The Los Angeles Horn Club was founded in 1951, during the height of film production for the major studios.70 The declining studio production that ensued from 1951 to 1958 resulted in increased free time for the studio horn players, without the accompanying economic hardship. It was under this backdrop that the formation of the Horn Club occurred. Quota laws, which limited the amount of work outside one's principal studio, made additional work contingent upon obtaining special union permission.71 Many of the hornists desired additional playing to stay in shape. This brief and unusual set of circumstances made Los Angeles fertile ground for the first professional horn society of its kind. The idea of a horn club was not new: European hunting horn societies had existed since the eighteenth century. The Wiener Waldhornverein, to name just one organization, was nearly seventy years old in 1951, but the professional nature of the Los Angeles Horn Club was unprecedented.
The following web page excerpt by James Decker, one of the founding officers of the Los Angeles Horn Club, provides most of the highlights of the Horn Club history.
The Los Angeles Horn Club was organized in 1951 for a concert in Los Angeles by thirty-six of the areas finest horn performers. The Los Angeles Horn Club became a well-known professional performing group. The first concert, conducted by Max Pottag,72 well-known horn historian and educator, was given for the National Conference of Music Educators at the Musician's Union concert hall in Hollywood. Everyone became very aware of the value of keeping the interest in a performance group active due to the immediate response of all who participated. A meeting by the executive officers, Alfred Brain, Wendell Hoss, Arthur Frantz, and James Decker was held and weekly playing meetings were begun. Music from the many Hollywood composers and orchestrators became available and concerts were then organized. Because many of the horn players were under contract to the motion picture and radio studios, and with quota laws that prohibited them to perform in other studios, the opportunity to do concerts with other gifted hornists became a very valuable asset for keeping in shape.
Annual banquets were held with outstanding guest soloists and an annual spoof on the Professor Schmutzig series became a staple for entertainment.
When the A & R producer for Capitol Record, Robert Meyers, came backstage at one of the concerts and mentioned that a certain surge of interest in the horn had the record industry wondering, if one hornist could sell that many records what would a group of professional hornists do.73 So, with the leadership of Wendell Hoss, well-known studio hornist, contacts were made with several leading composers and a record was made. Due to the success of the first record ,another record was prepared and recorded. When contracts were ended in 1959 and quota laws were voted out by the union, many of the hornists became too busy to continue with the weekly meetings. What occurred after were groups of amateur and some professional hornists meeting to run through some of the vast amount of horn music written especially for the Los Angeles Horn Club. The complete library is stored under the name of "The Wendell Hoss Memorial Library of the Los Angeles Horn Club" in the horn studio at the University of Southern California.74
It cannot be overstated how important the studio system of the 1950s was in creating a unique opportunity for a professional horn club to thrive, yet no other group of instrumentalists in Los Angeles availed themselves of that opportunity. A number of other factors also contributed to foster a nurturing environment for the creation of the club. Second only to the quota laws in ensuring the success of the Horn Club were the personalities of the leading horn players. Alfred Brain, the elder statesman of the horn community and in the twilight of his career, was unanimously elected president. As the leading horn player in Los Angeles for many years, he had set an example by always encouraging those around him as well as protecting the positions of those less talented than himself. Admiration and respect for him was universal. Gale Robinson remembers some of his fine qualities: "He was an enormous influence to all of us; as a father, he always helped young people. Never, never would he put a young man down. Never. He was just a tremendous person - very hospitable." The following is an obituary tribute to him from the MTA75 Journal:
A gentleman he was, in every connotation of the word. Pleasant and gracious to everyone with whom he came in contact in any way, he had a tremendous zest for living. A gracious host and an excellent chef, his parties are among my finest memories. To say only that Alf held a position of dominance, as the almost universally acknowledged greatest horn-player in the world is to understate the immense respect the man so justly earned. Alfred Brain will be sorely missed-by me, personally and by all musicians everywhere. To have known him was a privilege and an honor. And probably as fitting a farewell to him as words can express may be found in Shakespeare, whose writing Alf so dearly loved: 'Good-night, sweet prince.'
After he retired, Brain purchased and ran the Horn Inn, where members could meet and eat lunch. His presence and organizational skills alone might have been enough to insure the success of the Horn Club. In 1934, after the death of the manager of the Hollywood Bowl, he headed the orchestra committee that saved the rest of the season from financial disaster. There were, however, other outstanding individuals that contributed to the success of the Horn Club.
Wendell Hoss, another elder statesman of the horn, is remembered as the prime organizer of the Los Angeles Horn Club for many years. While not of the stature of Alfred Brain as a horn player, his passion for organizing the Horn Club activities eventually led him to be one of the founders of the International Horn Society. He was highly respected by the community of horn players in Los Angeles. Cave remarked: "He was such a fine gentleman. I couldn't help but have great admiration for him." Hoss' passion for organizing horn gatherings began long before the Horn Club was organized. Cave recalls some of these early instances:
I know that he was here when I first came to Los Angeles [1930]. I used to play duets, quartets and quintets and anything else that I could do with other horn players that I would get together with, and Wendell was wonderful. He'd have all the guys over and have all the music.
A man of means by way of both marriage and his own playing and teaching, 76 he was financially able to support various horn-related causes. Wendell Hoss was also a gentleman on par with Alfred Brain, who encouraged amateur participation when the leading professionals became extremely busy after the quota laws were abolished. Gale Robinson said of Wendell Hoss, "I think that he did a tremendous amount of work, and he was a great musician himself, enormously respected by everyone. I loved him. I studied conducting with him. He was a fine conductor. He had enormous experience. He was first horn everywhere." Wendell Hoss, together with Brain, set a tone of collegiality among Los Angeles hornists which lasted for many years, creating an unwritten "gentlemen's" agreement: "never speak ill of one's colleagues."
Another founding officer of the Horn Club was James Decker, who picked up the torch from Hoss and Brain, and for years has been the most frequent Los Angeles Horn Club contact throughout the horn world. He has regularly hosted touring horn sections visiting Los Angeles, written articles, and presented performances and lectures in connection with the International Horn Society events. A good example of the inclusiveness of the Los Angeles Horn Club, as well as the general good relations among the horn players, was the number of hornists used on the first Horn Club recording. Thirty-six hornists took part, twice as many as was needed for the largest work. According to Decker this was due in large part to Wendell Hoss. Decker said of Hoss:
Wendell Hoss, though, was actually the instigator of a gentlemen's agreement in this town between the horn players. He was the all-time great smoother-over technician, and he would never ever say anything negative about anybody's horn playing. He was always very much of a gentleman and caused everybody else to be a gentleman. That was the influence that he had. That was his way when we had the Horn Club. He would not necessarily play with the different teams, and somebody else might organize it, but he would keep everybody happy. He made sure that all the members of the Horn Club got on the recordings. In fact, if you look at the list of the horn players that were on that recording, I think that there were thirty-six of them. It wasn't necessary to have thirty-six players, but they were the kind of works where it didn't matter if you put some of the lesser-known players on some of those parts.
The club was active until 1977 and then went into a hiatus. Among the enduring legacies of the Horn Club, which reached beyond Los Angeles, are two recordings. The first was made in 1959 and released in 1960;77 the second was released in 1970.78 They have subsequently been reissued together as a single compact disc. These were the first recordings of large horn ensembles released on a major label. The multiple horn works originally championed by the Los Angeles Horn Club contain innovative writing for descants and Wagner tuben, which are featured on both recordings. The influence of these recordings is difficult to gauge but undoubtedly large.
Another contribution of the Los Angeles Horn Club was to make its large collection of horn music available all over the world. Included in Appendix III is a list of music compiled by Horn Club member Arthur Briegleb located in The Wendell Hoss Memorial Library of the Los Angeles Horn Club. A third influence of the Horn Club was as a model for the International Horn Society.
In 1969, Philip Farkas, Professor of Music at Indiana University and former principal horn of the Chicago Symphony, and William C. Robinson, Professor at Florida State University, discussed and organized the first International Horn Workshop at Florida State. Some of the world's leading hornists were invited to perform as guest artists. Other professional and amateur hornists from around the United States and beyond attended these events. Los Angeles Horn Club music was used for massed horn choir performances at the close of this and subsequent workshops. For this first workshop, Wendell Hoss was a guest artist and also brought Los Angeles Horn Club music to use in the final "gala" performance. In 1971, at the third International Horn Workshop, the notion of an International Horn Society was put forth and acted upon. Today the organization boasts over three thousand hornists from around the globe. In the more than quarter-century since their inception, the annual International Horn Workshops and regional workshops continue to include works written for the Los Angeles Horn Club for final massed horn choir performances, performed by as many as four hundred hornists.
The fourth and most important influence of the Horn Club is the music that was commissioned by and written for it. Composers and arrangers that have contributed music for the Club include George Hyde, Huntington Burdick, Russell Garcia, David Raksin, Gunther Schuller, Stu Phillips, John Parker, Brad Warnaar, Ronald Lo Presti, Clare Fisher, Gunther Kauder, Peter Korn, Al Egizi, and Otto Vincze. George Hyde's contributions remain unique because he was an outstanding hornist, Horn Club member, and a composer. His composition, Color Contrasts, is full of innovative effects that seek to exploit many of the possible colors a horn can produce.
In addition to his own compositions, George Hyde is also connected with one of the twentieth-century's premiere sonatas for horn. Hyde was one of Halsey Stevens' composition students at Los Angeles' leading music school, the University of Southern California. Written between September of 1952 and January of 1953, Stevens' Sonata was dedicated to and premiered by Hyde when he was a masters student at USC. Hyde's long-time chamber music and orchestral collaborator, James Decker, also made the first commercial recording of the sonata in 1977. The sonata is a highly integrated work based on a small number of interrelated motives. It is a technical masterpiece that brings to bear many nineteenth-century sonata practices, while using twentieth-century idioms. The last movement ends with a traditional hunting rondo.
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