Field trip to a horn factory

Dateline: MAINZ -- How do symphony musicians spend their days off when on tour? For the horn section of the CSO, a day off in Frankfurt, Germany didn't mean buying souvenirs or drinking beer (well, there was some of that). It meant traveling by train to the shrine of French horn players, Alexander showroom and musical instrument factory, a 30-minute ride from Frankfurt.

The appeal of these horns is that they are and have been played by the world's greatest players, including legend Dennis Brain, Hermann Baumann and the entire horn section of the Berlin Philharmonic. The company, founded in 1782, is also the oldest in Germany and perhaps the world.

So, nine of us -- principal horn Liz Freimuth, the orchestra's new second horn Lisa Conway, 29, Tom Sherwood, Charles Bell, Duane Dugger, trumpeter Steve Pride, bass trombonist Peter Norton and tuba player Peter Link (they make other brass instruments, too), left Frankfurt's Hauptbahnhof for Mainz, a beautiful small city on the Rhine.

They ogled showcases of historic and prototype horns and mutes and went into practice rooms to try out a few new ones. If you've ever been in a small room with four horns going at once, you can imagine the din. But this was serious playing, broken up by exclamations of "Wow!" "I like the triple" "It's got funky intonation" and "That's a nice horn -- it's really wide open."

Of course, horn players speak their own language, which included discussions of wraps, spit valves and berps. The women took photos of some "very cute mutes."

We also took a fascinating tour of the factory workshop where old-world craftsmen put together these masterpieces. The horns go through fire and ice before they are done. We saw a baking room for baking on the lacquer, a room where lead pipes are made, rooms where valves are fitted and soldered, a "bending room" just for bending pipes, a freezing room where pipes are put into molds and frozen, and row upon row of unfinished horns hanging from the ceilings.

"It's really just like plumbing," noted Pride.

Only 5 to 8 instruments are made per day. In some rooms, we were not allowed to take photos because of trade secrets. We were allowed, though, to see an experimental prototype that is not even out yet.

"Which means that Charlie's going to have to wipe the drool off," said Dugger. He was referring to Bell, who owns eight Alexander French horns and is in the market for a couple more.

A new one might run $12,000.

One set of Wagner tubas hanging and ready to ship was likely headed to CCM, where they have been ordered. That will mean that CCM will own the best Wagner tubas in the city, better than anything at the CSO.

A particular horn can give an orchestra a unique sound. American horn makers have created an American sound, that started with a large-bell silver instrument invented by German-born Anton Horner.

"We play now more like Chicago, which is a brighter sound, with a small-bell brass horn, and I think we play more like Europeans now," says Bell.