Wind instrument, brass family
A bit of history
Evolution of the instrument
The horn is today inseparable from the modern symphony orchestra, yet this was not always the case. Originally, this one, like the hunting horn, moreover often confused until the seventeenth century, is aninstrument related to hunting and battlefields as evidenced by the Song of Roland (eleventh century).
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the horn undergoes significant changes that allow it to integrate orchestras, then become a solo instrument. Indeed, at the end of the seventeenth century, a Nuremberg maker, Friedrich Steinmetz, managed to reduce the dimensions of the instrument by winding it two and a half times on itself in order to bring ease to musicians. Subsequently, horn players also begin to hold it differently, downward, which allows them to obstruct the bell in various ways with the hand in order to raise or lower the sound by a semitone.
In the early nineteenth century,horn player,Heinrich Stölzel and oboist Friedrich Blühmelequip the horn with piston, facilitating the use of the entire chromatic scale. This one is then called horn of harmony. Today it offers a wide variety of extremely soft or, on the contrary, powerfully heroic timbres.
Particularity
It gets its name from the horns with which the first forms of horns were designed. In both German and English, the horn is called a horn (as is the animal horn).
