French Horn Shitshow

As you probably know from diligently scrolling down and reading my earliest posts first, I am a student teacher at a public school district. It's the field of education's version of an unpaid intern.

Today, my cooperating teacher decided to pass out a moderately difficult piece to his middle school band. The piece has important exposed alto saxophone and French horn parts. My major instrument in college was saxophone so my co-op asked that I play along with the kids to help them out.

I didn't have my saxophone with me. Whoops. Oh well, I thought. I'm sure my co-op has a horn lying around that I could use because school districts usually have lots of horns. I played some horn in college and knew I could do the part reasonably well. My co-op pointed me to the instrument closet, which looked like this:

The instrument closet is a dead zone. I don't go in there and my co-op doesn't go in there. No one but the students go in there. It's a mysterious and dark place of prepubescent disregard for order, hygiene, and common sense. After narrowly escaping a deadly cardboard avalanche and skirting what looked suspiciously like a dead rat stuck in a milk carton, I dug out a hideous orange case and found a smelly, janky old horn. Most horns nowadays are double horns. This monstrosity was a single horn. What.

For those of you non-horn players out there, I'll use my advanced musical knowledge and finely honed MS Paint skills to illustrate how the double horn and single horn differ. I'll try not to get too technical.

When playing high notes, the double horn sounds like this:

In contrast, high notes on the single horn sound like this:

Needless to say, my horn playing on this moderately challenging middle school piece sounded like a complete shitshow. The little horn player next to me, smug with her relatively easier-to-play double horn, remarked on my god-awful yodeling as "your high notes sound like a bowel movement!" I laughed my ass off. What does that even mean? Middle school students say the most random snarky things. God, I love this job.

In any case, I boosted the horn section's confidence in their abilities. They played really well that day as if to rub their superiority in my face. It's whatever. At the end of the day, it's totally not my job to sound good on horn. Put this down in the books as a highly advanced teaching technique.