The history of horn playing in the city of Los Angeles between the years 1920-1970 parallels the rapid development of the city itself. Prior to the First World War, Los Angeles was a burgeoning but provincial city compared to the then slightly larger, cosmopolitan San Francisco. In 1920 Los Angeles had a population of 576,673. A decade later that population had more than doubled to 1,238,048. At the close of World War II, Los Angeles had become one of the largest and most important cities in America. By 1970, the population was 2,811,801, but this figure itself does not represent the real increase in population: most of the post World War II growth occurred in the suburbs. One of the primary industries that fueled this growth was the film industry, which first provided employment for musicians who accompanied silent films and eventually for the majority of musicians recording for film and television in the United States.
Prior to 1927, when soundtracks were first added to silent film, it was common practice to accompany those films with an organ and/or pit orchestra. Theaters in large cities often employed orchestras of symphonic proportions to accompany silent film.3
This was especially true of the post-World War I period, when a boom in large theater construction required orchestras of greater power to fill these large spaces. An example of this practice is documented in the weekly programs from the California Theatre, which was located in downtown Los Angeles at Main and 8th Street. A typical program from 1919-1921 included an orchestral overture, a weekly newsreel (California Topical Review and Magazine) accompanied by the theater orchestra (known as the California Concert Orchestra), an organ solo, and the regular feature film fare. Beginning with the November 20, 1921 program, the orchestra, now referred to as the Greater California Concert Orchestra played a short concert before each of the three daily film presentations. These concerts included classical music, popular music and songs, often arranged by Carli Elinor4 who was the artistic director of the California Theater. The California Concert Orchestra always carried a compliment of two horn players.5
The addition of film soundtracks in the late 1920s was a logical development to the previous practice of combining orchestral music, dancing, and vaudeville with a feature film in local theaters. Jack Cave recalls the transition period from silent film to sound film in Los Angeles from 1930 to 1931:
We usually opened with the pit orchestra playing an overture. This was followed by a stage show with dancers and some vaudeville style entertainment produced by Fanchon and Marco or material from the Orpheum circuit. For the show tunes and for the dancing show girls the music probably came out of New York. I do not know whether the music was written specifically for each show or just excerpted as needed. The better theaters all had good pit orchestras, a stage show, and usually a first run picture. By 1930 most of the pictures had sound, which was to spell the demise of the pit orchestra and the stage show in the next two or three years. The level of playing was pretty good for what they needed; nothing spectacular at that time for the French horn that would require a fine first horn player from the symphony. A lot of good journeyman horn players could handle whatever was required.
There were maybe five or six theaters in town that kept pit orchestras regularly and they were usually the best jobs around town at the time. The Million-Dollar Theater was one of the main ones. The Paramount Theater downtown, the RKO, the Carthay Circle Theater, the Hollywood Pantages Theater, Grauman's Egyptian and Chinese Theater out in Hollywood had some of the best pit orchestras and stage shows at that time. That was prior to when I got into the studios [in 1932].6
There were a large number of working hornists associated with local theaters that could not make the transition from the pit orchestra work to the more demanding studio jobs and were left without work. The level of many of the theater horn players was not as high as that of the symphony or the recording studio hornists as remembered by Jack Cave:
I'll give you an idea of the caliber of those horn players: when I went to my first rehearsal orchestra with Leonard Walker on the fifth floor of the Union Building downtown in Los Angeles, we had the entire fifth floor open and it was a great place for an orchestra--all concrete. I don't think that it would record well there because it echoed so badly. I introduced myself to the three hornists who had already arrived. They were either Czechs or Germans and big men. Joseph Vogelsang played first horn and I played fourth (the new guy). We started with a piece of music that had a loud chord for the horns. I was totally unprepared for the wall of sound that hit me. I was thoroughly intimidated. I thought I smelled beer and later I found out that they made some of the finest home brew I had ever tasted (prohibition was still in effect until President Roosevelt discontinued it in 1933). Joe Vogelsang was a good hornist with a tendency to play with a little more volume than necessary.
Some of the F horn players had a limited range. There was a fellow by the name of Nick Novelli. He played around at the theater orchestras. I heard him play and he sounded terrific. He had a good tone and played softly, but he could still play a solo that would knock your brains out. He could play up to a high c'' [concert], but after that, forget it. He played an F horn and was amazingly accurate, as long as you kept it in that range.
The preceding anecdote also underscores the Bohemian and German influence that was present in Los Angeles in the early twentieth century and typical of most major American cities. Alfred Brain7 related a similar situation in England at the time to Jack Cave:
Al Brain told me that in England until he and some of the English French horn players got started, they would use Bohemians, Germans and Czechs, because English were thought not to be able to play French horn. Even in London, they had a sign outside of the Royal Opera House that said: "Horn opening. English need not apply."
The Bohemian and German connection was also true for Jack Cave's stepfather who was Jack's primary teacher. He was trained in Wiesbaden, Germany as a trumpet player. Cave's step-grandfather was a horn player in Germany as well as his step-uncles who played in the New York Philharmonic before and after its merger with the New York Symphony.
In spite of the presence of better trained central European and Italian horn players, the level of horn playing in Los Angeles was quite low in the early 1920s. This was true of many American cities where the boom in theater employment outstripped the available supply of fine musicians. Long time studio hornist James Decker recalls that, before the great British hornist Alfred Brain arrived in Los Angeles in 1923, horn players were thought of as band musicians: "We were just band players before that, playing after beats."8 Vincent de Rosa remembers the general level of hornists in the 1930s: "When I first started, the generation that preceded me was pretty bad. They [the studios] didn't use the horn much, but then when they liked the horn and could get someone that sounded nice and could be depended on, then all of a sudden there was work all the time."9
According to Vincent de Rosa, one of the best horn players of the pre-Brain era, who also worked for the California Theater beginning in 1920, was Vincent de Rubertis: "My uncle, Vincent de Rubertis, who was born in Naples and came from a family of musicians, was a wonderful horn player." Like Nick Novelli, another Italian, he played almost exclusively on the F horn. Gale Robinson remembers de Rubertis and his comments on hearing Alfred Brain for the first time:
I don't really remember what year Vincent [de Rubertis] came to town but he had been the first horn with the Kansas City Symphony. I think that he came before Brain, because Brain came and played one concert and de Rubertis was quoted as telling people, "Doggone, I just heard the greatest horn player I have ever heard in my life." That must have been when Brain was first horn in [the] Los Angeles [Philharmonic] and soon after that de Rubertis became the second horn player. He was there the whole time that Brain was there - for fifteen years. They were a beautiful pair together and at that time de Rubertis was a very good horn player. Then when they went into the studios, I think that his first big job was at Paramount as first horn.10 He was over at Paramount for fifteen years. I don't remember what year that was but it was in the 1930s, well before World War II when he started. That was his niche back then. He was a man who played an Alexander double horn with a very small Brain-style mouthpiece, and he got a very golden sound. A very good sound. It wasn't a fat sound, but it was a beautiful sound. He played mostly on the F side (the old fashioned way) not even throwing the trigger down for the B-flat side in the upper range.11
In the early 1920s the Los Angeles Philharmonic had a meteoric rise in quality when it recruited some of the finest European orchestral musicians as first chair players. Gale Robinson recounts how Brain was recruited to come to Los Angeles in 1923:
[Brain] had a contract in his pocket from the old LA Philharmonic, which was backed by a fellow named [William Andrews] Clark. He was a multi-millionaire who made his money in the gold fields of Montana. Clark used to play violin and would sit in the section and play with everybody else. Since he was the one shelling out money, when he got a hold of the orchestra he scoured the world for some of the greatest players on trumpet, clarinet, French horn and bassoon [Fred Martz]. That was when the great oboe player [de Busscher] was brought to this country from Brussels, and then Brain from England. They brought some other great players and paid them $250 dollars a week. At that time a family could live on $12 per week, so that was a huge amount of money.12
Alfred Brain's influence in raising the level of horn playing in Los Angeles cannot be underestimated. He held a monopoly as first horn in all the top London orchestras from 1919 until he left for New York in 1922. His dominance in London was so great that even his brother Aubrey13 was relegated to play in the section until Alfred departed for America.14 By the close of his career, Alfred had played principal horn in most of the finest orchestras in the English-speaking world. In addition to being a great horn player, Alfred Brain's career was furthered by his considerable charm and character.
Alfred Brain did not begin playing in the studios until 1927, four years after his arrival in Los Angeles. When he began playing at MGM studios, it was in addition to his Philharmonic duties.15 Don Christlieb, who has recorded for almost a thousand films in his Hollywood career, states in his book, Recollections of a First Chair Bassoonist, that Alfred Brain "made Los Angeles the capitol of horn playing in the country."16 The following recollection by Gale Robinson focuses on Alfred Brain's particular style of playing:
He was an incredible horn player, an incredible soloist, and didn't get the type of sound that everybody used on the big [Conn] 8D. He didn't have that kind of a sound (deep, rich and warm). It was a soaring sound. It was more of the way you would think of the single F [horn], because he started out with the single F.
Jack Cave remembered:
When you would just listen to one note, you would say that it was not a pretty sound. But listen to his performance and you would say that he was a genius. He could just phrase, and the way he put it all together, and the sound, the best way you could describe it was "thrilling." It was his phrasing. He was just so musical. He could just put a phrase together or a horn call. I remember I was playing on a picture called The Star with the operatic soprano Grace Moore, and doing L'Arlesienne with a horn solo. I was first horn and had just done the solo when Brain came in. He was hired to do the horn call, and he got his horn out of the box and the director said to start recording and he played the horn call. The way he played it, everyone in the orchestra just stood up and applauded because it was so thrilling. Nobody had said a thing when I played this big long solo from the L'Arlesienne Suite. I thought, "What do I have to do to be like him?" No, he was something. No question about it.
Brain's power and breath control were legendary as recalled by Jack Cave:
Al Brain was always trying to help the young horn players get work. On one occasion where the main title music required eight horns, a couple of these young horn players were in the section. Unfortunately, it was a unison for all eight horns and difficult. Not every one could play it. When it came time to make the recording Al said, "Well that's all right, I'll just cover it" and he did. I was sitting next to him when he picked his horn up and I was swallowing the notes. I could hardly play. You couldn't hear anybody else. His sound just cut through like a knife. He had such an enormous chest and volume of air. His tone simply filled the room. When they played the music back for us it was precise and perfect. If anyone had missed notes you couldn't hear them.
One time at MGM he [Brain] was playing second horn to me because he had just come back from the East playing in the symphony. I was established as first horn, so he played second horn for a while at MGM just to have money coming in. So I am playing this long note, with four slow bars and I'm holding this note and I kept running out on the third bar, so I said "Just let me see if I can make the whole thing." I really sucked up the rug and then just let out as little air as possible and still ran out. He picked up the horn and said, "Just let me play the next one." We rehearsed again and he got a hold of that note and played it all the way out to the end and then went "puff" and let out a chest full of air to show me what a chest he had.17 That's why he never got tired. He worked out in his garden. He had a hand plow that he used, and he stayed strong.
Another important horn player who came to Los Angeles in the pre-World War II period was James Stagliano. He came from the St. Louis Symphony where he played the 1934-1935 season and, before that, the Detroit Symphony until 1934, where he was third horn and his uncle, Albert Stagliano, was first. James Stagliano began in Los Angeles in 1935 as principal horn with the Philharmonic while Brain was playing with the Cleveland Orchestra.18 Brain's absences in Los Angeles were notable because of the huge vacuum they left and the ensuing opportunities that were created for other horn players.19 Cave recalls Stagliano's arrival in Los Angeles:
I remember when we were working at MGM. Wendell [Hoss] was talking about Stagliano, and he said, "What do you think of him?" I said I thought he was terrific and I wished I had that ability to get around on the horn. I'll tell you, he could get around on really difficult things. Stagliano could play anything. When I heard him, he had a beautiful tone and was playing on an Alexander. He had a big fat sound like he was playing on a Conn or something else. He also had power to burn. I remember sitting in the back playing extra horn at the Philharmonic (we played The Pines of Rome and Siegfried's Rhine Journey), and when he played Siegfried's call, man, I'm telling you, wow, he made that high f '' [concert] that you wouldn't believe.
Later, Stagliano went to Fox studios and eventually exchanged positions with Brain in 1944, returning to play first horn again with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, while Brain went to Fox studios, before leaving to go back to the Northeast. Robinson recalls the circumstances surrounding Stagliano's return to the Los Angeles Philharmonic:
Well, there was quite a story about that. When [Alfred] Wallenstein took the job as conductor of the LA Philharmonic, he and Stagliano apparently didn't get along. Stagliano left [the Philharmonic] and Alfred Brain, who was over at Fox studios and had previously been with the Philharmonic for fifteen years, and who had worked for Twentieth Century-Fox for many years as well as the Cleveland Orchestra, was asked by Wallenstein to return to the LA Philharmonic, which he did. Stagliano also had difficulties with Alfred Newman [at Twentieth Century-Fox], and Wallenstein didn't particularly love Brain, although he was respectful of his career; so they just traded jobs. Brain remained at Fox for many years and Stagliano eventually went back to Cleveland before going on to Boston.
Stagliano was the only serious rival to Brain's supremacy in Los Angeles during that era. In 1945 Stagliano went to the Cleveland Orchestra before beginning an illustrious career as principal horn of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Although he worked in Los Angeles only from 1936 to 1945, he left an important legacy there, both as a teacher and a performer. His many students included three of Los Angeles' most prominent horn players: James Decker, Richard Perissi,20 and Gale Robinson. His influence in Los Angeles did not end there: his Boston students, Robert Watt and William Lane, would become, respectively, assistant principal and principal horn of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Stagliano played an Alexander double horn, in distinct contrast to the bright, single B-flat horn style of Alfred Brain and another important hornist of that era, Wendell Hoss. Wendell Hoss began playing the horn in Los Angeles in the 1920s and performed in the NBC, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Rochester Symphony Orchestras, and eventually became principal horn for the Disney studios. The single B-flat instrument was somewhat controversial in the United States and is rarely seen today as a principal orchestral instrument. In an article entitled "The Development of the French Horn," Wendell Hoss addressed some of the criticisms that playing on the single B-flat horn engendered:
This double horn has come to be the standard instrument of today. A few performers, however, have taken one step further to the disapproval of many of their colleagues - and discarded the F horn altogether in favor of a single B-flat. In this case some of the rich quality of the horn in F is sacrificed, for which the performer endeavors to compensate by the manner of his tone production and with the shape of his mouthpiece.21
George Hyde elaborates on the disapproval with which Hoss' style was sometimes met:
Wendell had a great job for years at Disney. He was first horn through all those early cartoons, and played beautifully. They would write for Wendell because they knew what he could do. He could sound just like a woodwind if he wanted and blended beautifully with the flutes and oboes. That was his realm. Vince [de Rosa] never used him because he knew that his style was quite different and Wendell never budged. He kept his single horns and played as beautifully as ever. If they wanted him, he'd show up. He had his own niche in horn playing.22
An excellent example of a horn player who did not have any trouble matching the larger double horns with his B-flat instrument was Jack Cave. Long time studio bassoonist Don Christlieb writes regarding Cave's tone and intonation:
It was my good fortune to luck into Jack Cave for some meaning-ful quintet playing early in my career, some of it even before playing in the studios. Jack was such a sensitive artist, that balance was never a problem, in fact I never knew it could be a problem until I played in other quintets. Beautiful tone and flawless intonation were Jack's trademarks, and it landed him a permanent position at MGM.... He proved to the film music heads that local talent could train here and succeed.23
Vincent de Rosa, made a very similar comment about Jack Cave's playing:
Jack was just absolutely perfect - pitch, rhythm, and the whole thing. The most dependable of anybody that I ever had work with me. I never had to be concerned about anything but just doing my job. He played an Alexander, a silver B-flat [horn] that his uncle24 Bruno Jaenicke sent him.
Many of the horn players in Los Angeles played B-flat horns as a result of Brain's influence. However, before Brain switched to the Sansone five valve B-flat horn,25 Los Angeles was a decidedly F-horn or double horn26 town, which was the central European norm. Cave, who began on a double horn that Jaenicke also picked out, recalled the transition to the B-flat horns:
After I met Brain, I had to play everything like him. I was still in Santa Barbara but I heard him every time he came there. As far as the quality of tone and everything, Brain influenced everyone here in this town [LA], at least from the time I started. It would have to have been in the early 1930s or late 1920s, when the town went from double horns to B-flats (whenever Al got that horn). When I came to town, he was like the only horn player in town. When there was a recording session and Al was available, they didn't think about anybody else.
Bruno Jaenicke, whose career in America spanned the period between the two World Wars, was one of the greatest horn players in America. Although he never played in Los Angeles, he crossed paths with Alfred Brain in New York, where they played for rival symphonies. Brain played with the New York Symphony and Jaenicke played with the New York Philharmonic. Soon after Brain left, the two orchestras merged to become the New York Philharmonic. Many have said that the combined orchestra was the best in the world at that time. Two recordings that attest to this are Ein Heldenleben, conducted by Wilhelm Mengelberg, and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Jaenicke left his impact on Los Angeles horn players as well. Gale Robinson recounts:
I loved Brain's playing. I didn't get much of a chance to hear him play live but my god was really Bruno Jaenicke through his records and his broadcasts. As far as a lyrical horn player, I wished that I could sing the way he did. He was a singer on the instrument. Nobody could vibrate like he could. He vibrated just like a singer, because he was a singer.
Vincent de Rosa added that Bruno Jaenicke was "the best [hornist] I heard and I never minded when he missed. He was the true artist of that era and just played beautifully."
In addition to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and motion picture studios there was also employment for the horn in local radio in the early 1930s. Later in that decade, when the production costs of transcontinental broadcasts were lowered,27 additional well-paying jobs for hornists were created. Cave recounts one of those early local radio shows:
It was 1930 and I had played in Santa Barbara and knew a lot of the band musicians up there. When I first came to Los Angeles, one of the people I knew had been a player in the Santa Barbara band during the summer. One of these people knew me, and they needed a band for the Gilmore Circus and Side Show, which was a little local radio show that went on every week for about two years. Of course Gilmore Gasoline isn't around any more, but that was a big deal in the 1930s. Gilmore blue green gas: you got 12 gallons for a dollar. So I had a job right away making $12.50 a week, which wasn't too bad in 1930. It was enough to keep me in food. In those days, twenty-five percent of the people were unemployed. Most importantly, I was able to stay in Los Angeles and not have to go home and say that I couldn't make it.
Soon after the advent of sound tracks, the studios, and the Disney Studio in particular, began to use a "click track" to synchronize the music with the film. The click track allowed long segments of music to be timed and planned in advance without having to follow the film visually while one recorded. Jack Cave's first studio break came as a horn player who could double on ocarina.28 In the following recollection Cave notes that the early sound tracks favored a full scoring that rarely allowed the musicians to rest:
I had been in Los Angeles about two years, 1930 and 1931, and had started to get jobs around town. Someone down at the union said, "We have to have a horn player who can play an ocarina." I heard him and said, "Hey I can play it," when I had never seen an ocarina. I was desperate to get some kind of a job, and this was for a Disney recording session. I thought, oh wonderful, because it paid so much - $10 per hour - which was like a million dollars at that time. I asked how long before the date and the man said it was in a couple of weeks. I was so anxious to work I figured that I could practice for it. I went down to Southern California Music Company and bought an ocarina and I found out that they had a whole bunch of sizes. I went home and was practicing many hours a day to learn the ocarina. I came in and all I had to play was a few simple notes after going through all that work to play something more complicated.
Everything at Disney was recorded with a click track, requiring the musicians to wear headphones. When we did the piece that required the ocarina they found that I had insufficient time to get back to the horn, so I was provided with a basket with a pillow in it so that I could simply drop the ocarina on the pillow noiselessly and immediately pick up the horn and continue playing. When the orchestra was pretty small, the horns played pretty much "wall to wall" to make the orchestra sound bigger. That was typical in those days.
Dr. William Axt was head of the music at MGM. He wrote wall to wall: never a bar of rest. I don't know why, but he thought that the orchestra should use every instrument all the time, so you got a full big sound. At that time a band had maybe 35 pieces when I first started out, and we worked all the time.
In the early 1930s the MGM studios, and perhaps Warner Brothers, used personal contracts. Jack Cave defines those contracts:
To me, the personal service contract was just a guarantee that I would perform only for MGM as first horn for the year that I had signed up for, and was a guarantee that I would earn so much money. In 1935, I had an oral agreement to be on first call at MGM. If they were idle, I could work elsewhere as an extra when they expanded the orchestras at other studios.
Cave's 1933 contract with MGM gave that company exclusive rights to his services, a prerogative that was never exercised. In addition to the personal service contracts, there were work quotas designed to promote employment at a time of high unemployment. Jack Cave explains the rationale behind the quotas: "I remember when the head of the union, a man called [J. W.] Gillette, got up in front of the whole union meeting and said nobody had a right to more than $40 a week. I suspected that Gillette was a kind of socialist." The union offered a way around the quotas but only at a steep price, as recalled by Jack Cave:
When I played additional jobs at other studios, like United Artists Studios or for an independent producer that would record it at United Artists, and I had already worked my quota at MGM, they would have to pay two checks. The union didn't care how much you worked as long as the studio had to pay two checks (one to you and one to the union). The union check went into a fund for unemployed musicians.
Unlike the recording trust fund that came later, the money taken in during this period by the union was both collected and distributed by the same local union. In general, the early thirties was a time of shrinking employment for live musicians.
The "talkies" enabled theater owners to discharge pit musicians in wholesale fashion... By 1934 about twenty thousand theater musicians, perhaps a quarter of the nation's professional instrumentalists and half those who were fully employed, had lost their jobs.29
Los Angeles musicians who found studio jobs were somewhat cushioned from the decline in theater employment.
Vincent de Rosa, like Cave, also began his recording career on a single B-flat horn. Don Christleib recounts the early years of de Rosa's career:
Alfred's most promising young protégé, Vincent de Rosa was already playing first in the WPA Symphony30 under Modeste Altschuler.31 Ray Nowlin, Jack March, and I realized he was the star of the future and he was only sixteen years old at the time. It wasn't long before Alf [Brain] brought him over to Twentieth Century-Fox.32
After commenting on Brain's dental problems, Christlieb goes on to write:
Unfortunately for all of us, Alf was fighting a set of false teeth, a problem which he purposely kept quiet, but we all knew something was wrong because he was cracking tones, which was so uncharacteristic of him. By now it was Vince's time and his star was rising. He was beginning an ascendancy that was unequalled, a stardom likely to never happen again. While Alf was past the middle of his career when he left the symphony for film,33 Vince started in the WPA orchestra while he was still a teenager and graduated to film in his twenties.34
Another important horn player, a few years older than de Rosa, was William Hinshaw. He preceded de Rosa as first horn of the WPA orchestra. Hinshaw played principal horn at Warner Brothers for many years with George Hyde as his second horn and George Hoffman35 (who was previously third horn in the Philharmonic in the 1920s and 1930s) as third horn. Hinshaw was undoubtedly influenced by the style of Brain and, like the slightly older players Wendell Hoss and Jack Cave, Hinshaw played a single B-flat horn throughout his career. His second horn, George Hyde, at Warner Brothers said this of him: "Bill Hinshaw was quite a talent. He had a single Knopf and a nice clear sound with a good range."
Today, when ever-increasing qualifications are required to work as a musician, it may be difficult to imagine that young teenagers like Vincent de Rosa and Gale Robinson could find work in the late 1930s and early 1940s. De Rosa recalls the circumstances that pushed him into performing at an early age:
When I was a kid, my dad passed away and I became a bread winner of the family because there were five kids. I played little concerts and delivered papers because my dad left my mom with myself and four younger children.
Robinson relates:
I was fifteen and I received this call for Bambi, the picture about the deer. That was the first big call I got and it launched me into the recording field. Although I didn't work a lot, that was my first big break. From there I went over with Charlie Previn36 at Universal when I was at John Marshall High School. I used to have to get special permission to leave school to work.
Those decades were a time of unparalleled employment for musicians in Los Angeles, and many of the top horn players did not have to put their horns down during the war years. Alfred Brain, Wendell Hoss and others were too old to serve in the military and Vincent de Rosa, Richard Perissi, Jack Cave, James Stagliano, and James Decker all had military deferments.37 Vincent de Rosa, Richard Perissi, and James Decker all performed for a season at one time or another with the Los Angeles Philharmonic during the war years. Richard Perissi, James Decker, and Gale Robinson38 all gained experience in the early years of the war playing with the NYA (National Youth Administration) orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. Later on Robinson volunteered for the Navy and served three years aboard the U.S.S. California as quartermaster, during which time she sustained more than two hundred attacks by Axis bombers and submarines.39 After years of constant danger and bloodshed around him as well as time away from the horn, Robinson returned to the studios. It took him years to get back into full stride and to regain his ability to perform at his best under the highly stressful conditions of the studios. This was the kind of trauma and disruption to their careers that many of the Los Angeles horn players escaped.
There was also a great deal of movement between jobs as men were drafted or returned after being deferred.40 This undoubtedly provided opportunities for the younger players. Not surprisingly, it would be the horn players of the World War II generation, who got their "break" during the early studio era, and who would dominate the studio industry for the next forty years. In assessing why this generation was so successful, Cave remarked, "Finally they got a bunch of horn players that could play just about anything."
The rising level of performance was also connected to the quality of instruments available. Vincent de Rosa recounted his experiences in acquiring an instrument during World War II: "During the war you couldn't get an instrument here [Los Angeles],41 and being a young fellow in my teens, any instrument that came through went to the professionals. So I got whatever was left." Gale Robinson explained that often it was the unavailability of good instruments that led to the lower level of playing:
I think that all of the newer, younger horn players, if they get good instruction, are going to be better than anyone in the past. One of the big differences is the advancement made in instruments. People in the old days (not Brain or Stagliano, who always had first-class instruments, but a lot of us) had problems getting an instrument that had all of the notes on it. There were always bad notes, which is something that young horn players aren't even faced with today. You can buy an 8D and every single note is there. You don't even have to worry about it.
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