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Seventh in a 10-part seriesTom Stacy, English hornist: 'Never gets old'
(CNN) -- This is the seventh entry in an exclusive 10-part series at CNN Career, on the working lives of musicians who play with the New York Philharmonic, one of the world's premiere symphony orchestras. This week's player: Tom Stacy, English horn. In the orchestra world, he is one of the most recognized players of the English horn - one of the least recognized instruments outside the orchestra world.
There isn't really anything "English" about the English horn: The instrument, a tenor oboe, takes its name from a Middle German word that meant both "English" and "angelic" - the predecessor of the English horn was thought to resemble the horns played by angels in medieval religious images. The English horn can sound decidedly less than angelic: it is a double-reed instrument, and the reeds, made laboriously by hand, are fickle and fragile. The reeds can crack; notes can crack. But Stacy's consistent virtuoso playing prompted Leonard Bernstein to call him "a poet among craftsmen." What is an English horn?An English horn is a lower-pitched oboe. In today's orchestra, there are usually two or three oboes, and one English horn. Most people don't know what an English horn is - they get it confused with the French horn. Once I was soloist in Greenwich, (Connecticut), and even the newspaper said I was a French horn player. So at the concert, I came out carrying a French horn - and I played the French horn, then the English horn, so the audience could hear the difference. Did you start off playing the English horn, or the oboe?I started playing piano when I was really young -- in grade school -- studying with my mother. My mother was a musician - she came as a public school music teacher to Augusta, Arkansas, a town of 3,000 people where I grew up. My mother played piano at home, and we went to concerts in Memphis and Little Rock - I had exposure to good music. I listened to the New York Philharmonic play on Sunday afternoons on the radio -- that's if it was raining; if it was sunny, I had to caddy for my father. But the rest of the time, I listened -- and I thought, "That would be something really fun to do!" Then in junior high school, a band started in Augusta -- some of the parents got together and underwrote the band director's salary, so they could have a band. I played the clarinet. But then I heard an oboe on a Rossini recording that my mother had, and I was intoxicated by that sound -- it was something magical. So I got a second-hand oboe. I was in the marching band by that time, playing a variety of things -- clarinet, saxophone, cymbals -- but not the oboe: One does not march with the oboe. I played the oboe outside of school. Then in junior high school, I heard an English horn -- and I liked the sound of that even better. So I sold my motorcycle, and bought an English horn. If you weren't playing oboe and English horn in school bands, how did you learn to play these instruments?I was almost all self-taught. The first real classes I had were when I went to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester (New York), when I was 18. I had to start over in some ways, technically, on the oboe. I had never thought about how I started the notes, or about breath support -- I just kind of did it. I didn't know what I was doing, but I caught on. My senior year (at Eastman), I auditioned for the New Orleans Symphony, and I got the job as English horn (player). I went there, played one year in New Orleans, then made kind of a lateral move to San Antonio for one year, then to Minneapolis -- in those days it was called the Minneapolis Symphony, and now it's called the Minnesota Orchestra. After Minnesota, I auditioned for the New York Philharmonic and came here, in '72. 'Always a mystery'How hard is the English horn to play?The challenge is making a beautiful sound as opposed to a nasal sound -- like the instrument has a cold, or like the reeds are made out of two razor blades instead of two pieces of cane.
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