r/frenchhorn • u/Eviebean819 • 10d ago
Morceu de Concert Part 2-Low C
Hello! I’m a sophomore in high-school and I have honor band audition season coming up soon, and I genuinely think Morceu de Concert is gonna be the death of me. 😢Specifically part two mvt 3 with the low C up to F. I can play all the notes individually fine, but to play the C I have to set my jaw/face in general so low that I can‘t “reach” the notes past an octave up. This part ruins the entire rest of mvt 3 so I just need to be able to get it right. It’s genuinely terrible no matter how much I practice and I have one week left before my recording audition. I have some time before my live audition though and I think in my brain I’ve just registered it as impossible. Please help!
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u/zigon2007 9d ago
I played this piece in senior year of HS for a recital, it's a heck of a challenge. This section is really an excercise in air control and how you approach the low register of the horn.
There are a few ways to play really low. It's relatively easy to do it just by setting the embouchure and hoping for the best. I remember a friend of mine who could roll out his lips and push double pedal tones; it worked, but it's impossible to approach or exit smoothly. Unfortunately that's a very natural way to do it for many people.
Working with a teacher would help a lot for this, as I can only imagine what your lips may be doing, but Im guessing you've relaxed your face as far as you can and switched to a puckered lip shape. An embouchure like that can produce low notes very naturally, but it is rather impossible to return to a normal set position from it without a full reset of the face.
That's probably not great to hear, but it's not that far of a leap to get to where you need to be. You've got this. The best piece of advice I've so far recieved on my low range was to focus on anchoring everything. It's natural to flop out the lips and get the note going, but it meshes far better with the upper register if you keep the same basic structure you use for the upper range and adapt it to the low notes.
When I was first developing my low range, my horn professor instructed me to anchor the embouchure from below at the corners. (A face muscle chart makes it look like the "depressor anguli oris" is the muscle I think of when doing this. Look those three words up on the internet and go to images.) Keep your face relaxed and form an embouchure highlighting that region of your face to support it. Relax your lips a little, without allowing it to roll outwards, and support the sound with oodles and oodles of air.
Approach this facial posture from your middle range embouchure, and descend in a scalar motion. Lowering your jaw while maintaining the rest of your embouchure is a common tip, but be careful not to lose the support of the muscles in your chin when you do it. Once you can approach it in a scale, approach with a lip slur. Phillip Farkas's "the Art of French Horn Playing" has a very good low range excercise in it for this stage. If you send me a dm I can send you a pdf of it.
That's all I can offer without more information. I wish you luck, and please do let me know if anything doesn't make sense or is particularly useful.