Southeast Missouri State University’s River Campus will be hosting their Mid-South Horn Workshop from March 17th through the 19th. In addition to holding master classes and catering to hundreds of horn players from across the region, they will also feature performers from the St. Louis Symphony, the Czech Philharmonic, and the Colorado Symphony. KRCU’s Lindsey Grojean talked to Southeast’s assistant horn professor Dr. Nicholas Kenney about their big event.
Lindsey: Dr. Kenney, the Mid-South Horn Workshop is coming up soon! Tell me about it.
Kenney: We’re having the workshop here at the River Campus. It is a regional workshop sponsored by the International Horn Society that caters to horn players - french horn players, you might’ve heard them referred to as - but we call ourselves horn players. There will be roughly 250 horn players from the region and beyond here that weekend, and there’s a bunch of different events going on.
Lindsey: So I know you all will have a lot of visiting artists coming to the River Campus for this event, several traveling internationally. Tell me who we’ll get the opportunity to see perform here in Cape Girardeau.
Kenney: Well, we have about eight or nine featured artists from all over the world coming, and there are about thirty contributing artists from the region and beyond coming as well. The headlining events Friday night will be Katerina Javurkova from the Czech Phlharmonic, Saturday night will be Todd Bowermaster from the St. Louis Symphony, Saturday afternoon the St. Louis Symphony horn section will be playing a concert in Bedell, and Austin Larsen will be here from the Colorado Symphony doing some things on Friday and Sunday.
Lindsey: So why would someone want to come see a horn workshop?
Kenney: That’s a good question! It’s definitely catering to a specific people. There will be a lot of university students here, in fact, the bulk of the participants - there’s about 132 already registered. There will be university professors, people who enjoy hearing horn or playing horn as a hobby as well, and for the public, it’s a really cool thing to see some of these international and national artists come together and play these concerts. You know, of course I’m biased to the occasion, but it’s a very big event that’s being put on. We’ve got Katerina coming from the Czech Republic who, two weeks ago, won a Czech Grammy Award, she’s been named the top prize winner in several major international competitions over the past few years, and she’s only 26 years old. It’s kind of a once in a lifetime to see some of this all come together in one place and it's pretty neat that we have it here on the River Campus. If you’re not interested in being around all day to see the workshop, the competitions, lectures, and things of that nature, the public really wants to be at these nighttime featured events because they’re going to be very spectacular. It is over our spring break, but the wind ensemble will be here doing part of one of the featured performances as well. So locally, horn players, band directors, and their students are going to want to come and learn. The cool thing about the workshop is - it’s catered to different things: we’ve got competitions for people all the way from high school age to graduate school, there are lectures for people who are horn professors to go and learn more about what they’re doing, there are performances for horn professors, the contributing artist concert series has three different recitals over the weekend, and it features music from all time periods and chamber music, solo music, and everything in-between. It’s really catering to a large variety of people but it’s centered around the horn as the base medium.
Lindsey: Now, you’re really passionate about the horn, of course. What inspired you to put this on for our area?
Kenney: You know, as part of this, I’ve been going to these workshops since I was eighteen years old. In fact, my first one was fifteen years ago this time of year. So I got to go to one and it really inspired me, and when I first was hired at Southeast, I went directly to our department chair and said, “this is something I want to do.” I put in a bid for it and it was accepted. So I’ve been planning this event for two years, and really it’s a professional thing, for me and for my colleagues in the business. But the great thing about it is, not only is it reaching out to my professional colleagues around the region and even some beyond (we have some artists coming from Wyoming, Florida, and North Carolina) but it also really gives the Southeast community a chance to really hear what the horn can do. Besides seeing us in the back of the orchestra, it puts the horn out front as the main thing, and it’s pretty exceptional that we’re going to get to have that here.
Lindsey: Perfect! So go ahead and tell me how people can get their tickets for this!
Kenney: So ticket prices for the featured events on Friday night, Saturday afternoon and Saturday night are $12 for each concert. If you wanted to purchase a complete day pass, you can online, and it’s $35 and you can come for a whole day. If you wanted to register for the entire workshop, it’s $85 for an adult and $75 for students at this point. The day pass will get you into every event at the university that day. All of the regional artist recitals, and the featured artist recitals at night, you can purchase those through the box office, you can go to the website, it’s semo.edu/horn, to purchase day or weekend passes. Or you can email me at nkenney@semo.edu for information if you have any other questions.
Lindsey: Alright, thank you for your time Dr. Kenney, and again the dates for this are March 17th through the 19th. The workshop will start that Friday around 8 AM with competitions, and end Sunday afternoon around 2:30 PM.