The English horn, or cor anglais, is a member of the oboe family. It is neither English nor a horn, and the name is usually written off as a mystery. Pitched a fifth below the oboe, it had been developed in 1760 by Ferlandis of Bergamo, but was rarely heard in the orchestra before the Romantic ...
Beginning as the simple pastoral and hunting instrument that its name suggests, the seventeenth-century horn was a brass tube with three coils, with a conical ‘bore’, or inner measurement, opening outwards from the funnel-shaped mouthpiece to the concluding ‘bell’. Pitch was controlled through breath pressure. This instrument, included by Handel in his Water Music (1717) and by ...
The nineteenth century saw several attempts at remaking the French horn when a valved horn along the lines of the trumpet competed with an omnitonic horn. The latter looks like a bowl of spaghetti and includes enough tubing for the instrument to be played in any key. The problem was controlling the tubing: models with various kinds of valving were tried. ...
The term ‘horn’ is generally used to refer to the orchestral horn, also known as the French horn. Although it is used in jazz slang to indicate any wind instrument played by a soloist, the name here refers to the orchestral horn. History The early history of the horn is bound intimately to that of the trumpet. Both instruments ...
The post horn is a small, valveless brass instrument once used by guards on mail coaches to announce arrivals and departures. Originally bow shaped, in the seventeenth century post horns were bent in a single loop to play the fundamental pitch bb'. Clearly these were small instruments, perhaps only 7 cm (3 in) across; nevertheless they appear in ...
– did not alter greatly in the Renaissance. Meanwhile, its compass expanded upwards. Then in the Baroque period, the bell throat became progressively narrower and, like the horn, it was provided by makers with purpose-built extra lengths of tubing. These could be fitted to extend the length of the instrument pipework and thus allow it to play ...
(Vocals, piano, b. 1934) Shirley Horn was successful from 1954 through the mid-1960s in her hometown of Washington, DC. She was promoted by Miles Davis and Quincy Jones and owned a club called the Place Where Louie Dwells, but gradually turned full attention to her family. She returned with records, club dates and concert tours in ...
sharp; by adding a downward-facing metal bell, the range was extended to B flat and later A sharp. Styles & Forms | Late Romantic | Classical Instruments | French Horn | Late Romantic | Classical ...
was a development from circular hunting horns and the usually straight post horns used by mail-coaches to announce the arrival of the post from the fifteenth century onwards. A coiled horn emerged during the Seven Years’ War of the mid-eighteenth century as an army signalling device. By 1800 the English bugle had stabilized as a single loop of copper or brass ...
The history of the bugle is usually traced to the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), when the semicircular metal hunting horn came into use on the battlefield. It settled down as a single loop, pitched in C or B flat around 1800, while a two-loop version developed later in the nineteenth century following the Crimean War (1853–56). This instrument was ...
new instrument is needed when existing instruments are forced to use unusual, high-risk techniques to overcome shortcomings in their capabilities. In the eighteenth century, for example the natural horn, was asked to use awkward hand-stopping more and more frequently to provide extra notes, and it was therefore inevitable that it should be given a complete chromatic range ...
era continued to be a time of experiment and several different competing and complementary instruments were on the market throughout Europe. Mozart wrote for a deeper clarinet called the basset horn in his Requiem. His friend, the virtuoso Anton Stadler (1753–1812), developed a variant known to us as the ‘basset clarinet’ in around 1789. Again a little deeper than the ...
weak in these lower notes and the chalumeau went on being used alongside it throughout the eighteenth century. Styles & Forms | Late Baroque | Classical Instruments | Trumpet & Horn | Late Baroque | Classical ...
music from the time of Berlioz. The modern clarinet is commonly pitched in B flat, and family members include the higher E-flat clarinet, the lower (and rarer) basset horn and, still lower, the bass and contrabass clarinets. Styles & Forms | Late Romantic | Classical Instruments | Bass Clarinet | Late Romantic | Classical ...
hero in his tone poem Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streicher (1894–95). Strauss actually wrote the part for a clarinet in D which, although still available, is largely obsolete. Basset Horn The basset horn is a member of the clarinet family, though not a clarinet itself. It is pitched in F and has a compass that extends down to a ...
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