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On This Episode of The Brass Junkies:
- Andrew and guest co-host Nicole Cash are joined by horn legend Gail Williams, retired Associate Principal Horn of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Professor Emerita at Northwestern University
- Why Gail will never write a memoir
- Her post-retirement obsession with photography and the promise she made to her late teacher, John Covert, that has her flying halfway around the world
- Doug Hill's line "don't be a should-er" and how it lands for Andrew in the practice room too
- The lessons she learned from John Covert (her very first teacher) and why they stick with her to this day
- Why she believes handing young players orchestral excerpts too early does real damage
- Growing up on a dairy farm, playing horn for the cows, and the discovery she and her brother made about echo inside a 70-foot silo
- How her mother, a K-12 vocal music teacher, shaped a teaching philosophy Gail still uses today, one Nicole remembers learning from her firsthand
- Her go-to trick for teaching embouchure to students who insist they "can't"
- The interaction that Gail had with Andrew's 11-year-old son at the International Horn Symposium that sums up her kindness and thoughtfulness
- Attending her very first horn workshop at 18, her jaw on the floor meeting legends like Barry Tuckwell, and why she misses the format those workshops used to have
- Why she left the CSO after 20 years: the tension between touring life and raising two teenagers, with her husband still playing Principal Clarinet in the orchestra
- The Phil Farkas line that stuck with her for decades and altered the course of her career
- What she actually misses about orchestral life, and what she very much doesn't
- Playing in the Lyric Opera pit for Pavarotti and Domingo, which she calls her real "post-grad degree"
- Posting her CSO resignation letter the same week she was set to solo with the orchestra, and how unkindly some colleagues responded
- Being the one who leaves the orchestra and not her husband, and the "peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the car" reality of motherhood in a male-dominated field
- Borrowing a concept from photography to teach horn students about balance
- Why "change is healthy" is her guiding phrase, and how it connects to Seth Godin's idea of "tension"
- Her Northwestern send-off: an 80-person horn choir spanning every class she ever taught, and two straight nights of backyard bonfires
- Asking her own former student and successor at Northwestern, Adam Unsworth, what he didn't get from her as a teacher
- Studying with Arnold Jacobs, and how his teaching gradually boiled down to one simple instruction
- Applying to college as a phys ed major to avoid the family business of music, and why she still coaches horn playing like an athletic skill
- A phrase of the late Sam Pilafian's that comes up more than once in this conversation
- Why two different mentors, Covert and Farkas, independently pointed her toward Chicago
- Nicole's second act as a decorated audiobook narrator, and the phone call from an old Dallas Symphony colleague that got her started
- Andrew's take on why AI could never replicate what happens in the moment for musicians
- Gail's blunt take on AI in the classroom, and the picture book about butterflies her granddaughter chose over a graphic novel
- The scales question her old teacher used to ask her, and the twist she still applies to her own practice
- The story of Gail "fixing" an emergency before Mallory Thompson's wedding (when Tim Higgins got COVID), and the surprise Empire Brass connection it turned up for Andrew
