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by Richard Merewether
Copyright© 1978 Richard Merewether
'The horn, the horn, the lusty horn
is not a thing to laugh to scorn.'
(As You Like It)Indeed no: in fact there never seems to have been a time when the horn was laughed at. Horn-players, yes-they have probably always been laughed at a great deal, particularly by each other-but not the horn itself.
Other types of instruments found their place in the pre-Classical ensemble long before the horn. Occasionally it would be invited into the salon from the forest and field, from a world of cobbled yard and buckets, to join the band in accompanying a chorus or two-perhaps even giving an obbligato before retiring behind the green baize door again.
Much more at home in the orchestra by the time of Haydn and Mozart, now with a lot more to do and a growing capacity for delicacy, for the rising Beethoven and Schubert it probably seemed always to have been there. And then-'die Romantik': its sudden blossoming with Weber and his evocation of days and nights in the woods, in every mood from boisterous merriment to dreamy languor, made the horn for Robert Schumann 'the soul of the orchestra' . To this day the horn can instantly hark back to its bucolic origins and the hunt with an effect most exhilarating to hear.
Thus onward through Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, to Sibelius and our own century, the horn romped from strength to strength-and not a word yet of the fine XIXth-century French school of stylish playing and composition for the instrument it had drawn from Bohemia. That tradition underwent a lamentable decline into excesses of sour, wobbly tone and queasy intonation earlier in our century, amid a brash manner of playing by the brass generally which other countries associate more with the circus and street corner than with symphony and opera. With the Russian revolution, an offshoot there of this fin-de-siëcle decadence became as it were frozen into eastern-European musical habit, and these mannerisms ('style' is scarcely the word) persist today in their horn-playing amid the general raising of eyebrows in many another country. A brave renascence in France itself has been busily shedding every trace of this lapse into quasi-travesty, which brought the horn as near to being laughed at as one would ever wish to see it . . .
The horn has advanced a long way from its chores about the estate and the great house, often to a seat on the Board if not in the Chair itself; it is loved every bit as much as such a rùle permits for all of the time-and (one hopes) is never, never laughed to scorn.
This booklet will start with the most immediate observations about the horn itself, its appearance regarding materials and different forms, with a word of help in what should be sought as a beginning with the instrument. It will then proceed with a description of how horns are made, and a more detailed explanation of the various models and the reasons for their development; a section then follows advising how the instrument should best be cared for and maintained, leading to a chapter (appearing, the author imagines, for the first time in a form of use to players) which advises how performer and instrument can best combine to employ the potential of both to fullest musical use. The final section then deals (again it is hoped, originally) with the physics of the instrument in lay terms, with a definitive explanation of 'stopping' and of hand-horn technique. The author wishes his readers the best of luck, end dedicates this short work with affection to all friends and colleagues-the horn-players of the world.
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