The Horn

Of all the brass, the horn is the most reluctant member — and, by a wide margin, the most beloved. Its bore is conical where its neighbours are largely cylindrical; its tone is rounder; its high register sits, by nature, in a vertiginous corner of the harmonic series; and its right hand, of all things, lives inside the bell. The result is an instrument that can speak in turn nobly, mournfully, jubilantly, or in a half-hush — and which, more than any other, binds the orchestra together from within.

It is also an instrument of nerves. The principal horn is asked, night after night, to enter on a high note from cold breath, with no slide to adjust and no reed to blame. Schumann called it die Seele des Orchesters — the soul of the orchestra — and it is partly because the soul, by tradition, sings without a safety net.

The modern instrument is the double horn, two horns sharing a single bell: an F side of about twelve feet of tubing, and a B♭ side a fourth shorter. A thumb valve switches between them, allowing the player to choose the more secure pitch — F for warmth and the lower compass, B♭ for accuracy in the high register. Three rotary valves, operated by the left hand, lower the open pitch by a tone, a semitone, and a tone-and-a-half, in the familiar combinations of the brass.

The right hand sits inside the bell, where it tunes, colours, and — by further closure — produces the muffled, slightly metallic tone called stopped (German gestopft, French cuivré bouché), notated with a + above the note. It is the only orchestral instrument routinely played one-handed, and the only one whose interior is, in part, the player.

Berlioz heard in the horn “a noble and melancholy character, in the soft passages — and a brilliance, in the loud ones, that few instruments can rival.” He was right on both counts. The horn at piano is a candle; the horn at fortissimo is a beacon; and the horn in the middle, where most of its life is lived, is the warm thread that runs through every great symphonic tutti.

It blends. That is the practical secret of it. Four horns will sit comfortably inside a string chord without erasing it, beneath a wind choir without crowding it, and beside the trombones without forfeiting their own colour. No other brass instrument is so good at being heard without intruding — and few wind instruments are so good at carrying weight.

“The horn is the soul of the orchestra.”

— Robert Schumann

Write for the horn as one writes for a singer who is also a hunter. The line should breathe; the high notes should be earned; and the instrument, given its time, will reward you with something no other voice in the orchestra can give.

The horn is forgiving in the middle of its compass and unsparing at the extremes. A handful of habits, kept in mind, will save many later revisions — and many a cracked entrance.

• i.Write in F, even if it strains the eye. The horn is a transposing instrument by long convention. Sound a perfect fifth below the written pitch, treble clef as a rule, bass clef when the line descends below the staff.
• ii.Cold entrances are the hard ones. A high exposed entry from silence asks much of the player. Give a bar or two of context, or accept that the risk is part of the music.
• iii.Write the horns in pairs, or in fours. Two horns will harmonise as a single voice; four will form a complete choir. The standard orchestral complement is four — first and third high, second and fourth low — and the assignments are not arbitrary.
• iv.Use the stopped tone with intention. Marked +, the stopped horn is small, metallic, and faintly distant — neither louder nor softer than the open tone, but unmistakably different in colour. Reserve it for moments the music has named.
• v.Mind the breath, and the rest after the high note. Sustained high writing tires the lip in a way that no other brass instrument quite shares. Build recoveries into the part, not around it.

Beyond these few rules, write with the player in mind. A horn player will tell you what is possible — and, more usefully, what is honest.

A short, partial list — five places to begin if one wishes to know what the horn can do, and what it has been asked to do by composers who loved it.

1. № 01

   Strauss — Ein Heldenleben

   The hero’s theme

   Eight horns in unison — the most extroverted writing in the repertoire, and a kind of self-portrait.

   Listen on Spotify
2. № 02

   Tchaikovsky — Symphony No. 5

   Andante cantabile

   A solo of such tenderness that the rest of the orchestra seems, for a moment, to listen along with us.

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3. № 03

   Mahler — Symphony No. 5

   Scherzo, obbligato horn

   Mahler asks the principal to stand. The horn becomes, for fifteen minutes, a concerto soloist in disguise.

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4. № 04

   Brahms — Symphony No. 1

   Finale, alphorn call

   Brahms wrote the theme on a postcard to Clara Schumann. Across the strings of the introduction it sounds like a memory of mountains.

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5. № 05

   Mozart — Horn Concerto No. 4, K. 495

   Rondo

   Written for Joseph Leutgeb on a natural horn — gallant, cheerful, impossibly idiomatic. The repertoire begins here.

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Further entries will be added as our study deepens.

The horn comes to the orchestra from the forest. Its immediate ancestor is the cor de chasse — the great coiled hunting horn of seventeenth-century France, wound wide enough to be slung over a rider’s shoulder. By the 1680s it was being heard, tentatively, in operatic pit bands; by the early eighteenth century it had been narrowed in bore, smoothed in tone, and admitted to the orchestra in earnest.

For more than a century the orchestral instrument was a natural horn: a length of valveless brass tubing, capable of producing only the notes of the harmonic series in a single key. To change key the player exchanged a crook — a coiled segment of tubing — for one of a different length. From around 1750, the Bohemian player Anton Hampel showed that the right hand, inserted into the bell, could fill in the missing pitches; the technique, known as hand-stopping, made the horn for the first time a fully chromatic instrument. It is the horn of Mozart, of Haydn, of the early Beethoven.

In 1814 Heinrich Stölzel, a Silesian horn player, devised a piston valve that could re-route the airstream through additional tubing at will. With Friedrich Blühmel he patented an early valve mechanism in 1818, and within a generation the valved horn had displaced the crooked instrument across most of Europe. Composers met it warily — Brahms continued to write idiomatic natural-horn parts long after the valves had won — but by 1850 it was settled.

The single F horn is rich and warm, but its high register is treacherous; the single B♭ horn is secure on top but thinner below. In 1897 the Erfurt maker Fritz Kruspe, working with the player Edmund Gumpert, joined the two into a single instrument with a thumb valve to switch between them. The double horn was an immediate success, and within a generation it had become the standard professional instrument throughout the world.

The modern horn is, in essence, the Kruspe-Gumpert design refined. American makers — Conn, Holton, Lewis — broadened the bore through the twentieth century in pursuit of a darker, larger sound; German makers held closer to the original. Triple horns, adding an F-alto branch, have entered the high repertoire of Strauss, Mahler, and the film score, but for most composers most of the time the instrument Stravinsky knew is the instrument written for today.

Specifications

A summary, for the composer’s desk.