[HORN MUSIC]
RICHARD DEANE: Hi, I'm Richard Deane.
I'm the Associate Principal Horn of the New York Philharmonic.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
My position in the orchestra is associate principal horn.
What that means is is that whenever the principal horn is
not playing, I'm actually sitting in the principal horn
chair.
So there's another principal horn
in the orchestra called the assistant principal horn.
And he or she is the person who is involved
in helping the principals, me and the principal horn,
play our part.
So most of the time, there are two people
on the principal chair.
But the principal and I are hardly ever
onstage at the same time.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
This is the first question I get all the time.
What are you doing with your right hand when you play?
There's a lot going on back here,
not just holding the instrument up,
but moving the hand around to change the color of the sound.
Also pushing the hand as far as you can up into the bell
and changing the sound.
[PLAYS NOTES]
That kind of thing.
So we do that a lot.
It's very active back here.
It's almost like-- almost--
not quite, but almost like another hand
on the keyboard in a way.
So I've got this one going.
This one's going very subtly, but mostly up in the face.
So I think people find it surprising that there's
that kind of going on.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
I got to play a whole program with David Robertson,
I remember, and the last piece was
Beethoven's "Second Symphony," which is a really fun piece.
And it's got a really difficult horn parts.
And it's one of those things I'd never played it before,
because in Atlanta I was a third horn player
and there's only two horns on the piece.
And so I never got to play the piece.
I don't know what it was about the performance.
I think by the end I just realized that--
and this might sound a little over the top or cliche--
but I realized, if at that moment
I had to put my horn down and never play again,
it would be OK, because I had experienced something
that to me personally was really as good as it could get.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
The piece that really blew my mind
was an arrangement of the last movement of Mahler "6"
for a youth orchestra, for like seventh graders.
It's real slow.
And things are really important when
you're in the seventh grade.
Things are overblown in terms of their emotional content.
And so I'm sitting there, and I'm listening to this music.
And it's all of a sudden, just like Mahler said,
it's like the whole world opens up to you.
The smallness of your world that you've
experienced in a tiny little town in the middle of Kentucky,
where I grew up, all of a sudden becomes
something unfathomably large.
If I think about the fact that I'm in the orchestra
that Mahler conducted and I'm playing the songs that he
wrote, it's almost crushing in terms of its gravity.
So it's best sometimes not to even think about that.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
Cats, my wife's going to love that I said that.
I would go with neither, but I would say cats
because I love my wife.
Absolutely detachable.
East Side has been very good to me and my family,
so I'm going to say East Side.
Barbudo.
North Carolina, vinegar sauce, not a lot of sauce on the meat.
My kitchen.
Brahms' "Requiem."
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
In Atlanta, I was really into woodworking.
I even had a woodworking business for about three years.
We made-- designed, fabricated, and made custom wine cellars
for folks all over town.
The other thing I'm passionate about is my family, of course.
I have two teenage boys, who live on the East Side.
And they're into sports and all sorts
of really fun stuff over there.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
Hair's OK and everything?
CREW: Yeah.
RICHARD DEANE: Decent?
CREW: Can maybe give it up sweep.
Yeah.
That's good.
RICHARD DEANE: A Justin Bieber.
That's what the guy who cut my hair yesterday said--
I needed to start thinking about doing a Justin Bieber
kind of a look, get a comb-over thing going like this.
[HORN MUSIC]
[APPLAUSE, CHEERING]