The natural horn is a musical instrument that is the ancestor of the modern-day horn

Horn (instrument)

The horn is a brass instrument consisting of about of tubing wrapped into a coil with a flared bell. A musician who plays the horn is called a horn player ....

, and is differentiated by its lack of valves. It consists of a mouthpiece, some long coiled tubing, and a large flared bell. Pitch changes are made through a few different techniques:

• Modulating the lip tension as done with modern brass instruments. This allows for notes in the harmonic series
  Harmonic series (music)
  Pitched musical instruments are often based on an approximate harmonic oscillator such as a string or a column of air, which oscillates at numerous frequencies simultaneously. At these resonant frequencies, waves travel in both directions along the string or air column, reinforcing and canceling...
  
   to be played.
• Changing the length of the instrument by switching the crooks
  Crook (music)
  A crook, also sometimes called a shank, is an exchangeable segment of tubing in a natural horn which is used to change the length of the pipe, altering the fundamental pitch and harmonic series which the instrument can sound, and thus the key in which it plays.-Master crook and coupler...
  
  . This is a rather slow process. Before the advent of the modern valved horn many ideas were attempted to speed up the process of changing the key of the instrument.
• Changing the position of the hand in the bell; this is called hand-stopping
  Hand-stopping
  Hand-stopping is a technique by which a natural horn can be made to produce notes outside of its normal harmonic series. By inserting the hand, cupped, into the bell, the player can reduce the pitch of a note by a semitone or more...
  
  .

This instrument was used extensively until the emergence of the valved horn in the early 19th century.

Handhorn technique

The natural horn has several gaps in its harmonic range. In order to play chromatically, in addition to crooking the instrument into the right key, two additional techniques are required: bending and hand-stopping

Hand-stopping

Hand-stopping is a technique by which a natural horn can be made to produce notes outside of its normal harmonic series. By inserting the hand, cupped, into the bell, the player can reduce the pitch of a note by a semitone or more...

. Bending a note is achieved by modifying the embouchure

Embouchure

The embouchure is the use of facial muscles and the shaping of the lips to the mouthpiece of woodwind instruments or the mouthpiece of the brass instruments.The word is of French origin and is related to the root bouche , 'mouth'....

 to raise or lower the pitch fractionally, and compensates for the slightly out of pitch "wolf tone

Wolf tone

A wolf tone, or simply a "wolf", is produced when a played note matches the natural resonating frequency of the body of a musical instrument, producing a sustaining sympathetic artificial overtone that amplifies and expands the frequencies of the original note, frequently accompanied by an...

s" which all brass instruments have. Hand-stopping is a technique whereby the player can modify the pitch of a note by up to a semitone (or sometimes slightly more) by inserting a cupped hand into the bell. Both change the timbre as well as the pitch.

Repertoire

The List of compositions for horn includes many pieces that were originally written with the natural horn in mind. Until the development of the modern horn in the early to mid 19th century, Western music employed the natural horn and its natural brass brethren. Substantial contributors to the horn repertoire include Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...

, Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...

, Telemann

Georg Philipp Telemann

Georg Philipp Telemann was a German Baroque composer and multi-instrumentalist. Almost completely self-taught in music, he became a composer against his family's wishes. After studying in Magdeburg, Zellerfeld, and Hildesheim, Telemann entered the University of Leipzig to study law, but eventually...

, Weber

Carl Maria von Weber

Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber was a German composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist and critic, one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school....

 and many others.

The chromatic

Chromaticism

Chromaticism is a compositional technique interspersing the primary diatonic pitches and chords with other pitches of the chromatic scale. Chromaticism is in contrast or addition to tonality or diatonicism...

 abilities of recently-developed brass instruments, however, opened new possibilities for composers of the Romantic era, and fit with the artistic currents of the time. By the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, almost all music was written for the modern valved horn.

However, the natural horn still found its way into the works of some composers. Brahms

Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist, and one of the leading musicians of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria, where he was a leader of the musical scene...

 did not care for the valved horn and wrote for natural horn. Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten

Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...

's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, though written for the modern horn, makes notable use of the F harmonic series.

György Ligeti

György Ligeti

György Sándor Ligeti was a composer of contemporary classical music. Born in a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania, Romania, he briefly lived in Hungary before becoming an Austrian citizen.-Early life:...

's Hamburgisches Konzert (Hamburg Concerto) makes a great use of the natural horn and of natural sounds on the modern horn in the solo part and requires four natural horns in the orchestra.

Natural horn and the modern horn

Below lists natural horn keys with their corresponding fingering on the modern horn. If a piece of music says the key on the left you can press the key combination on the right on the modern horn to get the correct tube length. This is useful for simulating natural horn when playing older compositions.

• B♭ alto - T0
• A - T2
• A♭ - T1
• G - T12
• G♭ - T23
• F - 0 or T13
• E - 2 or T123
• E♭ - 1
• D - 12
• D♭ - 23
• C - 13
• B basso - 123
• B♭ basso - not possible on F horn unless you pull all the valve slides and tuning slide out as far as they will go (without detaching) and then use the 123 fingering.

External links

• The Cyber Horn Museum

• Ericson, John. The Natural Horn.

• Seraphinoff, Richard. Natural Horns.