Having marching French horns as a part of your middle horn presentation is almost impossible to argue successfully from a practical standpoint. They are generally not as powerful as the smaller and lighter mellophones, they are certainly more difficult to play (even if you manage to find one that is constructed properly), and they would probably tend to "muddy the waters" if treated incorrectly in scoring and application.
However...I don't think anyone has argued that they bring a remarkably different color to the tonal palette available to the discriminating composer/arranger. When we used them and I was carrying one, I think we did so to good effect, and we were certainly not the only ones to do so. (Anyone who wants to point out that this is the period before the meteoric rise in quality of Cavaliers brass performance is welcome to do so...the sound I'm describing is still there, i.e. beginning of Peterloo in '92.) Our guys balanced 8 horns against 6 mellos, as I recall, and let us know the places in the score where they wanted one or the other of the two solutions to take over. (Admittedly, most were pretty obvious...for example, anything faster than an 8th note, or the end of Gavorkna.) I'm going to gloss over the biggest problems, which were matching pitch and blending timbre on two COMPLETELY different approaches to filling in the middle of an ensemble, because I think I just explained how to take care of that (right before this...well, read it AGAIN.)
As far as general difficulty goes, I have two humble suggestions for the sceptical among you who would like to include these instruments in your program but are afraid of the result (or lack therof). FIRST, the cant in the leadpipe of my Kanstul KHB 185 was a revelation. One of my favorite pictures from my early band days is of my first high school show's closer...big finish, I'm the tip of Texas in the big U.S.A. formation out on the field, and my horn is actually pointing DOWN for the box pop.... How can you expect your kids to play well when such a basic thing is so radically different? Don't know if I can recommend bending mello pipes to accomodate normal horn players, since most of those are made out of tinfoil, but some accomodation would show vast improvements. SECOND, I spent both years flying around the DCI fields (yes I KNOW things have gotten even faster) with a Neil Sanders medium deep cup horn mouthpiece on the end of the horn. Anyone wishing to check out this phenomenon should visit Tom Greer at Moosewood Horn Requisites online. Radical alternative? Too different? No more so than a mellophone mouthpiece (if we can agree that the INNER diameter of the piece is the most important dimension.) Articulations aren't the best, but slurs are ridiculous, and you can bang it off your face all day and not have a problem.
Just some thoughts... Loved this post, looking forward to more!
