(dramatic music) - One of the great things about being a brass player is that we get all the heroic tunes, that we also get the romantic tunes.

When you hear a poignant moment, it's the horn solo.

When you hear the happy moment, it's the brass players, so the horn does it all.

I'm Ellen Dinwiddie Smith, and I play the horn.

The horn is notoriously the most difficult of the brass instruments, and one of the reasons is because it has a four and a half octave range, so it can play almost as low as the tuba and almost as high as the trumpet.

And unlike an instrument like the trumpet where as you get higher, the partials are still a little bit further apart, with the horn, they're very, very close together.

So it gets very tricky as you go higher to find the right pitch.

It is a very tricky instrument to learn.

We commonly call our lips our embouchure.

You can't really see what you're doing when you're playing, unlike if you're playing the violin and you can so clearly see.

A lot of what happens happens behind the mask of your face.

We actually vibrate our lips, so where we're playing is in the front of our mouth, and everything that happens behind it impacts how it sounds.

(bright music) When I was a young woman, we lived in Hawaii, and they bused us down to see the Honolulu Symphony.

And I loved the concert and I went home and told my mother that I wanted to play an instrument.

But by the time it was time to start band, we moved to Texas and I had some definite band director saviors who pushed the horn into my hands.

I immediately fell in love with the instrument.

Out of high school, I got a full scholarship to go to the University of Texas at Austin.

I auditioned and I got into the Juilliard School and the teacher that I was studying with there, he was the former principal of the Cleveland Orchestra named Myron Bloom.

My first year at Juilliard, he asked if I wanted to audition for Curtis and I did, and I was accepted.

So that's where I finished up.

I had some really important mentors along the way, and so if it wasn't for those people, there's no doubt that I wouldn't have gotten a job in the Minnesota Orchestra.

I joined the orchestra in 1993, and when I joined the orchestra, it basically changed my life.

So my husband and I have been living apart at that point, and we bought a house and decided to make it our home.

So I met my husband when I was a student at the Juilliard School.

He was a cellist.

And then by chance, he happened to go to Curtis the same year I did.

Now he's at the University of Minnesota.

He's the Director of Orchestral Studies and he's also the head conductor for the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphonies.

(bright music) This is a natural horn, it's a halari, and it's a reproduction of an instrument that they would've played in the classical era when they first started writing for horn in the concert hall.

Before that time, horn was just a signal instrument that you would play out when you were hunting.

And when they decided to bring it in, they only had one shape for it.

And at some point they figured out, well, if we made, for instance, a longer piece of tubing, then we could play in a lower key.

So here is, this is the key of F, which is the key the horn is pitched in.

And this is the key of E, which is one half step lower.

This is like putting down our second valve on our horn.

So that's how much more tubing we get just by putting down one valve.

And you can't really tell that when you look at the horn now.

(Ellen playing horn) You can almost play a scale and a couple extra notes just by by doing it all with your embouchure.

And so I love teaching the natural horn because I feel like it's a big connection to what we do on the regular horn.

So when you hear especially Beethoven, Brahms, DvoYák, you'll be listening to pieces that were written for this instrument.

(gentle music) I have students who are horn majors.

I have some that are master's students.

I have a doctorate student, but I've had students who are music therapy students, music ed students.

I love that two before G, that was awesome.

But the most important thing, of course, is really getting them playing the horn and finding their path.

I still teach at home.

I have a few home students.

And I also teach at the university, and I help with the horn studio class there as well.

I started diving when Mark's dad and stepmom invited us to go to Cozumel one year with our sons and tried it out in the pool.

And I was initially really worried because I'm a musician and what about my ears, but I discovered really quickly that if you can clear your ears, just like when you're going into a pool, then you're gonna be okay.

I did my advance course and I did my rescue course, and then finally I did my divemaster course.

The breath is a big part of it because you have to be able to control that, when you feel something exciting, not let your breath get out of control so that you can stay neutrally buoyant.

How would you feel if a 15 foot tiger shark came your way and you were holding your camera in front of you?

You have to have the wherewithal to go like the tiger shark's gonna hit the front of my camera and just go the other way.

Or he's not, or he's just gonna circle really closely.

And they will literally do one of those two things, and in the meantime, you just hold it still and hope you get a couple good shots.

It's overwhelming and sometimes you get out of the water and you can't believe what you just saw.

Most recently I was in Fiji and Tonga, and the Tonga part of the trip was kind of a lifelong goal to see the humpback whales as they give birth in the lagoons there.

When you add photography to that mix, it's a whole nother layer of calm because you're trying to get the shot and calm your breath at the same time.

Because I have such great dive buddies, I just decided it would be really nice to give you both a little present.

Just after New Year, I had planned a trope go to St. Croix and Milana just said, "Hey, where are you going on our break?"

And I said, "I'm going to St. Croix, you wanna come?"

She's like, "Yeah, I do."

So she took a big leap and got certified and did everything that week.

- Thank you so much.

- You're welcome.

- That's awesome.

- He was a pro helping me light up the colors.

- No bubbles, no sand.

Being from Florida, it's always been something that fascinated me.

And I was this close to being an oceanographer.

- Really?

- In high school, I had to decide between science and music.

And I thought music would be easier, wrong.

- Well, I just appreciate you inviting me, and you just gave me such confidence in myself that I could do it.

- Mike will tell you, we haven't seen someone just slide into the water and become a mermaid quite as quickly as you did.

- That was pretty amazing to see how fast you learned.

I just let you go.

- And you too, Mike, you were so encouraging.

- It speaks a lot to our nature about being curious about things that are new, but also about things that we love, not being afraid to go out and do them.

And I'm so glad you've joined us.

- I'm so glad too, so, so glad.

- I feel like there's so few times in life where you really feel like your heart is singing, you're doing something that makes you that happy.

And I've been so fortunate to sit on stage with you guys and get to play amazing music.

So to have another thing that we do together where we're in the water and it's just, it's fantastic.

(gentle music) When I got in the orchestra, I was the first woman in the brass section, and until we just hired Jaclyn Rainey last spring, that's been the way it has been for 31 years.

So it's pretty cool that that's changing.

It's a section of people with beautiful sounds, which is, to me, the most important thing.

So we have our own little choir going, and the beauty of that is that we're always listening to each other's voice, and it amazes me even still.

I'm just thankful that this is the place where I ended up.