When Brass Breathes: Mary Beth Orr Releases "The Singing Horn"
Magic happens with brass breathing like a body, metal curves articulating the tremble of a voice. In Mary Beth Orr's new release, "THE SINGING HORN" (Big Round Records, March 2025), French horn and human voice aren't just friends — they're twins born apart, reunited in song. From the tender familiarity of the gospel standard "I’ll Fly Away" to the aching wanderlust of Mahler’s "Songs of the Wayfarer", Orr builds bridges between centuries, cultures, and continents, carrying the listener across with an artist’s steady hand and a poet’s heart. She calls the album “a love letter to my life, and to yours,” and it feels exactly that intimate — handwritten, smudged with memory, sealed with breath.
From 26 songs, Orr moves with ease from role to role: horn player, balladeer, storyteller. Sometimes she is one or the other, sometimes both at once, bedazzling rich brass into her voice until the two become indistinguishable. The first five songs make up a whispered cycle, a weave of folk and classical strands that tightens into the bone-achingly stillness of "Oh Death". Then there is "Good and True", a child of a Dagara Tribe birthing song of rhythms taught by author and educator Sobonfu Somé — a time both ancient and gorgeously alive. This is music not so much played as lived, each note infused by her life as an artist and human being.
Her qualifications are as elegant as her playing: 3rd Horn with the Grand Rapids Symphony, regular guest artist with the Detroit and Charleston Symphonies, winner of the International Horn Competition of America and the International Women's Brass Conference Solo Competition. And yet "THE SINGING HORN" doesn't feel like a showcase of technicality — though the technicality is clear. It reads very much like a diary written to music, one that so happens to have won Silver Outstanding Achievement Honors at the 2025 Global Music Awards. This is not hornist yearning for perfection; this is artist yearning to connect.
Orr, writing in liner notes of her own, catches the lyricism of music itself — reflections on motherhood, love, and loss that illuminate from within upon the work. The horn becomes an organ of speech; voice, a resonating brass bell. The folk and classical mix. Raw and sophisticated collide. Life and loss become one. And within that space where they converge — that soft, vibrating area between them — dwells "THE SINGING HORN". An album that doesn't just sing to you, but listens back.
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