Customer Reviews

Mel Bay's Anthology of French Horn Music

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Terrible title, but the best single-volume book of orchestral excerpts for horn. It is the only horn excerpt book that is annotated, giving us the benefit of the author's experience and providing valuable information about the excerpts that comes from experience and tradition and is not written down. Why don't all excerpt book authors do this? If you are only going to get one horn excerpt book, this is the one to get. If you're going to get two, get the Horn Audition Handbook by Arthur LaBar. It has similar excerpts (but no annotations), but also has excerpts by Strauss, Stravinsky, and Wagner.

This book is an absolute treasure for any French horn player interested in orchestral French horn. No matter what key you play in, or whether you can transpose in any way possible, this book has memorable pieces, some of which you can't help but love.

The Horn player who wrote this book was a predecessor of the current Principal Horn player at the Met. Opera, who my son has studied with a few times. Great book, full of different orchestral excerpts from all sorts of classical composers!