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Music open thread: Horn concertos [1]
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Date: 2025-02-10
Last week, after the bassoon, I decided to go on to the saxophone, holding off on the horn. So now I’m on to the horn.
This is the instrument that’s colloquially known as the “French” horn. Remember when Republicans under President George W. Bush wanted French fries renamed “freedom fries”? But at least Bush the Lesser was smart enough not to start a ridiculous trade war with France.
Someone just jumped down to the comments to point out the 2009 tariff on roquefort cheese.
For a President who prefers canned vegetables to fresh, it probably wasn’t hard for George W. Bush to decide last week to make it impossible for Americans to buy Roquefort. In a last ditch effort to stick it to the French, a 300% tariff was added to the cheese, making it prohibitively expensive. This move only added to the animosity between the two countries that began after the French refused to go to war in Iraq and America responded with Operation Freedom Fries. But the reasoning behind the move was more astonishing: to punish the E.U. for their continued ban on our growth hormone-treated beef.
Well, it actually seems sensible compared to Trump’s reasoning for the latest tariffs.
The new Nazis don’t care about orchestral music the way the old Nazis did. So there was no Republican effort to rename the horn “freedom horn.”
Though I do admit that “freedom horn” has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? But nah, I’m not gonna call it that. I don’t call it “French horn” either, in part because the French don’t call it that either. To Beethoven, it’s “il corno” or “der Horn,” and to the French it’s “le cor,” or “le cor à pistons” if they want to specifically refer to the horn with valves.
To French composers and performers, it’s far more important to declare that the horn has valves than to declare that it’s in any way French. This is to distinguish it from the old natural horn, which was very limited in what notes it could play. For example, a natural horn in C could play these notes:
Actually, there are caveats for a lot of these notes. The lowest tone might sound too ugly and unfocused to be worthwhile, and the higher notes under the slur might be of dubious intonation. Really, only the staccato notes in this example might be reliable (those are the ones with dots).
Before the invention of the valve horn, composers had workarounds. A couple of horns in C might be good enough for a piece in C major. For a piece in C minor, some composers would use four horns, two in C and two in E-flat.
Valves enable the horn to change from one harmonic series to another by simply depressing one or more of the valves. The horn in F became what I’ll call the “base” horn for the valve horn, and so most horn parts these days are written in F transposition. The example above could be written this way:
There’s a whole thing about writing horns in bass clef but I don’t want to get into that here. Suffice it to say that the valve horn’s most usable notes are fairly comfortable on the treble clef a perfect fifth up from the sounding pitch.
Of the composers who worked prior to the invention of the valve horn, Leopold Mozart in my opinion had the best feeling for the instrument, though his music is usually played nowadays on modern valve horns.
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Antonio Rosetti was a contemporary of Leopold Mozart. Rosetti’s Horn Concerto in D minor has long been a favorite of mine in a performance by the great Hermann Baumann, which is available on YouTube though with dubious licensing. So instead here I’m posting Jana Kiselová’s performance with the Nordböhmischen Philharmonie Teplice. I surmise the piece was written for a natural horn in D, and it seems to me most of what the horn plays is major key music.
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For whatever reason, Kiselová split the video in two. The result is that YouTube guides most viewers to a video with Hermann Baumann’s recording in the audio track, so Kiselová’s second video has a lot fewer thumbs up than her first.
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I hope to be proven wrong about this assertion: prior to the 21st Century, no woman ever wrote.a horn concerto. This one by Kati Agócs is heard here in a performance by James Sommerville, who also conducted the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra.
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I couldn’t find a video of Franz Strauss’s Horn Concerto on YouTube that I liked, but I did find plenty for Richard Strauss’s Horn Concerto.
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Christopher Tyler Nickel, whom I first came across looking for a concerto for bass oboe, wrote a concerto for four Wagner tubas. Despite the name, the Wagner tuba is not a tuba, but really a modified horn with a sound somewhere in between that of the regular horn and the trombone. Definitely worth checking out.
The open thread question: What is your favorite music with horn solos?
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