|
|
|
||||||||
 |
The French horn is a brass instrument
that is distinctive because of its 21 feet (6.4 meters) of tubing all coiled
in an elaborate circular structure. The modern French horn was developed
throughout the 19th century as valves were added to allow players access
to all the available notes. Before this, horn players had to attach various
lengths of tubing called crooks in order to play in a particular key. This
is the distinction between natural horns and valved horns. A player also
had to use a hand in the flaired bell to help control the pitch of the
notes. In performance, French horn players place their right hand actually
inside the bell of the instrument to produce special sound effects like
muting. Because of its smooth tone color and expressive ability to play
both loudly and softly, it helps to blend the homogeneous sound of the
strings with the more varied color of the woodwinds. --Photo courtesy of
McCrea Music Company, La Mesa, California
---------------------------------------------------------
|
  
|
||
| The French horn (so called to distinguish
it from the English horn, a member of the oboe family) is the developed
European orchestral member of the true horn family. The instrument is classified
technically as a lip-vibrated aerophone (see musical instruments), characterized
by a conical bore and funnel-shaped mouthpiece, as opposed to the cylindrical
bore and cup-shaped mouthpiece of the trumpet family.
Descended from primitive animal-horn prototypes (for example, the biblical shofar), short, curved horns were used in medieval Europe primarily as signal instruments, especially for the hunt; they could usually be relied on only for the rhythmic sounding of a single pitch. In the late 16th and 17th centuries the horn, from this time usually made of brass, was lengthened and coiled--first in a small, spiral coil, later in a wider, open loop. By the late 17th century in France the cor de chasse ("hunting horn") emerged with a wide, flaring bell and a tube length of up to 4.37 m (14 ft), the obvious prototype of the modern instrument. Responsive to a greatly increased number of its natural overtones (see music, acoustics of), the cor de chasse possessed a wide enough range of pitches for use in the orchestra of the early 18th century. The addition of "crooks" (curved extensions to the tubing of various lengths) and the technique--attributed to the Dresden virtuoso Anton Joseph Hampel--of altering the pitch by stopping the bell with the hand made the horn still more complete melodically in its middle ranges, thus greatly increasing its versatility in the orchestra of the classical period of Haydn and Mozart. Also at this time (the late 18th century) the cup-shaped, trumpetlike mouthpiece was abandoned for the funnel-shaped mouthpiece of the modern horn, resulting in a smoother, less raucous sound. During the early 19th century valves were added (patented in 1818 by Heinrich Stolzel and Friedrich Bluhmel in Berlin) to vary the playing length of the tube, yielding an instrument virtually chromatic (proceeding by semitones) throughout its range. Although it was slow to be accepted, the valve horn prevailed by the end of the 19th century. The modern French horn is usually pitched in F, and has three valves and a tube length of about 3.75 m (12 ft). The great demands on the resources of the horn have led to the widespread adoption of the "double horn," in which a separate set of coils for a horn in B-flat is added to a horn in F, a fourth valve acting as a switch between the two sets of coils. Excerpted from Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia
|