History

Nobody knows when or where the first human picked up a conch-shell or animal horn and discovered the sounds that can be made – it is as old as mankind. Many studies have demonstrated that human communities throughout all of our collective history have valued this ability to make sounds used them both for signalling over large distances and for ceremonial purposes.

It is a fundamental physical property of any tube, that when the air within it is set in motion in a particular way (with a reed or the player’s lips), it will create a sound. This sound is shaped by the dimensions of the tube and we hear this shaping as different pitches and “tonal quality”. The instruments we know today owe their very existence to this simple but powerful physical property.

If we have a sufficiently long tube, we can create not just one pitch but an entire array of pitches, known as the Harmonic Series. This is another natural consequence of physics and is common to all tubes.

This array of notes allows the player to produce melodies and when there are multiple players and instruments, there can be harmony too! A fine example of this is the Alphorn. It consists of a conical tube, about three meters in length. The sound is made by the player’s lips as they blow into the narrow end of the tube. The overall length of the tube has a defining impact on the pitch or “key” of the harmonic series. If we were to make our tube shorter, the whole sequence of notes would be heard at a higher pitch but would still be recognisably the same sequence of notes. Similarly, if we were to make our tube longer, it would all sound lower in pitch. By choosing the right length, we can make our tube able to play in a specified key and so join in with other instruments.

The majestic and somewhat melancholic sound of the Alphorn has been with us since the late 1400’s and quite probably much longer than that. The instrument is ubiquitous in all corners of the Alps and bears a very clear resemblance to the Lituus which was used by the Romans. There are similar examples from around the ancient world, all dating from civilizations that had mastered metal-working, e.g. the Scandinavian Luur, Tibetan Trumpets and the silver instruments discovered in Egyptian Pharoah Tutankharmun’s burial chamber.

Instruments such as the Alphorn are rather cumbersome to use and have fairly limited musical scope and over many generations, musicians and craftsmen have contributed to the on-going development which has given us the instruments we play today.

Soft metals were adopted in place of wooden construction which allowed the instrument to be “rolled up” and made more easily manageable in use. Subtle changes began to appear; the tube was no longer a simple cone-shape, various profiles were tried, cylindrical tubing, exponential cones, combinations of these and in addition, the open end of the tube acquired a distinct “flare” (now known as the “bell”). Enterprising players sought a means of “correcting” the wayward intonation of some of the harmonics and discovered that by placing their hand in the bell, not only could they re-tune the harmonics, they could produce notes that do not lie within the harmonic series at all. This led to two further changes, the bell became wider and deeper affording more working space for the player’s hand and the “hoop” of tubing became tighter to allow the player to put their hand into the bell more easily. This playing methodology, known simply as Hand Technique quickly became the standard for horn-players everywhere. Alongside these developments, there was another change to the layout of the horn, driven by the requirement to change the length of the tube in order to play in different keys. This was the development of “crooks”. The instruments were now built in two parts, the body (which was essentially the bell and the final 210cm or so of tubing) and a selection of interchangeable coils of tubing (the crooks) which were built in different lengths.

Each crook was associated with a key and was built to the length required to place the whole instrument in that key. A tuning slide was added to this arrangement to allow more precise tuning adjustment. A complete horn “kit” could easily consist of a body with two or three different tuning slides and a complement of eleven or more crooks, making for a heavy and, yet again, cumbersome arrangement.

Composers were quick to spot the new musical possibilities which followed from these innovations and their writing for the horn became more elaborate allowing it to find a more meaningful role in the musical world. As the music being written for the horn developed, there arose a need for a means to achieve instantaneous crook-changes, without the requirement to give the player thirty or more seconds break in which to do this. Rather like the development of the modern car, different ideas emerged in different places and various “concept designs” were tried.

Some advances created as many problems as they were intended to solve……

The definitive breakthrough occurred in the early years of the 1800’s when the first valves were developed. So successful was this new technology that it remains in use to this day although, as with many great new developments, it had unforeseen consequences.

The valves made it possible to play chromatically across the whole range of the instrument with the result that the school of Hand Technique which had reigned supreme for nearly a century was rapidly lost as many turned to the valve-horn which did not require the same skills. Brahms was oft heard to mutter “Blech Bratsche” (“Brass Viola”) when confronted with valve horns. He wrote his horn parts with the valveless horn (Natural Horn) in mind and went so far as to specify that instrument for his Trio Op.40, written in 1865. Nevertheless, use of the Natural Horn declined sharply and it was not until another hundred years after Brahms wrote his Trio that there was a resurgence in interest in playing and making Natural Horns.

Not all was lost however, the limitations of the Natural Horn had shaped the way that composers wrote for the horn, establishing an enduring idiom for horn writing. Composers such as Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and more recently John Williams and Hans Zimmer have continued to write horn parts that are imbued with the character and soul of the instrument and in his epic work “Des Canyons aux Etoilles” Olivier Messiaen wrote a solo horn movement called “Appell Interstellaire” which magnificently carries the idiom forward into the Twentieth Century.

And, of course, the journey is not over. More music is being written now which makes still greater demands on the player and the instrument, continuing the process of technical and subsequent musical development. The Natural Horn and the Baroque Horn are in regular use again and composers are now writing new music for these instruments as well. There is much to look forward to!