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 of the bell and lengthening of the tubes. It consists of a mouthpiece, long coiled tubing, and a large flared bell. This instrument was used extensively until the emergence of the valved horn in the early 19th century.
A horn is any of a family of musical instruments made of a tube, usually made of metal and often curved in various ways, with one narrow end into which the musician blows, and a wide end from which sound emerges. In horns, unlike some other brass instruments such as the trumpet, the bore gradually increases in width through most of its length—that is to say, it is conical rather than cylindrical. In jazz and popular-music contexts, the word may be used loosely to refer to any wind instrument, and a section of brass or woodwind instruments, or a mixture of the two, is called a horn section in these contexts.
A wind quintet, also known as a woodwind quintet, is a group of five wind players (most commonly flute, oboe, clarinet, French horn and bassoon).
Unlike the string quartet (of 4 string instruments) with its homogeneous blend of sound color, the instruments in a wind quintet differ from each other considerably in technique, idiom, and timbre. The modern wind quintet sprang from the octet ensemble favored in the court of Joseph II in late 18th century Vienna: two oboes, two clarinets, two (natural) horns, and two bassoons. The influence of Haydn's chamber writing suggested similar possibilities for winds, and advances in the building of these instruments in that period made them more useful in small ensemble settings, leading composers to attempt smaller combinations.
Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern ('How beautifully the morning star shines'), BWV 1, is a church cantata for Annunciation by Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1725, when the cantata was composed, the feast of the Annunciation (25 March) coincided with Palm Sunday. Based on Philipp Nicolai's hymn "Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern" (1599), it is one of Bach's chorale cantatas. Bach composed it in his second year as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, where the Marian feast was the only occasion during Lent when music of this kind was permitted. The theme of the hymn suits both the Annunciation and Palm Sunday occasions, in a spirit of longing expectation of an arrival. As usual for Bach's chorale cantata cycle, the hymn was paraphrased by a contemporary poet who retained the hymn's first and last stanzas unchanged, but transformed the themes of the inner stanzas into a sequence of alternating recitatives and arias.
Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern is the last chorale cantata of Bach's second cantata cycle, possibly because the librettist who provided the paraphrases for the middle movements of these cantatas was no longer available. Bach scored the work for three vocal soloists, a four-part choir and a Baroque instrumental ensemble of two horns, two oboes da caccia, two solo violins, strings and continuo. The chorale melody of Nicolai's hymn appears in the opening and closing choral movements of the cantata. All instruments play in the opening festive chorale fantasia, in which the soprano sings the hymn tune, and the two solo concertante violins represent the morning star. An oboe da caccia accompanies the vocal soloist in the first aria. The strings, including the solo violins, return in the second aria. An independent horn part crowns the closing chorale.
Irish traditional music (also known as Irish trad, Irish folk music, and other variants) is a genre of folk music that developed in Ireland.
In A History of Irish Music (1905), W. H. Grattan Flood wrote that, in Gaelic Ireland, there were at least ten instruments in general use. These were the crwth (a small rubbed strings harp) and cláirseach (a bigger harp with typically 30 strings), the tiompán (a small string instrument played with a bow or plectrum), the feadán (a fife), the buinne (an oboe or flute), the guthbuinne (a bassoon-type horn), the beannbhuabhal and corn (hornpipes), the cuislenna (bagpipes – see Great Irish warpipes), the stoc and storgán (clarions or trumpets), and the cnámha (bones). Within the tradition, there is poetic reference to the use of a fiddle as far back as the 7th century, which predates the development of the modern violin by around 900 years.
The alphorn (German: Alphorn, Alpenhorn; French: cor des Alpes; Italian: corno alpino) is a traditional lip-reed wind instrument. It consists of a very long straight wooden natural horn, with a length of 3 to 4 metres (9.8 to 13 feet), a conical bore and a wooden cup-shaped mouthpiece. Traditionally the alphorn was made in one piece from the trunk of a pine. Modern alphorns are usually made in three detachable sections for easier transport and handling, carved from blocks of spruce. The alphorn is used by rural communities in the Alps. Similar wooden horns were used for communication in most mountainous regions of Europe, from the Alps to the Carpathians.
The Concertino for Horn and Orchestra in E minor, J188 (Op. 45), was composed in 1806 for the Karlsruhe player Dautrevaux, and revised for the Munich virtuoso Rauch in 1815 (completed on 31 August) by Carl Maria von Weber (Warrack 1976, p. 167). It is an extremely taxing work, whether played on the natural horn for which it was written, or on the modern valve horn. The soloist is accompanied by a small orchestra. It requires, among other feats, that the player produce what is in effect a four-note chord using the interplay between humming and the sound from the instrument, a technique known as multiphonics.
The autograph manuscript of the work is preserved in the Berlin State Library.