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The French horn (since the 1930s known simply as the horn in professional music circles) is a brass instrument made of tubing wrapped into a coil with a flared bell. The double horn in F/B ♭ (technically a variety of German horn) is the horn most often used by players in professional orchestras and bands, although the descant and triple horn have become increasingly popular.
However, it still leaves the actual sounds of each instrument up to the supplier to implement; one manufacturer's French horn, say, could be brighter, or more mellow, than another's. The GM 1 specification was superseded by General MIDI 2 in 1999; however, GM 1 is still commonly used. [ 1 ]
Horn notation is a complex subject beyond the scope of this article, but what is written as middle C for the horn is the fourth harmonic of the unlengthened instrument, not the second. Horn music makes greater use of the higher range of the harmonic series than do most other modern brass instruments.
The pear-shaped bell (called Liebesfuß) of the cor anglais gives it a more covered timbre than the oboe, closer in tonal quality to the oboe d'amore.Whereas the oboe is the soprano instrument of the oboe family, the cor anglais is generally regarded as the alto member of the family, and the oboe d'amore—pitched between the two in the key of A—as the mezzo-soprano member. [5]
The natural horn is a musical instrument that is the predecessor to the modern-day (French) horn (differentiated by its lack of valves). Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the natural horn evolved as a separation from the trumpet by widening the bell and lengthening the tubes. [ 1 ]
This results in producing a somewhat nasal sound. When required, in the sheet music the usual notation is a '+' above the note followed by a 'o' above notes that are to be played open. For longer stopped passages, the word indicating a stopped horn is written out. The pitch lowers gradually when the hand is placed in the bell and slowly moved ...
The French horn (as distinct from the German and Vienna horns), is also usually referred to simply as the "horn" by orchestral players. The bore of the French horn is small, between 10.8 and 11 mm, compared to 11.5 mm for the German horn, but not as small as the Vienna horn at 10.7 mm.
The sound of the flugelhorn has been described as halfway between a trumpet and a French horn, whereas the cornet's sound is halfway between a trumpet and a flugelhorn. [6] The flugelhorn is as agile as the cornet but more difficult to control in the high register (from approximately written G 5), where in general it locks onto notes less easily.