[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> a well-meaning friend bought me a couple of CDs for
> Christmas, played on original instruments, the Handel Fireworks music, and
> the Mozart horn concertos. The horns in particular sound dreadful, awfully out
> of tune, so much so that I got a headache after a while.
>
> My question: do you believe that the composers heard that out-of-tunesness in
> the heads when they composed the music, even liked the sound (knowing no
> other), or would they have longed for instruments that actually played what
> they
> wrote? (Though Bruckner liked the natural horn because of the flat seventh,
> which he preferred).
You don't say who you were listening to, or when the recordings were made
(technical standards were lower on earlier recordings, which were often made
by players who could not afford to specialize and were still feeling out the
right technique on instruments by makers who were still figuring out how to
build) so I can only suggest:
1. The tuning was, in fact, bad; or
2. The horn players were doing exactly what they intended to do, and you
aren't used to the intervals they were playing; or
3. What you took to be inaccurate tuning was actually an attack that you
weren't used to hearing (the natural horn's attack has much more of what
horn players call "rebound"--a sort of blip in the attack).
I suspect any of the three is likely.
Obviously, Mozart and Handel liked the horn; they wrote often and
prominently for it. Mozart's pitch sensitivity was legendary; it's one
reason he tended to use the simpler keys. It's hard to imagine he would
have written four concertos, the horn quintet, and zillions of orchestral
horn parts for an instrument that no one played in tune.
To the hoary old question of whether an 18th-century composer would have
preferred "modern" instruments I give the hoary old answer: they didn't have
them and conceived their music for what they had. If Mozart had the modern
horn, I'm sure you will agree, he would have written music that sounded like
Boulez, who is, after all, the pinnacle of musical evolution, along with
Mick Jagger, John Cage and Vanilla Ice. It's a great time we live in.
But if you are inclined to think that valves on trumpets and horns were
necessarily "improvements," you may want to ask why most of the modern
trumpet and horn soloists' concerto repertoire was written in the pre-valve
era. (Much of the woodwind soloist repertoire is similarly from before the
instruments went through their own Industrial Revolution).
You may also want to ask why there was so much resistance to valves in
orchestras. Valves were widely available by the 1820's, but the valved
trumpet didn't become common until after mid-century, while the natural horn
was not entirely displaced until close to the end of the century. Brahms,
who was born in 1833, pretty much ignored valves, perhaps thinking they were
a passing fancy. He called valved horns "Blechbratschen" ("metal violas").
Wagner specified both valved horn and natural horn ("Waldhorn") in his
scores. So it isn't like composers heard valved brass instruments and said
"Where have you been all my life?"
You'd be interested to know that one of the major objections to valves is
that they make the instrument out of tune. This is an arithmetical problem:
if one valve that lowers the pitch a half step and another lowers it a whole
step, together they will not amount to a minor third; it's a little like
having a fingerboard in which the distance between all the frets is exactly
the same. Another objection to valves is that the mechanism adds weight to
the instrument, which affects the resonance. A third objection, which
applies to the horn but not the trumpet, is that you have to alter the
conical bore of the instrument, because a valve mechanism needs cylindrical
pipes.
>I realise this is not a lute question
It's relevant to the lute's place in the modern musical world.
HP
