Peter de Boor has played third horn with the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra since 1997. He has also performed with the National Symphony Orchestra, the Harrisburg Symphony, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Richmond Symphony, the Toledo Symphony, the Windsor Symphony, the Mexico State Symphony Orchestra, and the Greater Lansing Symphony Orchestra. He received his MM in horn performance from the University of Michigan, as well as a MS from the University of Chicago, a MAS from Cambridge University, and a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, all in mathematics. He currently lives in Arlington, Virginia. Peter was a part of the University Symphony Orchestra from 1989 to 1993.
What are you most excited about for the current season at the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra?
I was probably most excited about Aida, which already finished last month. There’s a lot of fantastic music in it, and I became more aware of how complicated the score is a few years ago when I arranged a highly abbreviated version of the triumphal march at the end of act II for horn trio (for a Washington National Opera donor event). For the remainder of the season, I’m looking forward to Treemonisha, an opera by Scott Joplin that I know next to nothing about, and the return of a ballet that is scored with most of Mendelssohn’s 3rd Symphony (a work that is very familiar to anyone taking more than a few third horn auditions).
During your time at UChicago, you were pursuing a PhD in mathematics and ended up going on to get a master’s degree in horn performance at the University of Michigan. What led you to make this decision?
I think most people who know the bare bones of my story tend to assume I was following my passion. The truth is more prosaic. I was floundering a bit in my PhD and severely lacking in motivation. At the time, my wife was pursuing a PhD in physics at Northwestern University and having similar motivation problems but much more success (she went on to finish that summer). She got a job offer doing IT work in Michigan, and I was wondering what to do next, when I heard about the professional horn playing success of a high school friend with whom I had played in a horn quartet (she won her current job in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra about the same time as I won my job). I had toyed with the idea of going into music when choosing colleges, and the success of my friend now made a music career seem more attainable—so I thought it was worth making a go of it!
Besides the more obvious ways in which music and mathematics are related, in what ways has your career fused together your musical and mathematical expertise?
Early on in my current job, I got involved in union business—serving on the orchestra committee, the local executive board, as a delegate to ICSOM (the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians) and then on its governing board, and now as secretary-treasurer of my local union. In all of these endeavors, logical thinking and an affinity for numbers have been an asset. Actual mathematical expertise has been useful only in the tutoring and teaching I’ve been doing for the last decade or so.
What are some of your most memorable musical experiences from being part of the USO and from your time as a professional?
In my time in the USO, Barbara was quite adventurous in her programming choices, and I got to play a lot of great repertoire in a short time: several of the Strauss tone poems, Copland’s Third Symphony, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, Beethoven’s Eroica. I particularly remember a production of Candide at the Court Theatre that she conducted. Dan arranged the score reduction to an instrument complement that would fit on a bandstand upstage, and I got to shout out a line (“Stark naked??!!”) in the middle of the "Barcarolle.”
In my career, I’d have to name our complete Ring Cycle in 2016 as a highlight.
What are interests that you like to explore in your free time?
I have frittered away entirely too much time on variant sudoku, particularly since my middle child introduced me to the Cracking the Cryptic YouTube channel.