What an exciting week I just had! Not only did I sell a horn on eBay for some good money, I also placed an order for a new horn (more on that in a future post), AND I also got to play Mahler’s 6th Symphony. The last time I performed that work was on assistant many years ago with the New World Symphony, when I was a senior in college. So this is the 1st time I’ve gotten to play 3rd on it, which was very fun.
Mahler 6 is a literal marathon for the horns, at about 90 minutes of pretty much non-stop horn playing. The 3rd horn probably gets the most rest time out of the 1st horn quartet (there are 8 horn parts!), and even with the 3rd horn playing the least out of the first 4 horns, my part was still 20 pages long. The 1st horn part is 23 pages long!
So, why does the 3rd horn play so “little” (of course a relative term) compared to horns 1, 2, and 4 in this work? I think that, like in many of his other symphonies, Mahler uses the 3rd horn as a sort of assistant to the 1st horn. 3rd horn plays with the 1st horn in all the big tuttis, but with practically no solo passages other than the occasional couple of notes here and there. But it’s still plenty to keep me happy and satisfied. All of the fun, none of the pressure!
As far as the horn sale, there were a few reasons why I thought the sale went successfully. I put a lot of thought and research into how I would go about selling the horn. Why did I decide to sell it on eBay? Because I wanted to avoid paying a consignment fee to a music store to sell it for me, and I wanted to sell it relatively quickly, and not have to wait around (possibly months) for it to sell. There are fees on eBay, but they are much less than if you sold a horn on consignment. Also, a colleague of mine sold a custom instrument a few years ago for well over what he thought he would get for it, so I knew it could be a successful sale.
Also, eBay is a darn entertaining way to sell something! I found myself checking my auction 5 times a day as the price went up like a bullet, especially in the final minutes, and over 100 people were watching the auction. When a really fine custom made instrument gets put on eBay, it seems word travels REALLY fast.
I decided on a 10 day auction, rather than the usual 7 day auction, in order to allow interested bidders more time to get their finances in order before bidding. I decided to time the ending of the auction on a Sunday night because as that is leisure time for most people, it offered the most visibility and bidding opportunity at that time.
I started the bidding at $999.99, well under what you’d pay for an excellent instrument, but I wanted to build some excitement about the horn. I set a reserve price that was not as much as a new instrument, but the minimum that I was willing to part with it. A reserve price is a minimum dollar amount you set for the item that the bidding must reach in order for it to sell. It ended up meeting my reserve price quickly and ended up going well over it.
I knew it was very important in an auction for a valuable item such as a musical instrument to have good photos, and lots of them from all different angles. So on a day off at about noon, when the natural light was the best in the brightest room in my house (the kitchen) I took pictures of my horn using a tripod and my digital camera. Though I’m no expert photographer by any means, the photos turned out quite well, and I was very happy with them.
I hope the winning bidder is very happy with the horn. I have taken the pictures down from my website in order to prevent them from being used by potential eBay scammers. I’ve kept one up as the new banner for my website, because the photo was better than the one I was using previously. I think if I ever have any spare time (ha!), I might take some new and better horn photos for my banner. Next time, I will post about the new horn that I ordered.
