[eredengrin]

Yep, fully agree. "researched, documented, and analyzed properly" is a very particular method of doing things, and much of the music pedagogy is pretty much "it worked for me and I'm good (or it worked for them and they're good), so it will work for you too". Which is true sometimes and very much not true other times. It's often a very conservative field (not in the political way, but in the sense of resisting change/doing it the traditional way), so if someone comes in and actually studies things with a more scientific sort of approach, there's no guarantee it will be accepted or catch on.

At least in the family of brass instruments, I am fairly confident that they're largely still living in the dark ages and often don't understand fundamentally how the instrument is even played, at least from a scientific/physical perspective, so good luck if you end up with a teacher/professor who expects you to play one way when in reality you'd probably be much better off playing another way. This happened to me early on and I eventually learned that there has in fact been some pretty good research and documentation into brass technique but it's pretty niche and lots of music professors pretty much entirely disregard it because of the above point about it being a very conservative field. Donald Reinhardt is kind of the one who kicked off a lot of that movement but there's a number of people who have been carrying on that work.

If a similar thing has been happening in the piano field I wouldn't be at all surprised (although I do think that the brass field is particularly ripe for things to go rotten in this way just because the brass embouchure is particularly complicated and also hard to observe).

[AlbertCory]

Just as an aside: a couple years ago I was hanging with a professional French Horn player at the dog park, and never having played one, I thought it would be amusing to try it. I had no aspirations of really being good. I was honest with him about my lack of ambition and he was fine with it.

So I got one for cheap, and took a couple lessons from him. Damn, that thing is hard!

[eredengrin]

Very interesting, professional performers in the classical music world are relatively hard to come by since it's so competitive. It certainly takes a lot of practice to make it start to sound somewhat good and the professionals are on a whole other level. The amount of competition to get a job in a professional orchestra makes a google interview look like a piece of cake. Although I would say you probably got a bit unlucky with instrument choice, out of all the brass instruments, french horn is generally regarded as being the hardest. Haven't ever tried myself but I don't doubt it.

[AlbertCory]

Yeah, for sure. Scott is on The List (my term), those guys who've passed the test and can fill in for your sick Horn player. So he's played with almost every orchestra in the Bay Area.

He played at LucasFilm for a couple weeks, to build their library of sounds. He said for that one week, he made more money than his son in high tech.