literally the end of it, into the small part of my mouthpiece.
00:04:00
Chandra Cervantes: Yes, it's a huge difference. It's very small. It makes it challenging to get all of your embouchure, which I'm sure we'll talk about, into that, but also this funnel type shape into the conical shape of the horn creates a unique sound other than the other brass instruments.
00:04:22
John Banther: That conical part sounds like it is a big important part of making it sound different than trumpet or trombone, which are cylindrical like a can of beans. It's the same size on the top versus the bottom.
00:04:35
Chandra Cervantes: That's right.
00:04:35
John Banther: Versus a cone, which is what our instruments are made out of.
00:04:37
Chandra Cervantes: Yes.
00:04:38
John Banther: Yours gets bigger once it leaves the mouthpiece the whole way through?
00:04:42
Chandra Cervantes: Yes, gradually grows into that, the large bell that you see. If you stretch it out, it's a huge number of feet. The horns we play now are double horns. There's two horns swished into one. When you stretch them out, it makes 25 feet or something. I'm not giving you exact numbers. It really makes this very unique sound that you don't hear on the cylindrical sound.
00:05:09
John Banther: I would also describe the sound as very rich and colorful and has more texture to it. I include my instrument in that too, because it's also conical compared to the trumpet and trombone. There's like a ripping sound you can get with a full section that you don't get with a full section of trumpets, for instance.
00:05:27
Chandra Cervantes: Yeah. There is sort of a variance and there's sort of a natural earthy quality about it.
00:05:35
John Banther: Earthy, I like that.
00:05:36
Chandra Cervantes: Yeah. I think that's a lot of where the natural horn idea came from. It was called a natural horn early days, and I think a lot of what we do now connects to that idea that they emerged out of something natural, you hear them in nature. Yeah, it's a very unique sound. We have a couple other things that make our sound unique. For one, we have our bells facing backwards, which if you have seen a horn, you've probably noticed and wondered why, and I think that's probably remnants of the hunting horn shape as well, where they needed it out of the way as they held it over their arm to ride a horse, so the bell faces back and I think that shape comes from there, so we have that.
00:06:20
John Banther: You don't want to be sitting on a horse and blow a trumpet in its ears.
00:06:23
Chandra Cervantes: That's right. Who knows how they would respond, yes. The bell is heading backwards, we have that, and then in addition, we put our hands into the bell and we get that question asked a lot, " Why do you put your hands in the bell?" That also comes from natural horn days when we didn't have valves, so we had to, in addition to our embouchure, use our hands to change the pitch if we wanted any sort of chromaticism at all.
00:06:52
John Banther: Mm- hmm. Let's start there with the natural horn. When you don't have any valves, and we're looking really at the Renaissance and the Baroque periods, it sounds like there's not much from the Renaissance, not much from the 17th century survives, but we do see the horn being used by Baroque composers like Telemann, who wrote a lot of different concertos. Start us there, the natural horn. There's no valves, so you're just using your hand, which I've heard a horn player say, " That's to keep the mouse inside the instrument." But you're using your hand to help your lips make some of these notes because you can't play all the notes in this time of Telemann and Bach. You can't just play all of the notes on the horn like you can on the piano.
00:07:35
Chandra Cervantes: Right, yeah. These natural horns were of a certain length, and from that length there's a playable harmonic series. Those are the only notes that you can make sound, and in order to move around to find those notes, you're using your embouchure and the size of that aperture and your air to change the pitches where you can. Then, you can add the hand in if you want to get some extra spice in there, some extra notes, but mostly, you can create what the length of the horn dictates.
00:08:09
John Banther: Literally, your horn, we'll try to put a picture as well on or some video on the show notes page at classicalbreakdown. org. But literally, your hand makes different movements or shapes inside the bell to subtly redirect this air.
00:08:22
Chandra Cervantes: That's right. It sits there regularly just to warm up the sound, that unique horn sound. It's there and then it can also affect just basic intonation, sharp or flat, whether we're sounding matching everybody else. Then, before the valves, I like to think of the knuckles as a little bit of a hinge. I'm no expert on natural horn and there are a lot of people who still make it work. I like the idea that we have valves now. I like the evolution, but I like to place my hand in a way thinking that my knuckles are hinged so that I can open or close my hand in that way. The different pitches are half open all the way close. There's just variations in that.
00:09:11
John Banther: It becomes automatic for you.
00:09:13
Chandra Cervantes: For someone who does that.
00:09:15
John Banther: We should say, you're talking about now someone who does this natural horn stuff. Not me, because it's a specialty thing.
00:09:23
Chandra Cervantes: Now, it's a specialty, yes. People can do amazing things with it, but I think most of us are pretty excited that valves happened and that there's some ease in that.
00:09:34
John Banther: Looking at some of the composers at this time period, like Telemann and Bach, they're writing for this natural horn with no valves. Telemann, it sounds like, loved the horn and grabbed it right away. Can you talk about how some of his music or maybe how the horn sounds in general, what's it doing within the orchestra or the ensemble?
00:09:53
Chandra Cervantes: Right. Early days, partly because of its limitations, it really didn't show up much in orchestral plane. It did start to appear probably in the, I don't know, is that the 1600s maybe?
00:10:06
John Banther: Mm-hmm.
00:10:07
Chandra Cervantes: Maybe earlier. Occasionally, but it seemed like maybe more of a prop on stage. You're playing the character of what you think a natural horn would be doing, and then, occasionally into the orchestra. But there wasn't a lot of capability as far as changing all the pitches and fitting in, so that's where all the different sizes of horns come in and eventually crooks to change the length of the horn, so you could add more notes as they were getting used more often. But yeah, it took a little while.
00:10:41
John Banther: Yeah. Let's talk about that for a second, because Telemann's writing these concertos, and it sounds like even as you're saying, as they're coming into this role with the orchestra, they're basically just continuing the idea of this hunting horn calls on horseback. It's very fanfare, declamatory- esque when the horn comes in. You mentioned crooks because one concerto was in D major, one by Bach that features horns is in F major. If you have just one horn, you're basically just playing in one key, but you have these crooks, it's like tubing you can take out and then put a shorter one or a longer one into play in a different key?
00:11:21
Chandra Cervantes: That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah. We were limited to that and the notes available with those links, so a lot of that early writing you hear it sounds, I like to compare them to Timpani parts in a way, where you're doing a lot of 1 5 1, there's only a certain range of notes that you can play. Yeah, that's the early sounds for sure.
00:11:46
John Banther: I think this is a point for us as modern musicians, I can kind of ... It's basically misery loves company, because I would bet a significant amount of money, Chandra, even though we've not seen or played with each other in a while, I guarantee at some point you have pulled over, stuck your hand in your case to make sure your mouthpiece is in your gig bag on the way to a concert or something, right?
00:12:10
Chandra Cervantes: That's true, yes.
00:12:11
John Banther: I lived with a natural horn player for a little bit and she pulled out these, she had these crooks and it's just like, that's insane. I'm going to break those. For us, when we show up to a gig, the fear is your mouthpiece is missing. That is literally, you're naked at your exam at school. You've shown up-
00:12:27
Chandra Cervantes: You're done.
00:12:28
John Banther: Congratulations, you are useless.
00:12:31
Chandra Cervantes: You can't play, yes, exactly.
00:12:31
John Banther: Yeah. You've locked your keys inside the spaceship-
00:12:34
Chandra Cervantes: That's right.
00:12:34
John Banther: ... and now you're stuck.
00:12:36
Chandra Cervantes: That's right. No, sounds available.
00:12:37
John Banther: I take some solace and good feelings that a couple of hundred years ago there were people stopping the horse digging through their back, " Oh gosh, do I have the G major crook?" Someone shows up to the gig, " Hey, Chandra, do you have another D major crook?"
00:12:53
Chandra Cervantes: That's probably true.
00:12:53
John Banther: " My horse stepped on mine."
00:12:56
Chandra Cervantes: Yeah, I love that.
00:12:57
John Banther: The stress, it continues.
00:12:59
Chandra Cervantes: It does. Now, it's gets music mouthpiece and then also the horns now, a lot of us have our bells cut off, so we have to reattach them when we take them out of the case.
00:13:08
John Banther: That's right.
00:13:09
Chandra Cervantes: That's another thing that I am terrified that I've forgotten, especially if my case feels a little bit lighter, somehow less music in there. " Do I have the bell?" Yeah.
00:13:20
John Banther: Yeah. Always look for that. When you see a horn player show up and they pull their horn out of the case, yeah, the bell and the body are separate parts and they'll screw them together.
00:13:31
Chandra Cervantes: That's right.
00:13:31
John Banther: Lots of 1 5 1, lots of declamatory type things. How does this change going into the classical area, the later part of the 1700s into the early 1800s? It sounds like we're stuck with the natural horn for a bit, but there's more being done for the horn in music.
00:13:51
Chandra Cervantes: Right. I think people were getting a little braver, more creative with some chromaticism with the hands. People were becoming virtuosic at it. You hear it at some of the Mozart's concertos. That's a lot of notes to make happen with just your lips and your hand positions. But it wasn't until the early 1800s that valves came about. Around 1815, 1814, somewhere in there, valves were added, which changed everything.
00:14:22
John Banther: We get more parts that use chromaticism that require the use of changing your hand. Sometimes it sounds like you're forcing the notes a little bit. You'll know you're hearing a recording of perhaps a symphony. I think I like the Hunting symphony by Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang's father. He wrote that in 1756. That has a lot of hunting horn aspects in it as well. Haydn's Horn Concerto in 1762, that one's very low- sounding, but when you're listening to these, you can tell is it natural horn or not? Because you'll hear some notes suddenly sound very, very different. Even thinking about Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, glorious horn parts. Almost everyone hears it with a modern horn today, but when you hear it with a natural horn, it is also glorious, but you'll hear sudden shifts in the sound because the whole section is having to do something to alter the sound to get the pitch to happen.
But then, we see with Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, now it's used in, well, as you said, all different parts in all different expressions, even though you might be limited by the chromaticism without valves. But as you said in the middle of the 1800s, we do get valves, and it sounds like that changes everything for composers.
00:15:37
Chandra Cervantes: It really does, and I think people started to pay attention to it a little bit more for that use. before, like we said, it was more of referencing their history where they came from, natural horn sound, that kind of thing, and then eventually, we're available to do whatever you can imagine. Although there were some composers, like Brahms for example, famously still loved the sound of the natural horn and preferred that you either play it with that vibe or even on a natural horn, he really liked that sound.
00:16:18
John Banther: That was like for 50 years after about, yeah.
00:16:19
Chandra Cervantes: That went on, yeah.
00:16:21
John Banther: The valves seem like power steering to me. You can race, you can drive without power steering, they did it back in the day, but you really want power steering. You want to be able to move your car and your steering wheel easily anyway, which you want, and now it sounds like with the valves, that makes it pretty, pretty simple. This is for all the instruments too, the brass. The trumpet gets valves. The tuba is invented with valves, basically. It's a big changing point, but especially for the horn.
00:16:52
Chandra Cervantes: Yeah, I like that comparison. That's funny, it does. Yes, it does make things easier. Although, essentially, what happens with valves for all of us, is that we have a bunch of different horns all mushed into one. Every valve combination creates a different length of horn, and on that length you can play a certain number of notes. You have to be able to, within one valve combination, cover a lot of range. You're still harkening back to that idea of a natural horn, but yes, it is just no comparison in my opinion.
00:17:27
John Banther: Some incredible works from this time period. One would be, I think, Schumann's Concertstück for four horns. Just the opening of that is just mesmerizing. Also, Richard Strauss, Wagner, Bruckner, everyone just starts writing. Mahler also later on. The horn is really rising into its own, but still very, very heroic I think.
00:17:52
Chandra Cervantes: Yeah, that was quite a heyday. All those composers just have written some of the most amazing, heroic, the lover, the hero in every sense, the villain. They're covering all of the personalities now and just have written some of the most glorious music you can hear.
00:18:14
John Banther: How do those parts compare as you just described? How do they compare to something like the trumpet, which is, we should mention the range as well. The range is huge on the horn more so than the trumpet basically, but how does it sound or how are the parts written differently for horn compared to trumpet you think?
00:18:37
Chandra Cervantes: Well, as you said, we're covering a lot more range. We say we have a section usually, so the orchestra eventually, Beethoven and beyond started to move into bigger horn section, so the standard horn section is forced, and within that, often, the first and third are playing high, second and fourth are playing low. That also speaking back to the time where you had to bring your right size crook, so you're operating in pairs of people who have matching crooks. There's four of us, first and third play high, the second and fourth play low, and so we're really covering a very broad range of, like you said. But then also, just the character. I think that the horn is used to represent so many different things in music, and so we have that flexibility as well with the very lyrical, gorgeous sounding moments. They're very technical and light and you think of, these are all Strauss, Mahler, they're bringing it all, but the beginning of Till, for example, where there's the mischievous character, so that we are able to address all those styles now.
00:19:50
John Banther: I think one of the big differences, and maybe you don't even notice this as a horn player, is how not auxiliary the horn sounds compared to trumpets, trombone, tuba, everyone else in the back row. Because when there's interaction with violins, when there's interaction with the woodwind section, if there's going to be a brass section interacting with it, it's almost always horn. Thinking of Bruckner 4, where there's so many moments where it's like the horn itself as a director on stage helping everyone shape lines. You don't really hear that with other instruments compared to the horn.
00:20:24
Chandra Cervantes: That's right. The horn has become the one to bridge the gap. A lot of our writing is either with the brass section where it's big and maybe loud, maybe fanfare light, all that kind of, " Oh, Bruckner has these lovely chorales, it's beautiful." But then, we also play lots of lines with the woodwind section, so we can have that lighter feel, more technical, more pure sound that will blend with the woodwinds a little bit better as well, so yeah, we do bridge that gap.
00:20:59
John Banther: Something else you mentioned, which is really unlike any section I think is, you said one and three is playing high and two and four is playing low. There's low horn playing, there's high horn playing, there's these different segments or distinctions that I'm not even totally fully aware of, but there's people who specialize in low horn, I guess because the range is so huge as well. There's some people who specialize in the higher playing or the lower playing?
00:21:26
Chandra Cervantes: I think yes, that has been that way for quite a while. But these days, I think it's changing. For one, I've played a lot of new compositions where maybe the message hasn't been shared, and so they'll write top- down, which seems sensible. First is high, then second, then third and low. If you're on fourth, you're low one way or another. But sometimes, I'll sit down to play a second part with a new composition and wonder, " Why am I playing so high? I'm ready to play low." But I would say that now, the level of playing has become so incredible. People can do anything. There's no limitations, there's no story about what you can and cannot do on the horn.
People are playing high, they're playing low. I don't think there's as much specializing unless you, I guess, sit in an orchestra section, where you're only going to play second horn for the rest of time. Then yes, obviously, you'll be specialized in that. But for me, for example, as a freelancer, I feel I need to be able to sit down and play whatever is there in front of me. If it's high, if it's low, if it's technical, if it's lyrical, if it's modern, stopped horn, all the things that happen, those all need to be available.
00:22:50
John Banther: It sounds like the trend with everything else in modern times, you have to do it all.
00:22:56
Chandra Cervantes: Do it all, I know. I feel things used to be simpler.
00:22:59
John Banther: Well, sticking with this time period and something like that, what about an assistant? Different countries and orchestras have different traditions, but for example, if you're playing maybe a big Bruckner Symphony, where the first horn player has a lot of solo parts, oftentimes, they will have an assistant, someone else playing that they can wave off to play parts that they don't need to play. They need to be ready for the big solos, the principal player.
00:23:24
Chandra Cervantes: That's right. That is something that the horn section does. I don't think that many other sections really operate that way. It's true. It can be really taxing to get through some of those bigger pieces and all of a sudden, as the soloist, you emerge and you want to be prepared and rested, so yes, the assistant will come to either cover you in spots where you're resting or to boost the volume at some point, so you don't have to play as loud. Yeah, basically just spelling you when you need to take a break, and that's for the first horn spot.
00:23:58
John Banther: I didn't even think about that too much in terms of dynamics as well. You can sit back a little bit and rest literally while you're playing, while they're playing a louder dynamic to make up for it.
00:24:08
Chandra Cervantes: Sure, yeah. Then, we're having to compensate for that if you want to boost the section all around, first different halls and what we're playing into with our backwards facing bell, so there's a lot of factors to consider as to how you're going to use an assistant.
00:24:25
John Banther: You mentioned double horn earlier. There's actually multiple kinds of horns. Explain that real quick because there's a single horn, there's a double horn. There's another one I'll talk to you afterwards, but what is that? A single horn and a double horn?
00:24:40
Chandra Cervantes: Right. Eventually, the horn settled into two different keys. There will be a single F or a single B flat. F is a longer instrument, so maybe more classically horn sound and comfortable in the lower registers, that warm quality. B flat is a smaller instrument, so it will be lending itself toward higher pitches, more pointed sound, more direct. The horns that we now play on as professionals are double horns, which essentially smushes those two together. Then, we have an extra valve, a thumb valve that we use to switch in between those two horns. As you're learning horn, you'll learn that from bottom of the staff down, you play on the F horn and from there up, you switch to B flat horn, we call it B horn, to make it easier.
00:25:39
John Banther: It's literally a whole extra set of tubing. When you push down the first valve, there's a set of tubing for the F horn, then a set for the B flat horn.
00:25:47
Chandra Cervantes: That's right, and so when you see the horn, you can see the valves. The valve slides stacked on top of each other. Now, there are even triple horns. They've been around for a while.
00:25:59
John Banther: Someone's trying to make money.
00:26:01
Chandra Cervantes: Well, I think they are. There's triple horns. I think they have a high F or a high E flat side even. There's a horn called a descant horn, which is a small horn. A triple horn is like that got stacked on as well. You have an additional thumb valve that switches you to the even higher register. Horn is notoriously difficult for picking out high notes. Even the composers love to write that. A triple horn just gives you that little bit of extra comfort level up there, still not easy.
00:26:39
John Banther: That's one of the hard things that many may not realize is, once you get higher up, what we call partials, they get smaller and smaller. If you look at a piano, look how big a difference is. It is between a string on the very, very low end and maybe even one next to it. It might be a couple inches shorter, but once you get up really high to the top part of those notes on the piano, maybe it's only a few millimeters of a difference in the string. Transfer this to a brass instrument like a horn, you have to be able to slot. It's almost like thinking about throwing a dart and you got to hit this one little spot.
00:27:13
Chandra Cervantes: Yeah, it is a lot like throwing a dart. It can be terrifying. But yeah, so it's so close together up there. We have the one valve combination down, and we're trained to be able to play different notes with just the slightest change of our embouchure, so somehow you have to put that valve down and pick the right one right in the middle there. It's challenging for sure.
00:27:36
John Banther: The embouchure, that's just that little opening we make with our lips and how we use our muscles to produce these sounds.
00:27:44
Chandra Cervantes: Right, how we set up our face and our lips to play. Then, there's the opening, the aperture there, that gets smaller or larger for higher or lower.
00:27:54
John Banther: I've not set it yet, but maybe people can infer, the horn is the diva of the back half of the orchestra, I think.
00:28:01
Chandra Cervantes: What are you saying?
00:28:02
John Banther: I say that because it's so, you're playing all these extraordinary parts. It's very difficult, it's getting more complicated. It just looks like if you're playing Bruckner 4, I'm not going to be looking at you and talking to you in your face five minutes before a concert. I'm going to look at the ground and just walk by Chandra before she plays Bruckner 4.
00:28:24
Chandra Cervantes: Oh my gosh, yes. That's true. It is really a delicate existence. We have our fragile egos and all of that. I think the story is that a good conductor knows not to address or look at a horn player before solos. Even if they're cueing them in, maybe they're not really going to make eye contact, because there's so much set up and mental gymnastics and physical aspects before you just play this one note out of nowhere that we need to be babied.
00:29:05
John Banther: You don't need to be looking at and trying to interpret a different facial expression coming at you from a conductor.
00:29:11
Chandra Cervantes: No, and just the timing of it. If you look away, then maybe you're not going to have to worry quite where they're going to hit, but yeah.
00:29:19
John Banther: It is often a very high- paid position, principal horn, by comparison.
00:29:23
Chandra Cervantes: Yes. It's a tricky one to fill that spot in orchestras. It takes a very, very specific type of person. You got to have some real courage and be able to deal with the day- to- day like on the spot pressure all the time, yeah.
00:29:44
John Banther: Let's go into the 20th century and how the horn is used today. I imagine a big part of the change is, well, we have movies.
00:29:54
Chandra Cervantes: Movies. Yes, I think movies have created some of the most fun, exciting repertoire we have on horn. John Williams, of course, which most people know. He's written for so many movies. It's sort of built in. Sometimes we don't even realize, " Oh, that was John Williams too." Everything was John Williams. He's written some incredible stuff for horn, which we all have so much fun playing.
00:30:19
John Banther: The horn is really running the gamut, doing everything to make different sounds in the 20th century. There is huge moments in film scores, heroic. It seems like it took a lot of cues also from opera. A lot of, of course, early music for film took cues from there, but especially the horn, how it's heroic. I think Lord of the Rings, there's all these-
00:30:45
Chandra Cervantes: So lush.
00:30:47
John Banther: Star Wars, yeah.
00:30:48
Chandra Cervantes: Yeah, Star Wars, it's everything. Lord of the Rings is really beautiful. I see it a lot where it's like they're covering vast landscapes and you can just hear this thick horn section, that natural sound again. I was thinking at some point, " How does horn show up in movies?" It really is, there was just a list of every kind of character that we show up, as you said. There's fanfare moments. There's these lyrical, like Princess Leia has this beautiful lyrical horn solo. There's the swashbuckling pirates and there's the dashing hero. That's the horn. Or even just solemn, forlorn movements. If there's a scene where, I don't know, someone has died or you hear that, it's just from out of nowhere dark, warm sound. We show up for all of it, and it makes it really fun to play.
00:31:55
John Banther: One type of sound and technique we haven't touched on, and I wonder if it's used a lot in the 20th century, and that is stopped horn. That's a totally different sound. I don't know anything other than I sit in rehearsals and I hear it. It sounds like your hand is just totally stuffed inside the bell, and it's just stopping all the air?
00:32:14
Chandra Cervantes: Yeah. Speaking of different characters, that's another one too. When we play stopped horn, it sounds like a buzzing bee. It creates that really sizzly, brassy sound. Sometimes it's referred to as brass mute, because if we aren't using our hand, there's also a mute that creates the same thing called brass mute. It's a tiny little brass mute. Now, they're made of other things as well, but with a tiny little bell of its own, and it gets that really buzzy sound. Yes, you're right though, we basically want to seal up the bell as well as we can. Then, we have to give that extra oomph to just drive the air through the instrument. But it also changes the length of the instrument when we do that essentially, so we have to use a different valve combination, so we have to transpose. We play the note, but we put down the valves for the half step lower.
00:33:16
John Banther: Okay, I didn't know that.
00:33:17
Chandra Cervantes: Yeah.
00:33:17
John Banther: Yeah.
00:33:19
Chandra Cervantes: If someone wanted to demonstrate, you'll hear as the hand is getting closed, just like they were doing before with the different amount of open and close to get different notes. As the hand is closing, sealing up that air, you hear the pitch change.
00:33:33
John Banther: Okay, I love it. I think we're going to hear you play in just a moment right after we take a quick break. Classical breakdown, your guide to classical music is brought to you by WETA Classical. Join us for the music anytime, day or night at wetaclassical. org, where you'll also find educational resources like take note, the WETA classical playlist and our blog, Classical Score. Find all that and more at wetaclassical. org. Okay. Chandra, now a moment I and I think everyone's been waiting for. We're excited to hear you play the horn. What's the first thing you're going to play for us?
00:34:18
Chandra Cervantes: The first thing that I chose was this Handel aria from Caesar in Egypt. It's called, the arrangement I'm playing, they gave it a title, I See a Huntsman, but it translates to How Silently, How Slyly.
00:34:33
John Banther: That was so beautiful, Chandra, and we're seeing the horn in all different kinds of roles already, as you're putting the horn in the spotlight here in an aria from Handel. Tell us a little bit about this and with the horn.
00:36:32
Chandra Cervantes: This is an arrangement that's just meant to be for solo horn and piano now. I thought this was interesting, because it is actually this in the opera, but a different key. It's an interesting use of horns, still sort of looking back at, " Oh, here's horn as the natural horn, the hunting horn," referencing that character. But actually having this very soloistic part, and then eventually we move into having it sit in the orchestra.
00:37:04
John Banther: One thing that grabbed me was how you, but also the sound of the horn works so well, in an aria like this compared to my instrument, for example. I think that's because, when you have those moments, the da- da- da- da-da-da, these sighs that happened in the music, they feel so natural and maybe more vocal- esque in a way, more compact. I think it's that compact nature of the sound that makes it sound much more naturally Baroque or much more in the style, I think compared to if a trumpet played it.
00:37:38
Chandra Cervantes: I think it's that idea again where horn covers a lot of different characters. But I also think that that horn, and maybe it is for other instruments as well, but I feel like it's very vocal. For a brief moment, I took a few lessons with the singer and some of the mechanics that they talk about the way that they're making sound resonate and moving air and where they're focusing and their face are really similar to what I think works on playing the horn as well. I think now we're making up for lost time. When this opera happened, we weren't getting really those kind of roles, and so it's really fun to get to play arrangements. Not just as this actually was representative of what was in the opera, but we also play a lot of transcriptions of other music, of arias, anything that we didn't get to play before, it's always fun to go back. Even like Bach cello suites, for example. I know a lot of instruments do that, but it's so fun to get to go back with what we have now and try to create those different characters.
00:38:46
John Banther: Being naturally vocalistic with the horn, I'm wondering, does your breath last the same amount of time when you're singing as you're playing the horn? Because it's so much higher, I feel you can play for a much longer time.
00:38:59
Chandra Cervantes: I guess I don't have a definitive answer for that. I think the phrasing, the range, the volume, whatever is involved is going to dictate that. I think the mechanics of the horn are slightly different in that sense, so I think with a singer, maybe you're thinking more about the lyrics and maybe that extends a phrase in a different way than we might need to breathe to make something work differently. I can't make that comparison exactly, but I imagine it's similar, uses a lot of air and a lot of support.
00:39:36
John Banther: What is the next thing you're going to play for us?
00:39:39
Chandra Cervantes: Okay. The next thing that I'm going to play is a brief little excerpt of Mahler's First Symphony in the 1st movement.
00:40:31
John Banther: Now, you're just showing off, Chandra, with this heroic Mahler stuff. That is I feel like what the horn is made for. This is one of the most glorious moments coming in the 1st movement, and it's just you're making me want to switch instruments.
00:40:48
Chandra Cervantes: Well, tuba does like to play some of the horn repertoire.
00:40:52
John Banther: Yes, that's true.
00:40:53
Chandra Cervantes: We're stealing from earlier, you're stealing from a ... yeah. I like playing this excerpt. I played the second part actually, so it doesn't go up quite as high as the first part. I really like that flashy technicality. That's something I've always enjoyed playing around with, and that's something that not everyone feels super comfortable with, especially when it comes to extended technique and double tonguing and things. It's that flash, it's the heroism of the horn. It really builds up into this huge moment, and yeah, it's exciting.
00:41:29
John Banther: Is there anything that Mahler does special or unique to horn in his symphonies compared to others at this time?
00:41:39
Chandra Cervantes: He's just so individual. I think it's maybe just pushing the horn to the limit of its capabilities.
00:41:48
John Banther: It's a big section.
00:41:50
Chandra Cervantes: Yes. He often uses a lot of horns. Some Mahler one, I think is, I'm blanking, eight maybe?
00:41:58
John Banther: But I have another question that relates to Mahler when people see, sometimes horns put their bells in the air.
00:42:05
Chandra Cervantes: All right.
00:42:06
John Banther: Bells up, bells up. What is this?
00:42:09
Chandra Cervantes: That's right. Bells up, so that literally just means that we lift our bells into the air while we're playing and it just brings ... well, it's the visual, that's exciting. But then also, the quality of sound changes. It's very vibrant, it's very piercing. Then, even at the end of Mahler 1, we stand up. We literally stand up on stage, the whole horn section, and that pretty much never happens.
00:42:37
John Banther: All this from a section that doesn't even want you to look at them when they enter. Here I am putting my instrument in the air out of, no, I'm going to stand up the orchestra.
00:42:47
Chandra Cervantes: Yeah.
00:42:48
John Banther: Anyone else would get fired if you just stood up and started playing in the orchestra.
00:42:50
Chandra Cervantes: I know.
00:42:51
John Banther: But that's a funny thing, that's just with horn, with Mahler especially, where I guess it just brings the sound up in terms of getting out over the orchestra. It propels it into the air more. It's huge.
00:43:07
Chandra Cervantes: It is huge and tricky.
00:43:07
John Banther: Okay. What is something else you can play for us?
00:43:09
Chandra Cervantes: I'm going to play another excerpt. It's a big horn call, a section horn call from Strauss, Don Juan.
00:43:56
John Banther: This sounds like another big glorious moment. Strauss uses the horns different than Mahler, and the more you listen to these two, you can hear how, well, it sounds very characteristic like you're playing a character here in the music.
00:44:10
Chandra Cervantes: That's right. He's famous for his tone poems, which are basically pieces that are trying to tell a specific story. This is Don Juan, the Lover, the Player. This is one of his big heroic moments. This one's fun because the whole horn section gets to do it. It's very lush, it's very lyric and thick and just full of character. I played a second part again. I guess I'm addicted to the second horn part, so it doesn't go quite as high at the end, but everything else is a unison horn section, so it really just comes to the fore all of a sudden.
00:44:57
John Banther: Do you ever get sick of playing music like this? For some people, myself included, if I listen to a lot of Strauss, it's like, " Okay, like this, but I need a little bit of a break." Or is it for the horn like, " I love this. I'm never going to stop playing this"?
00:45:14
Chandra Cervantes: I think that the latter. I think as a horn player, Strauss, Mahler, Brahms, there's certain composers that you can't really, I don't think you can get sick of. But the thing is, unless you're playing full- time in an orchestra, and even then, certain pieces don't come up all that often, so it's always a treat to get to. I haven't played a tone poem in a while in context. That's always such a pleasure. Mahler symphonies are always incredible. It's such a journey. Bruckner, oh my gosh. Some of my most poignant moments have been with Bruckner on stage. Yeah, I don't think I can get sick of it, but there's certainly a variety of other things to play that are also enjoyable.
00:46:04
John Banther: One of them, I imagine, might be some film score stuff.
00:46:08
Chandra Cervantes: Absolutely.
00:46:09
John Banther: I don't want you to leave here without playing something from a film score. You have to play something from perhaps John Williams?
00:46:18
Chandra Cervantes: Sure, of course. John Williams, he's the classic, and he's written so many amazing film scores and has horn music that has just, it's part of the repertoire now. This is just a little excerpt from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it's actually an arrangement written for a horn solo book. As a student, you're able to have an arrangement that maybe isn't quite as technically difficult as the orchestral parts themselves, but you still get the pleasure of playing the style and character.
You can hear in this arrangement that it's a little bit different rhythmically. That has to be simplified a little bit to be accessible to a wide range of levels. John Williams music can get really challenging, really technical, so this is a slightly simplified, but still get the same energy and fun out of it.
00:47:51
John Banther: Yeah. I think people don't realize how hard John Williams is, and especially the double- tonguing. That's when you are doing triple- tonguing in these very fast things that rip into little grace notes into an entrance. It's very, very difficult. The book you were talking about, it's like for horn and piano. You see these in music stores. If you play an instrument, you can walk in and see John Williams and it's like all these different tunes and you can just start playing all these tunes. It's a lot of fun, I do it.
00:48:24
Chandra Cervantes: I do it too, I love it. It's something that I really encourage in my students as well, because I want them to find something that is just fun for them to play, something they can connect to on a different level than just trying to learn the technical aspects of an instrument. It's great.
00:48:39
John Banther: But you'll just find some of the rhythms changed a little bit, maybe in a different key a little bit more.
00:48:45
Chandra Cervantes: That's (inaudible) .
00:48:46
John Banther: You don't have to be a professional principal horn player and some big symphony to play your favorite moments from Star Wars or something.
00:48:55
Chandra Cervantes: That's right. It's out there.
00:48:57
John Banther: I love it.
00:48:57
Chandra Cervantes: Everything's out there for you.
00:48:59
John Banther: Let's talk now about some of the groups that you've played with that you've been a member of. You were in the US Army Field Band, one of the premier military bands here in the DC area. I'm wondering, what did that entail? What was that job like? Your rank, I guess, all of that? Tell us about that.
00:49:21
Chandra Cervantes: Okay. Well, that is what landed me in this area. It is one of the special bands, and every military branch has a special band here in DC. Army actually has two. They have one that operates within the beltway out of Fort Meyer. Then, the field band that I was in is up at Fort Meade, and they essentially travel around the country playing concerts, so we're on the road. When I was in, and this has been a while back, but when I was in, I would say we were on the road probably for about four months of the year, broken up into a few different tours. As I was getting out, chamber music tours were starting to pop up as well. Who knows? It's probably developed even since then, but I did get an opportunity to travel with the horn quartet some. There was a lot of traveling. Didn't quite feel like you lived anywhere for a while.
00:50:23
John Banther: Because some of the military band jobs here are, yeah, you're here and you're never going anywhere else, and for some like you, it is, you are gone. You are on the road playing these concerts. I actually remember seeing the US Army Field Band at a festival or something. The touring is quite intense and there's probably a mission associated with that playing throughout the United States.
00:50:47
Chandra Cervantes: Yeah. I think, when I was doing it, I think we had different oversight then. We were basically advertising for the Army. We were a PR for the Army for sure, and we were out there reaching out to people who wouldn't necessarily see a concert, wouldn't necessarily have interaction with any military, so it was interesting. Honestly, I traveled the whole country. I've been to every state except for Hawaii. Still need to get to Hawaii, but I've been to every state. You've seen pockets of the country that you might not otherwise, and sometimes that was great, sometimes it was challenging, but that part was really interesting. Yeah, I felt like I got ... It felt valuable to bring something to people that they obviously were excited about and appreciated.
00:51:42
John Banther: How big is the horn section in a band compared to an orchestra?
00:51:48
Chandra Cervantes: It's really similar. A professional orchestra may carry five to six, and I think when I was in, there was about six, can't remember. But it was the same, operated in a very similar way, where someone would play assistant. We rotated around more, so we weren't necessarily just playing one spot all the time. Even also, I got to have the opportunity to solo with the band as well, which is very cool because as a freelancer standing in front of an orchestra or band soloing doesn't come up as often. That was an incredible experience, to go on the road with as the soloist as well. It was really fun.
00:52:36
John Banther: I don't even know this. Are the parts the same like in orchestra, one and three is high, two and four is low?
00:52:42
Chandra Cervantes: Generally, yes.
00:52:43
John Banther: Generally, okay, so that carried over into there.
00:52:46
Chandra Cervantes: Yes. We played a lot of orchestral rep as well. Now, there's just incredible arrangers around that can just make anything happen and back then too. We, in orchestra, often see things that cross over. We all play Stars and Stripes. We all play a lot of marches at certain occasions. There was one exciting one that sticks in my head from there, which I thought maybe it was even written for the field band, but I could be wrong. Anyway, it's called American Overture and it has a really fun horn rip. Kind of like the Don Juan, but faster. It has that really, it's very flashy, very fun to play on horn. Super challenging.
00:53:29
John Banther: You are also teaching as well, right?
00:53:32
Chandra Cervantes: Yes. I teach privately at home, but I also am the horn lecturer at UMBC and also teach at the Levine school.
00:53:45
John Banther: How have you seen that change or if there's been any changes over the years, like when I was in band, the tuba parts are so bad in terms of like, they're barely, not even that. It's just like a whole note rest for 16 measures, something like that, and now, there's more involvement. I'm wondering if you've seen any changes over the years?
00:54:05
Chandra Cervantes: Yeah. Of course, there's that expansion of repertoire. So many more people are writing for horns and so many more situations that horn can show up in. That's one thing I love about freelancing and teaching, is that there's such a variety in what I do. Even I was telling you, I just finished up a recording session, doing an album with a big brass ensemble. I spent the summer playing orchestra and some chamber music and opera. There's a lot of smaller groups like Inscape for example, that have mixed instrumentation and also doing shows. I've been doing a lot of shows in the area now, which is amazing. Being part of this whole, it's very exciting. There's just so many different things you can do on horn, and I think and hope that students coming out of college now have a broader perspective about what they're going to do in the world.
When I was graduating from school, it was sort of, you play in an orchestra or you're not a professional musician vibe. Obviously, that's not true. There's plenty of people making a living as a musician that don't have a regular spot somewhere. I really think around here for sure, the music scene thrives on freelancers. They definitely fill a significant role. I worry that people will have tunnel vision about what they can do, and I don't think that's the case as much anymore. I think it's still there, and that can be what someone wants. You want to go and be in an orchestra, awesome. Yeah, it's awesome.
But there is so many more ways to do it. People have become so creative. Here we are, you have your podcast and there's just so many different things you can do as a musician in music. I can't speak to all programs, but I do hope that there's a broader take on those possibilities and maybe talking about business or, I don't know, that kind of thing, entrepreneurship or whatever it is that inspires you to get out there and find your place in the world, I think is important.
I also think that just a holistic approach toward the person is really important now. So much of what we do is just having a good mental place. Mental preparation and confidence and also the physicality of it is really important, and we have to know how to take care of our bodies in that way, so that they're ready to step into whatever role. I do try to talk about that a lot with my students. Even the first thing I do every day, which is a popular exercise from an old book, Joseph Singer, which is just so basic, just half note, half note rest, half note, half note rest, long whole note. It's like this morning meditation and incorporating just this steady breathing. You hear that a lot now, people talking about different ways of breathing. That's just for life, but also being able to apply that to horror, I think and hope that that's how people are approaching it more now. It's a lot. It's a lot of competition. It's a struggle out there sometimes to get work.
00:57:45
John Banther: It's intense. It's harder than most people realize. I agree. I'm glad to see things moving in the direction that you described. Things being more holistic, more well- rounded, because for one, we're doing incredible things on instruments people weren't even really dreaming of back in the day.
00:58:02
Chandra Cervantes: Absolutely.
00:58:03
John Banther: And we're so busy. You're talking about you have to do everything, and you just mentioned the theater, playing in a band, playing orchestra, all these things, you have to be a chameleon. Grab a horn player from 1800 and put them in a week in your life. Chandra. They will have a panic attack immediately. It's like, " I have how many gigs or how many rehearsals I have to do right now?"
00:58:25
Chandra Cervantes: That could be a good movie. One of those very specific movie about musicians, maybe something after Mozart in the Jungle.
00:58:32
John Banther: I like that.
00:58:34
Chandra Cervantes: Time travel thing.
00:58:34
John Banther: Yeah, they've done that with stuff bring a caveman into now, bring a-
00:58:37
Chandra Cervantes: A guy with his crooks, "Here, play this."
00:58:40
John Banther: Shows up to rehearsal, " Do you have a D crook?" Well, this has been fantastic, Chandra. One question I like to ask to end it with is fun. If you don't have an answer that's an answer in itself, or if you have to change names or locations, I guess, what's been your wildest experience on stage or maybe broadly in music?
00:59:06
Chandra Cervantes: Wildest experience? Well, oh my gosh, it's hard to narrow it down. For some reason, what pops into my head are all these dire situations, which may be involve fire or falling parts of stage.
00:59:20
John Banther: Oh my gosh.
00:59:20
Chandra Cervantes: There's been that kind of wild. I will say, there's just been some really profound experiences. One of them right here with National Symphony and Bruckner and Eschenbach, just having that moment at the end of this connection with everybody and this sense of accomplishment and just the interpretation of the music feelings just, ugh. I am getting chills just thinking about it. Literally shed a tear on stage, and I don't know if that's wild, but it's certainly memorable.
00:59:58
John Banther: Well, those are the intense moments that stay with us forever, and point to the entire point of the art that is music and that is, someone talked about it recently in the podcast and that paintings and sculptures, that takes place within a space. Music, it takes place within time. It happens once and that will never happen again as it was. The people in the orchestra, the people in the audience, it's just a one time experience. I guess that's what keeps us going back for more. Throughout all the punishment and practicing, you want to chase another moment like that.
01:00:34
Chandra Cervantes: That's true. There's something really intoxicating about that impermanence and nothing will ever be like this again. Yeah, I can definitely relate to that. It's also was, just to say one more thing like post- COVID. I thought it was really heartening to realize how important music was to everybody. Maybe they realized it themselves, but I know that that was one of the things that people missed so much as a consumer and as a musician as well, that it is such an important part of people's everyday lives. I love that.
01:01:13
John Banther: Well, thank you so much, Chandra, for coming in and just sharing everything about the horn.
01:01:18
Chandra Cervantes: Thank you for having me. This was so much fun.
01:01:23
John Banther: Thanks for listening to Classical Breakdown, your guide to classical music. For more information on this episode, visit the show notes page at ClassicalBreakdown. org. You can send me comments and episode ideas to ClassicalBreakdown@WETA. org. If you enjoyed this episode, leave a review in your podcast app. I'm John Banther. Thanks for listening to Classical Breakdown from WETA Classical.