Unique Horn

“not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment.” -- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

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Unique Horn CD Cover

Unique Horn 1997
Martin Mayes (horns)

For this highly unusual and beautiful work, we quote Bruce Carnavale’s review from Pulse! in its entirety. It is worth the read as befitting this recording.

"Some instruments seem to be able to function independently of their history," French horn player Martin Mayes says, "but I feel that the horn's potential for exploring new territory lies very much in the history of the instrument itself. This is because the horn is rather unusual from a purely acoustic point of view."

Born in Scotland, Mayes began playing the French horn at age 11. Currently living in Turin, he has entered the quirky world of Italian jazz, lyrical and free, playing with the likes of the Italian Instabile Orchestra. While his instrument is rare in jazz circles, he nevertheless has taken its resonating properties into other realms, by exploring its own brass and history. Not only does he play various modern, valved French horns, but also older, valveless hand horns, plus self-made contraptions using plastic tube and a bike claxon. While standing on a rotating pedestal he'll play a mouthpiece. He calls this exploration "contamination": allowing performing spaces to alter his sound or the environment to overwhelm his instrument, relegating it to a background role.

Despite which innovations he does not feels he's doing a "Gesamtkunstwerk" -- the German term for the examining, rewriting and melding of artistic genres. Summing up his work he describes "a prism which subjects it to spectrum analysis." On his first solo release, 'unique horn 1997' (random acoustics), those spectrums include reverberating rooms, "a horseshoe theater as found in many Italian towns," a table with teapots amidst Hebridian storytellers intoning supernatural tales, an art gallery installation featuring dropping water, and an arrangement of Bach's Cantata No. 4 for four horns.

The reverberating rooms provide Mayes with outlets for the hunting history of the horn to be re-examined: he improvises long lines, allowing them to echo and beckon. In another piece, after an elderly Scottish woman talks about supernatural occurrences in daily life, Mayes recites Shakespeare, Mercutio's speech from 'Romeo and Juliet.' A horn moans in the background, clocks tick, then water drops. Indeed what makes this recording so fascinating is the different listening environments Mayes presents to his instrument.

A fundamental question, when Mayes performs or thinks about music, is the role sound plays in our lives." He explains further: "How little time most people spend listening, that the Western tonal system has colonized much of the globe, that the 'silence' most people experience is the almost uniformly standard three-second gap between tracks on a CD, that it has been discovered that there is now no naturally occurring place on earth where it is possible to be more than five minutes without hearing some form of human-created noise."

The French horn's tube length is what makes its sound unusual: the overtones it thereby creates, explains Mayes, make hunting motifs arise quite naturally just by blowing down the tube. "Of particular interest to me [because of my use of space] is the fact that the hunting horn is an instrument which was developed for performing whilst in movement outdoors," he says. Critic John Corbett has written, in his book 'Extended Play,' about how recording technology has "perfected" sound, often making location invisible. Mayes contaminates this status quo by re-introducing environment, movement and theater into the music. By dating the work "1997," he also historicizes. An amazing task for a little silver disc and a long tube of brass.” --BRUCE CARNAVALE

6 tracks in 59:37 minutes

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