Horn (instrument)

This original usage survives in the shofar (Hebrew: שופר), a ram's horn, which plays an important role in Jewish religious rituals.

The genus of animal-horn instruments to which the shofar belongs is called קרן (keren) in Hebrew, qarnu in Akkadian, and κέρας (keras) in Greek.

[4] 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".

[6] Metal instruments modelled on animal horns survive from as early as the 10th century BC, in the form of lurer (a modern name devised by archaeologists).

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 (Sanskrit for "war-horn"), kurudutu, and kombu.

Marin Mersenne calls these trompe, made in a crescent shape, and the cor à plusieurs tours, a tightly coiled instrument in spiral form.

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 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.

A notable example of this are the four Mozart Horn Concerti and Concert Rondo (K. 412, 417, 477, 495, 371), wherein melodic chromatic tones are used, owing to the growing prevalence of hand-stopping and other newly emerging techniques.

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.

Archaeologists have discovered cow horns with fingerholes drilled in the side (providing a more complete musical scale) dating from the Iron Age.

In 1751, Prince Narishkin, Master of the Hunt to Empress Elizabeth of Russia, had a set of sixteen carefully tuned metal horns made to ensure that his huntsmen would sound a harmonious D-major chord while signalling to each other.

Maresch had made a second set of thirty-two (or perhaps thirty-seven) horns, each capable of playing a different, single note—the second harmonic of the instrument—from a C-major scale covering several octaves.

The instruments were straight or slightly curved horns made of copper or brass, had a wide conical bore, and were played with a cupped trumpet-type mouthpiece.

Each man in the band was trained to play his note in turn, similar to the way in which a group of handbell ringers perform melodies by each sounding their bells at a predetermined moment.

Some bands toured Europe and the British Isles, playing arrangements of standard concert repertory and Russian folk music, as well as original compositions.

Pitch is controlled through the adjustment of lip tension in the mouthpiece and the operation of valves by the left hand, which route the air into extra tubing.

The backward-facing orientation of the bell relates to the perceived desirability to create a subdued sound, in concert situations, in contrast to the more-piercing quality of the trumpet.

Pitched in eight alternating sizes in E-flat and B-flat, like saxophones, they were originally designed for army use and revolutionized military and brass bands in Europe and America.

Later makers, particularly in America, altered the scale and designs sometimes to such an extent as to make it difficult to determine whether the larger sizes of the resulting instruments actually have descended from the saxhorn or the tuba.

[28] Although Dame Juliana Berners's Boke of Saint Albans (c. 1345)—also known as the Book of Hawkinge, Hunting and Fysshing—is cited as an even earlier source of notated horn calls,[29] the copy containing them actually dates from the sixteenth century.

[32] Although it is generally accepted that the horns used on the hunt at this early date were only capable of a single note, or at best a striking of the pitch well below and "whooping up to the true pitch",[29][33] the objection has been raised against a literal, monotonic interpretation of the notation on grounds that many of the calls would be indistinguishable one from another, whereas the hunt participants would need each call to be distinctive, even if we have no direct evidence of melodic variation.

A less certain association is found in the same alternation of two notes a fourth apart in John Bull's The King's Hunt in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, copied at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

[35] The increased tube length of the cor à plusieurs tours in the late sixteenth century and with the trompe de chasse in the middle of the seventeenth, a larger number of pitches became available for horn calls, and these calls are imitated in programme music from the second quarter of the seventeenth century onward, though scored not for actual horns but for strings only.

[8] Soon afterward the hooped trompe de chasse began appearing in ballet and opera orchestras in the Empire and German states.

The intrada of a ballet by Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, performed in Linz on 15 November 1680, was played by violins and hunting horns together, according to the libretto (the music does not survive).

An anonymous Sonata da caccia con un cornu from before 1680 found in a manuscript in Kroměříž sets a cor à plusieurs tours against two violins, two violas, and basso continuo, and a Sonata venatoria from 1684 by Pavel Josef Vejvanovský calls for two trombae breves, which probably also means spiral horns, though hooped horns are not out of the question.

[36][37] The horn did not officially enter the Imperial court orchestra in Vienna until 1712, but from there it quickly migrated to the Neapolitan viceroyalty, dominated at that time by the Austrians.

[36] In the eighteenth century some outstanding concertos were written for solo horn and orchestra by Telemann, Christoph Förster, Michael and Joseph Haydn, Leopold and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Carl Stamitz.

Gioachino Rossini exploited the instrument's association with hunting in a piece called Rendez-vous de chasse for four corni da caccia and orchestra (1828).