Instruments - Part 4

French Horn

We continue our survey of musical instruments with the French horn.

The horn was originally exactly that: an animal horn such as a cow horn (above).  Animal horns are still in use today.  The shofar, usually made from a ram's horn, is used in Jewish religious observances such as Rosh Hashanah, which is being celebrated today.  (To my Jewish friends: sorry, I couldn't find any pictures of a naked man with a shofar.)

Man-made horns date back at least to the Etruscans.  These early horns were the ancestor of both the trumpet and the French horn.  We saw the example above in our post about the trumpet.  It's from an illustration in a medieval manuscript.  The fact that one little guy is blowing his horn or trumpet into another little guy's butt is presumably a Medieval joke.

In the trumpet, the metal tube is the same diameter for most of its length, flaring near the end.  In the horn, the tube gradually gets wider for much of its length, flaring to be very wide at the end.  This gives it a different sound.  The next step was to bend the long flaring tube into a coil, to make it more portable, as seen above.  This meant it could be carried while riding a horse.  Thus was born the hunting horn.

The instrument above is called a natural horn because it has no keys or valves to change the pitch.  The player can play a limited series of notes that are natural harmonics, just like a bugle.

In the early 1800s, horn makers in France and Germany added valves that the player could control with his fingers (above), which allowed all the notes of the musical scale to be played.  The French version used piston-like values similar to a trumpet, while the German version (above) has become standard today, using rotary values controlled by levers.  Thus, the instrument that people call a French horn is really a German horn.  Confused?  For this reason, professional musicians just call it a horn.

The photo above shows how wide the flared mouth of the instrument is, which has a lot to do with its sound.

Finally, this giant horn was labeled on a website as a Wagner tuba, an instrument invented by composer Richard Wagner, but it looks more like a helicon tuba.  Both are actually large horns, not tubas.  The Sousaphone is another instrument that's basically a large horn, but we'll see Sousaphones in a future post.

Until then, stay horny!