About Me

Welcome to the LA Horn Club's historical preservation website!  I first became interested in the LA Horn Club when I was a graduate student at USC. At the time, Vince DeRosa and Jim Decker were still teaching there, and I was one of Decker’s last students. I had a part-time job as music librarian and copyist of the  Wendell Hoss Memorial Library of the Los Angeles Horn Club, where I inventoried and catalogued over 1,200 solo and ensemble works for horn and worked with such noted film composers as Elmer Bernstein, Bruce Broughton and Michael Giacchino to prepare the LA Horn Club’s newly-commissioned works for publication and sale.  Many years later, I realized that the library was a valuable piece of history worthy of preservation, and I'm currently exploring ways to conserve the collection for future generations of horn players.

I'm also interested in documenting the history of the horn players who were members of the LA Horn Club and played on its recordings (as well as the other musicians on their two albums). Information about the better-known players such as Vince and Jim is readily available; however, information about the other players is hard to come by.  As a genealogist, I specialize in researching people's stories and family histories, and have employed my genealogical skills to help shed some light on these great players' histories. They all have fascinating stories, and a lot of them are immigrants or first-generation Americans. The stories of how they ended up in Hollywood are fascinating.  I will be blogging periodically about a horn player who was a member of the LA Horn Club, or other musicians, conductors and composers who were involved with the LA Horn Club's two recordings.  Since there were so many people involved (over 81), it will take me a while, but I hope to have most of them done by the LA Horn Club's 75th anniversary in 2026.  Additionally, I will be posting articles about the events which shaped these players' lives and music making in Hollywood in general, including the founding of both the LA Philharmonic and the Hollywood Bowl, and the Great Strike of 1958.   

About the blog:  I coined a term for my blog - "Prosoblography."   Prosoblography combines the words "blog" and "prosopography."  Now, you may be wondering what "prosopography" is.  According to Wikipedia, “A prosopography is not just any collection of biographies. The lives of the research subjects must have enough in common for relationships and connections to be uncovered. Genealogy, as practiced by family historians, has as its goal the reconstruction of familial relationships, and as such, well-conducted genealogical research may form the basis of a prosopography.”

I hope you enjoy my research.  I will update the LA Horn Club Prosoblography as I find new information, so please sign up for my newsletter!  

As a visitor here, you are part of a fantastic community.  Please feel free to send me comments and suggestions, or contributions to the site.  If you have any photos or stories about the players profiled here, please let me know!  I would love to include them.  If you are a former student or a descendant of theirs, I would especially love to hear from you.

Thank you so much for being part of this community. There are plenty of ways that you can become more involved. Please check out my page on Facebook and my channel on YouTube.  If you have performed any of the LA Horn Club's music and have a video, I would love to put in on my YouTube channel.  If you have an upcoming concert including any LA Horn Club music, please send me the information and I will post it on my site.

This Site is Free!

A word about this free website: After much soul searching, I have decided to make my content totally free and accessible. Trying to come up with strategies to monetize my content has only made it more difficult to bring this important project to fruition. I remember the early days of the Internet when ideas were freely exchanged without concern for financial remuneration and censorship. It was a heady, exciting time -- full of promise -- and I want my site to harken back to those days. I believe historical information should be free and accessible to everyone, and my hope is that the information contained here will be shared and passed along to present and future generations.  I also want to post my articles online without worrying that editors will trim them down to fit into print publications and charge membership fees for access those articles.

The information on my site is for the sole purpose of illustration for instruction; if you wish to reuse it, please just give credit where credit is due – whether I have written it, or someone else has. If you would like to help support my research and pay for the costs of operating this site, please feel free to make a small donation. Every little bit will help. But please remember that I am not in this for the money. This is a labor of love! 

NOTE: I first started working on this website during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 when I still lived in California. Then I retired and moved cross country to the middle of a national forest in Arkansas (with poor internet service!). I kept this website in draft form for three years because I wanted it to be perfect before it went live. Now I have decided to "go live" despite the fact that it's most definitely NOT in final form -- I just wanted to get the info out there, thinking it would spur me on to finish it. Please be aware that many of these blog posts are merely rough sketches of ideas that need to be fleshed out more fully. Check back often to see what updates I've made to them!

Thank you!