I'm the associate Principal Horn of the New York Philharmonic.

Positioning the orchestra is associate Principal Horn.

What that means is, is that whenever the principal one is not playing, I'm actually sitting in the principal horn chair.

So there are.

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 principal's me and the principal won't play our part.

So most of the time there are two people on principle chair, but Principal and I are hardly ever on stage at the same time.

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, Um, not just holding the instrument up, but moving their 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, that kind of thing.

So we do that a lot.

Um, it's very it's very active.

Back here'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.

I got to play a whole program with David Robertson.

I remember, and the last piece was Beethoven Second Symphony, which is really fun piece, and it's got a really difficult horn parts, and it's one of those things.

I've never played it before because in Atlanta I was 1/3 1 player and there's no there's only two horns on the piece, so I never got 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 of a cliche, but I realized at that moment I had to put my horn down and never play again.

It would be okay because I had experienced something that, to me personally, was really as good as it could get.

Theo piece That really blew my mind was, um, an arrangement of the last movement of Mahler six for Youth Orchestra for like seventh graders.

So we'll slow and, um, you know things were really important when you're in the seventh grade, things air overblown in terms of their emotional content.

And so I'm sitting there and, you know, listen to this music and it's all of a sudden, just like Muller said, It's like the whole world kind of opens up to you.

Smallness of your world that you have experienced in a tiny little town in the middle of Kentucky where I grew up all of a sudden becomes something unfathomable, unfathomably large.

If I think about the fact that I'm in orchestra that Muller conducted and I'm playing the souls that he wrote, it's almost crushing in terms of its gravity.

So she best sometimes not to even think about that cats.

My wife's gonna 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 gonna say Eastside Barbuda, North Carolina vinegar sauce.

Um, not a lot of sauce on the on the meat.

My kitchen Brahms record in Atlanta was really into woodworking.

I even had a Woodward of 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, it's my family.

Of course I have to.

Two teenage boys, We live on the East Side and they're into sports and all sorts of really fun stuff over there.

Here's okay and everything.

Just give up.

Maybe give it a sweet Justin Bieber.

That's what the guy cut my hair yesterday, said he needed to start thinking about doing adjusted.

People kind of look, get a comb over thing going on.