By Dejanae Perry
Steven Gross is a professor of French horn who heads the Woodwind, Brass and Percussion programs at UC Santa Barbara. He has had a spectacular career playing and teaching the French horn around the world, including positions with the Atlanta Symphony, the National Symphony, the Santa Fe Opera Orchestra, and for 24 years as Principal Horn of the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra.
Gross is currently the only full-time horn professor within the University of California system. In a recent phone interview, he discussed the career journey that led him to UCSB, as well as his latest projects.
Q: When did you first come to UCSB and what attracted you to teach here?
A: Well, it’s an interesting story. I’ve had a career that’s encompassed a number of aspects of music performance. The first 10 years of my career were with major symphony orchestras. Those were the Atlanta Symphony and the Washington National Symphony. I knew at some point I wanted to end up in higher education.
I ended up taking an interview for the University of California, Santa Barbara. I’d spent most of my life east of the Mississippi. I didn’t know anything about Santa Barbara. They wanted to interview me so I figured out where Santa Barbara was and I flew out. I was just blown away not only by the natural beauty but also by the specific advantages and unique aspects of UCSB. I’ve been able to do a lot of performing and recording literally across the world. It's a part of my job. It’s been wonderful.
Q: What has teaching music been like given the Covid-19 situation?
A: It’s difficult for music faculty to teach online because the sound fidelity is not very good via Zoom or Skype or FaceTime or any of the other media out there. Unfortunately, these things are designed primarily for voice communications so you get a lot of problems with compression and distortion and so forth. So, it’s difficult. Also, a bigger difficulty is when we have more than one person. For example, when we are teaching, or conducting an ensemble of more than a few people. So, we’ve had to sort of make do, I guess you could say, for many things. We can do direct listening. We can try a couple of people together, but it’s challenging.
Q: What research do you work on?
A: I’ve been able to do research in some of my academic specialties such as Baroque performance practice. In the case of Baroque period performance [we study] how people played music in the era of the baroque. It’s a fascinating field because, as of yet, nobody has been able to discover any recordings from the 1700s or 1800s. So, we have to go by recordings of the tutorials and we read music reviews. We look at pictures of surviving instruments and so forth to try to come to a sort of consensus. What’s rather interesting about music is that we don’t have 17th or 18th century ears. We listen to music differently. We have certain assumptions about it and that makes it even more interesting.
Q: What other projects are you working on at this time?
A: I am preparing a recording. It was supposed to be recorded actually in May, this month. It’s a recording of an American composer, Daniel Baldwin. He wrote the concerto for me. It is supposed to be performed with an orchestra as well as paired with the performance of an older concerto by the Russian composer Reinhold Gliere. It is a preparation of those two concertos for horn. It has had to be postponed for a year, but that gives me more time to prepare for it.
Dejanae Perry is a 4th-year environmental studies major at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this article for her Writing Program class Journalism for Web and Social Media.