Instruments

French Horn

Broadly speaking, a horn is a cone-shaped tube sounded by making the lips vibrate as a reed. Many prehistoric horns were in fact made from the horns of animals, but not all languages use the animal term for the modern brass orchestral and band horn, often known as the French horn because horns of coiled design were introduced into England from France in the seventeenth century; the term itself first appeared in print in 1682. The French horn has a tube several feet long coiled into circles (and into angled lengths within the circles), and finally flared out into a large bell. Modern horns have several valves (usually three or four) that alter the effective length of the tube, permitting the playing of complete chromatic scales, but the horn's substantial repertory in classical music before the nineteenth century calls for a valveless or "natural" horn, and these are still made. (The horn music of Mozart and Vivaldi, for example, was written for the natural horn. Although mutes are used as with other brass instruments, a unique feature of the horn is that the player's hand may be inserted into the bell to alter the instrument's tone. The horn was part of the marching band, but unlike other band instruments it has had only a modest presence in jazz and pop music.

Brass Instruments