A horn is any of a family of musical instruments made of a tube, usually made of metal and often curved in various ways, with one narrow end into which the musician blows, and a wide end from which sound emerges. In horns, unlike some other brass instruments such as the trumpet, the bore gradually increases in width through most of its length—that is to say, it is conical rather than cylindrical.Willi Apel, Harvard Dictionary of Music (1969), p. 874, noting that the trumpet is "cylindrical for about three-fourths its length", and identifying this as one of the characteristics that "distinguish it from the horn, which has a prevailingly conical bore". In jazz and popular-music contexts, the word may be used loosely to refer to any wind instrument, and a section of brass or woodwind instruments, or a mixture of the two, is called a horn section in these contexts.
Types Variations include:
Lur (prehistoric) Shofar Alboka Roman horns: Cornu Buccina Dung chen Dord Sringa Nyele Wazza Waqra phuku Alphorn Cornett Serpent Ophicleide Natural horn Bugle Post horn French horn German horn Vienna horn Wagner tuba Saxhorns, including: Alto horn (UK: tenor horn), pitched in E Baritone horn, pitched in B Valved bugles, including contrabass bugle Tuba Sousaphone
History
As the name indicates, people originally used to blow on the actual horns of animals before starting to emulate them in metal or other materials. This original usage survives in the shofar (), 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 () in Hebrew, in Akkadian, and () in Greek.Sibyl Marcuse, "Keras", "Keren", and "Qarnu", Musical Instruments: A Comprehensive Dictionary, corrected edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). .
The olifant or oliphant (an abbreviation of the French cor d'olifant/oliphant, "elephant horn") was the name applied in the Middle Ages to ivory hunting or signalling horns made from elephants' tusks. Apparently of Asian origin, they reached Europe from Byzantium in the tenth or eleventh century, and are first mentioned in French literature in the early 12th century. In Europe they came to be symbols of royalty.Sibyl Marcuse, "Olifant" and "Oliphant", Musical Instruments: A Comprehensive Dictionary, corrected edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). .
From late antiquity there are mentions of "alpine horns", but the earliest secure description of the wooden instrument now called an "alphorn" dates from the sixteenth century.Sibyl Marcuse, "Alphorn", Musical Instruments: A Comprehensive Dictionary, corrected edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). . 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"."longum ferè ad pedes undecim, duobus lignis modicè incuruis & excauatis compactum, & uiminibus scitè obligatum" (Conrad Gessner, De raris et admirandis herbis qvae sive qvod noctv luceant, siue alias ob causas, lunariae nominantur, commentariolus : & obiter de alijs etiam rebus quæ in tenebris lucent : inferunter & icones quedam herbarum nove : eivsdem descriptio Montis Fracti, siue Montis Pilati, iuxta Lucernam in Heluetia : his accedvnt Io. Dv Chovl G.F. Lugdunensis, Pilati Montis in Gallia descriptio : Io Rhellicani Stockhornias, qua Stockhornus mons altissimus in Bernensium Heluetiorum agro, versibus heroicis describitur. Tigvri [Zurich]: Apud Andream Gesnerum F. & Iacobvm Gesnerum, frates, 1555): 52. Nevertheless, one modern authority says that at the time it was a straight instrument eleven feet long, and this form persisted in Austria until the nineteenth century. The more familiar form, with an upturned bell, was developed in Switzerland in the eighteenth century. The practice of making these instruments in different sizes, to be played together in part music, originated in 1826. Similar wooden instruments, used by shepherds for signalling, are known in Romania by the name bucium. They are made in straight, hooked, and S-shaped forms, in lengths between 1.5 and 3 meters. A variant of the straight version is called tulnic.Sibyl Marcuse, "Bucium" and "Tulnic", Musical Instruments: A Comprehensive Dictionary, corrected edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). .
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). Nearly fifty of these curved bronze horns have been excavated from burial sites, mostly in Scandinavia, since the first was discovered in 1797. Many are in unison pairs, curved in opposite directions. Because their makers left no written histories, their use and manner of playing is unknown. The lur was likely known to the Etruscans, noted as bronze-workers from the 8th century BC, who in turn were credited by the Romans with the invention of their horns and trumpets, including long curved horns in the form of a letter C or G. Depictions of these instruments are found from the 5th century BC onward on Etruscan funerary monuments. The Etruscan name for them is unknown, but the Romans called them buccina and cornu. The latter name is the Latin word for "horn", and the source of the name of the musical instrument in many Romance languages: French cor, Italian corno, Provençal corn. 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.Anthony Baines, Brass Instruments: Their History and Development (London: Faber and Faber, 1976): 58–60, 64–65. ; Sibyl Marcuse, "Cor", "Corn", "Corno","Cornu", "Kombu", "Ranasringa", "Sringa",Musical Instruments: A Comprehensive Dictionary, corrected edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). .
Early metal horns were less complex than modern horns. By the early 17th century, there were two main types of hunting horns, both designed to deal with the problem of providing a tube long enough to allow playing higher partials, while at the same time allowing the instruments to be played on horseback. Marin Mersenne calls these trompe, made in a crescent shape, and the cor à plusieurs tours, a tightly coiled instrument in spiral form.Renato Meucci and Gabriele Rocchetti, "Horn", The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan Publishers, 2001): 2: "History to c1800", (i) Development of the Natural Horn. The tightly coiled (or spiral) form of horn was never very popular in France, but both there and in Germany was usually called a "trumpet". In German, the word "trumpet" was usually qualified by "Italian" or "hunting", to distinguish these coiled horns from the military or courtly trumpet, though spiral trumpets (sometimes called ) pitched in D and played in clarino style also existed.Anthony Baines, Brass Instruments: Their History and Development (London: Faber and Faber, 1976): 142–43. . The earliest surviving horn of the tightly spiralled type, dating from about 1570, is by Valentin Springer, though it is described as early as 1511 by Sebastian Virdung. Around the middle of the seventeenth century instruments began to appear in the form of brass tubes wound into a single open hoop, with a flared exit opening (the bell). Although these came to be associated especially with France, the first known example was made in 1667 by the German maker Starck, in Nuremberg. In French, they were most often called trompe de chasse, though cor de chasse is also frequently found. In Germany, they came to be called Waldhörner.Anthony Baines, Brass Instruments: Their History and Development (London: Faber and Faber, 1976): 143 151, 164–65. ; Because these horns were intended to be played on horseback during a hunt the mouthpiece was not removable. It was soldered to a mouthpipe, which in turn was often soldered to the body of the instrument and strengthened by a crosspiece, as was also the bell, rendering the horn more solid. The sound they produced was called a recheat. Change of pitch was effected entirely by the lips (the horn not being equipped with valves until the 19th century). Without valves, only the notes within the harmonic series are available.
Since the only notes available were those on the harmonic series of one of those pitches, they had no ability to play in different keys. The remedy for this limitation was the use of crooks, i.e., sections of tubing of differing length which, when inserted between the mouthpiece and lead pipe, increased the length of the instrument, and thus lowered its pitch. The earliest surviving crooked horn was made by the Viennese maker Michael Leichamschneider and is dated 1721.Renato Meucci and Gabriele Rocchetti, "Horn", The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan Publishers, 2001): 2: "History to c1800", (iii) "Crooks and Hand Technique". However, Leichamschneider is known to have been making crooked horns as early as 1703, when he sold "a pair of great new Jägerhorn" equipped with four double crooks and four tuning bits to the Abbot of Krems.Horace Fitzpatrick, The Horn and Horn Playing, and the Austro-Bohemian Tradition 1680–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970): 33. In England, the crooked horn appeared as early as 1704, when it was called corno cromatico or, because of its origin and because it was most often played by German musicians (in particular the Messing family, who popularized the instrument in London beginning around 1730), "German horn". In cases where it was necessary to specify the older, hooped horn without crooks, the English called it the "French horn".Jennifer Beakes, "The Horn Parts in Handel's Operas and Oratorios and the Horn Players Who Performed in These Works", DMA diss. (New York: The City University of New York, 2007): 118, 223.
By the second decade of the eighteenth century horns had become regular members of continental orchestras. In 1713 Johann Mattheson stated, "the lovely, majestic hunting horns (Ital. Cornette di Caccia, Gall. Cors de Chasse) have now become very fashionable, in church music just as much as in theatre and chamber music, partly because they are not so coarse as trumpets, but also partly because they can be managed with greater facilité. The most useful have the same ambitus above F as the trumpets have above C. However, they sound more poetic and are more satisfying than the deafening and shrieking clarini ... because they are a perfect fifth lower in pitch."