Horn (instrument)
A horn is any of a family of musical instruments made of a tube, usually made of metal and often curved in various ways, with one narrow end into which the musician blows, and a wide end from which sound emerges. In horns, unlike some other brass instruments such as the trumpet, the bore gradually increases in width through most of its length—that is to say, it is conical rather than cylindrical. In jazz and popular-music contexts, the word may be used loosely to refer to any wind instrument, and a section of brass or woodwind instruments, or a mixture of the two, is called a horn section in these contexts.
Types
Variations include:- Lur
- Shofar
- Alboka
- Roman horns:
- *Cornu
- *Buccina
- Dung chen
- Dord
- Sringa
- Nyele
- Wazza
- Waqra phuku
- Alphorn
- Cornett
- Serpent
- Ophicleide
- Natural horn
- *Bugle
- *Post horn
- French horn
- German horn
- Vienna horn
- Wagner tuba
- Saxhorns, including:
- *Alto horn, pitched in E
- *Baritone horn, pitched in B
- Valved bugles, including
- *contrabass bugle
- Tuba
- Sousaphone
History
The olifant or oliphant was the name applied in the Middle Ages to ivory hunting or signalling horns made from elephants' tusks. Apparently of Asian origin, they reached Europe from Byzantium in the tenth or eleventh century, and are first mentioned in French literature in the early 12th century. In Europe they came to be symbols of royalty.
From late antiquity there are mentions of "alpine horns", but the earliest secure description of the wooden instrument now called an "alphorn" dates from the sixteenth century. This description by the naturalist Conrad Gessner calls the instrument a lituus alpinus and says it is "nearly eleven feet long, made from two pieces of wood slightly curved and hollowed out, fitted together and skillfully bound with osiers". Nevertheless, one modern authority says that at the time it was a straight instrument eleven feet long, and this form persisted in Austria until the nineteenth century. The more familiar form, with an upturned bell, was developed in Switzerland in the eighteenth century. The practice of making these instruments in different sizes, to be played together in part music, originated in 1826. Similar wooden instruments, used by shepherds for signalling, are known in Romania by the name bucium. They are made in straight, hooked, and S-shaped forms, in lengths between 1.5 and 3 meters. A variant of the straight version is called tulnic.
Metal instruments modelled on animal horns survive from as early as the 10th century BC, in the form of lurer. Nearly fifty of these curved bronze horns have been excavated from burial sites, mostly in Scandinavia, since the first was discovered in 1797. Many are in unison pairs, curved in opposite directions. Because their makers left no written histories, their use and manner of playing is unknown. The lur was likely known to the Etruscans, noted as bronze-workers from the 8th century BC, who in turn were credited by the Romans with the invention of their horns and trumpets, including long curved horns in the form of a letter C or G. Depictions of these instruments are found from the 5th century BC onward on Etruscan funerary monuments. The Etruscan name for them is unknown, but the Romans called them buccina and cornu. The latter name is the Latin word for "horn", and the source of the name of the musical instrument in many Romance languages: French cor, Italian corno, Provençal corn. Very old metal instruments similar in form to both the lurer and the cornu, often also with ceremonial or military uses, are known on the Indian subcontinent by a variety of names: ramsinga, ransingha, sringa, ranasringa, kurudutu, and kombu.
Early metal horns were less complex than modern horns. By the early 17th century, there were two main types of hunting horns, both designed to deal with the problem of providing a tube long enough to allow playing higher partials, while at the same time allowing the instruments to be played on horseback. Marin Mersenne calls these trompe, made in a crescent shape, and the cor à plusieurs tours, a tightly coiled instrument in spiral form. The tightly coiled form of horn was never very popular in France, but both there and in Germany was usually called a "trumpet". In German, the word "trumpet" was usually qualified by "Italian" or "hunting", to distinguish these coiled horns from the military or courtly trumpet, though spiral trumpets pitched in D and played in clarino style also existed. The earliest surviving horn of the tightly spiralled type, dating from about 1570, is by Valentin Springer, though it is described as early as 1511 by Sebastian Virdung. Around the middle of the seventeenth century instruments began to appear in the form of brass tubes wound into a single open hoop, with a flared exit opening. Although these came to be associated especially with France, the first known example was made in 1667 by the German maker Starck, in Nuremberg. In French, they were most often called trompe de chasse, though cor de chasse is also frequently found. In Germany, they came to be called Waldhörner. Because these horns were intended to be played on horseback during a hunt the mouthpiece was not removable. It was soldered to a mouthpipe, which in turn was often soldered to the body of the instrument and strengthened by a crosspiece, as was also the bell, rendering the horn more solid. The sound they produced was called a recheat. Change of pitch was effected entirely by the lips. Without valves, only the notes within the harmonic series are available.
Since the only notes available were those on the harmonic series of one of those pitches, they had no ability to play in different keys. The remedy for this limitation was the use of crooks, i.e., sections of tubing of differing length which, when inserted between the mouthpiece and lead pipe, increased the length of the instrument, and thus lowered its pitch. The earliest surviving crooked horn was made by the Viennese maker Michael Leichamschneider and is dated 1721. However, Leichamschneider is known to have been making crooked horns as early as 1703, when he sold "a pair of great new Jägerhorn" equipped with four double crooks and four tuning bits to the Abbot of Krems. In England, the crooked horn appeared as early as 1704, when it was called corno cromatico or, because of its origin and because it was most often played by German musicians, "German horn". In cases where it was necessary to specify the older, hooped horn without crooks, the English called it the "French horn".
By the second decade of the eighteenth century horns had become regular members of continental orchestras. In 1713 Johann Mattheson stated, "the lovely, majestic hunting horns have now become very fashionable, in church music just as much as in theatre and chamber music, partly because they are not so coarse as trumpets, but also partly because they can be managed with greater facilité. The most useful have the same ambitus above F as the trumpets have above C. However, they sound more poetic and are more satisfying than the deafening and shrieking clarini... because they are a perfect fifth lower in pitch."
One performing difficulty raised by the use of crooks inserted at the mouthpiece end of the instrument was that players were obliged to hold the horn in a way that the crooks would not fall out. For the hunting horn played on horseback, the left hand held the reins while the right hand gripped the body of the horn, but with crooks the left hand was required to hold them and the instrument securely together, with the right hand grasping the bell or the body of the instrument. The solution came with the creation of the Inventionshorn in about 1753 by the famous horn player Anton Joseph Hampel in collaboration with the Dresden instrument maker Johann Georg Werner. In this type of instrument, the relationship between the mouthpiece and lead pipe is usually undisturbed and a series of cylindrical-bore sliding crooks are fitted into the central portion of the instrument to lower the pitch from E downwards. These sliding crooks also had the function of tuning slides, obviating the need for tuning "bits" inserted before or after the crook. In order to raise the pitch above F, however, it was necessary to insert a new, shorter lead pipe, acting as a crook. This design was adapted and improved by the Parisian maker Raoux in about 1780, and adopted by many soloists in France. This was called the cor solo, and was distinguished by the use of just five crooks for playing in the most common keys for solo compositions, G, F, E, E, and D.
Orchestral horns are traditionally grouped into "high" horn and "low" horn pairs. Players specialize to negotiate the unusually wide range required of the instrument. Formerly, in certain situations, composers called for two pairs of horns in two different keys. For example, a composer might call for two horns in C and two in E for a piece in C minor, in order to gain harmonics of the relative major unavailable on the C horns. Eventually, two pairs of horns became the standard, and from this tradition of two independent pairs, each with its own "high" and "low" horn, came the modern convention of writing both the first and third parts above the second and fourth.
In the mid-18th century, horn players began to insert the right hand into the bell to change the effective length of the instrument, adjusting the tuning up to the distance between two adjacent harmonics depending on how much of the opening was covered. This technique, known as hand-stopping, is generally credited to the self-same Anton Joseph Hampel who created the Inventionshorn. It was first developed around 1750, and was refined and carried to much of Europe by the influential Giovanni Punto. This offered more possibilities for playing notes not on the harmonic series. By the early classical period, the horn had become an instrument capable of much melodic playing. A notable example of this are the four Mozart Horn Concerti and Concert Rondo, wherein melodic chromatic tones are used, owing to the growing prevalence of hand-stopping and other newly emerging techniques.
In 1818 rotary valves were introduced by Heinrich Stölzel and Friedrich Blümel, initially to overcome problems associated with changing crooks during a performance. Valves' unreliability, musical taste, and players' distrust, among other reasons, slowed their adoption into mainstream. Many traditional conservatories and players refused to use them at first, claiming that the valveless horn, or natural horn, was a better instrument. Some musicians, specializing in period instruments, still use a natural horn when playing in original performance styles, seeking to recapture the sound and tenor in which an older piece was written.
The use of valves, however, opened up a great deal more flexibility in playing in different keys; in effect, the horn became an entirely different instrument, fully chromatic for the first time. Valves were originally used primarily as a means to play in different keys without crooks, not for harmonic playing. That is reflected in compositions for horns, which only began to include chromatic passages in the late 19th century. When valves were invented, generally, the French made narrower-bored horns with piston valves and the Germans made larger-bored horns with rotary valves.