Why the orchestra's French horn is really German, and hornists just say horn
Most orchestral hornists today play a double horn in F and B-flat, a German design. The International Horn Society has asked since 1971 that people drop the word French altogether. The name survives from a time when French workshops built the best hunting horns and gave the instrument its familiar hoop.
People first blew real animal horns, a practice that lives on in the ram's-horn shofar of Jewish ritual. Metal versions followed, and by the late seventeenth century French makers dominated the market for coiled hunting horns, blown from horseback. Such a horn has no valves, so the player can reach only the notes of one harmonic series, shifting between them with the lips. A long, narrow tube pushes those harmonics close together high up, which is why the horn could carry a tune even then.
Changing key meant swapping crooks, extra loops of tube that lengthened the instrument, and German makers pioneered them. From the mid-eighteenth century players also slid a hand into the bell, bending notes between harmonics. Then in 1818 Heinrich Stölzel and Friedrich Blümel patented a horn with rotary valves, and François Périnet brought piston valves to France about two decades later. Many conservatories resisted for years, insisting the valveless horn sounded better.
The German line won. A three-valve German horn in F became standard by the mid-nineteenth century, and in 1897 the Kruspe workshop in Erfurt produced the double horn, which uses a thumb valve to flip between an F set of tubing, with the classic sound, and a B-flat set that makes high notes safer. British orchestras held onto the lighter French model into the 1930s. Its last great champion, Dennis Brain, finally switched in October 1951, grumbling that he was paid to hit the notes and the German horn was nearly foolproof. His father, a devoted French-style player, quipped that his son had given up the horn. By the 1990s even French players had gone over to the darker German sound.
The bell points backwards to keep the tone veiled next to a trumpet's blaze. Players rest the mouthpiece about two thirds on the upper lip, and pressing too hard costs both tone and stamina, because it chokes blood flow to the lips.
Source: French horn
