How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art by Henry Edward Krehbiel
page 80 of 278 (28%)
page 80 of 278 (28%)
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call it the _Waldhorn_, _i.e._, "forest horn;" the old French name was
_cor de chasse_, the Italian _corno di caccia_. In this instrument formerly the tones which were not the natural resonances of the harmonic division of the tube were helped out by partly closing the bell with the right hand, it having been discovered accidentally that by putting the hand into the lower end of the tube--the flaring part called the bell--the pitch of a tone was raised. Players still make use of this method for convenience, and sometimes because a composer wishes to employ the slightly muffled effect of these tones; but since valves have been added to the instrument, it is possible to play a chromatic scale in what are called the unstopped or open tones. [Sidenote: _Kinds of horns._] [Sidenote: _The trumpet._] [Sidenote: _The cornet._] Formerly it was necessary to use horns of different pitch, and composers still respect this tradition, and designate the key of the horns which they wish to have employed; but so skilful have the players become that, as a rule, they use horns whose fundamental tone is F for all keys, and achieve the old purpose by simply transposing the music as they read it. If these most graceful instruments were straightened out they would be seventeen feet long. The convolutions of the horn and the many turns of the trumpet are all the fruit of necessity; they could not be manipulated to produce the tones that are asked of them if they were not bent and curved. The trumpet, when its tube is lengthened by the addition of crooks for its lowest key, is eight feet long; the tuba, sixteen. In most orchestras (in all of |
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