About horns
The horn is relatively frequently played among the wind instruments in the orchestra. The horn is a mellow sounding instrument, considering its size. Some say that is because the bell is facing backward so the blown sound does not directly reach the audience seats.
Crooks to valves
The horn is called 'cor' in French and 'corno' in Italian, both meaning a 'horn'. As its name suggests, the origin of the horn was pipe instruments made from animal horns. The hunting horn to signal that a target animal was nearby, and the post horn to notify that mail had arrived – horns were an integral part of the daily lives of European people. After that the metal horn with a coiled tube was developed. But unlike the present-day horns, these horns did not have a device to adjust the length of a tube, so they could play only limited number of notes. To overcome the limitation, a method to alter the length of the instrument by inserting tubes of different length was conceived. These tubes were called 'crooks'. The use of crooks enabled the horn to play any pitch.However, since horn players had to carry around as many as 13 crooks with them, the valve system introduced in the 19th century was truly an epoch-making invention.
Use of the right hand makes the horn one-of-a-kind
A major characteristic of the horn is that this is the only brass instrument with a backward-pointing bell and hornists play it by putting the right hand into the bell. Hornists operate the levers with the left hand and change the position of the right hand in the bell to control the volume and pitch and to dampen the sound. This technique of using the right hand is known as 'hand-stopping'. Incidentally, when straightened, the metal horn tube reaches the 3.5–4 m mark.
Depending on the number of pitches, horn types are divided into single horns, double horns, and triple horns. If you are a beginner, probably you should choose the widely-used double horn. By simply operating one lever, the double horn switches from an F horn (a horn tuned to F) to a B-flat horn (a horn tuned to B-flat). You can play different tonalities by simple switching.
In addition, when purchasing a horn, it is important to try the instrument to check whether you can play all of the notes solidly.
Range of the horn
