Natural horn

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Natural Horn in the V&A Museum, London.

The musical instrument natural horn is the ancestor of the modern-day horn, 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 to be played.
Changing the length of the instrument by switching the crooks. 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. See The Cyber Horn Museum for more information on this.
Changing the position of the hand in the bell referred to as handhorn technique.

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

[edit] Handhorn Technique

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Before starting to learn handhorn technique get to know the harmonic series of the horn or the notes that can naturally be played without valves.

For every harmonic there are a few things we can do to give us a near chromatic range:

To play one half-step lower close off the bell a bit. This will take some experimenting to figure out how much but it should be relatively easy.
To play one half-step higher fully stop the bell. For modern horns we are encouraged to make this sound quite nasally. For the natural horn it should not be quite so much. Experiment to make the note sound more uniform with other notes. This may even require playing some of the open notes slightly more closed.
Pitch bending with the lips is required for some notes. For example Beethoven especially likes throwing in low written G's (bottom line bass clef in new notation). This is not a note in the harmonic series, but bending the pitch that low is quite possible. Another example that is not used often is for playing the D just below the treble clef staff. It is a whole step away from the C and E which can both be played open. Bending all the way to the D from either note is quite difficult, but a half-step bend down from the E is very doable. So if we bend a half-step and then close off the bell a bit we can get a D.

This is a simplistic view of how the technique works, but it is the general idea.

[edit] Natural Horn Repertoire

The List of compositions for horn includes many pieces that were originally written with the natural horn in mind. Since the modern horn was just becoming used in the early to mid 19th century literature written before that always employed the natural horn. This includes Mozart, Beethoven and many others. Others are more ambiguous. For example Brahms was certainly writing much of his major works after this time, but he did not care for the valved horn and wrote for natural horn. Near the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century almost all music was written for the modern valved horn.

[edit] 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. (marked none where no fingering on a standard double horn creates an equivalent length):