Another element of the 18th fundamental in the list of 25 fundamentals by Douglas Hill (his book is the source of the prompts for this series) is something very fundamental: key signatures.
Why it can be more of a problem for horn players
It was for many years a tradition that horn parts did not have key signatures. It is a somewhat unfortunate tradition.
Besides this making it harder for us to find places in a rehearsal (“start at the key change” means nothing, if we have no key changes!), for players who perform a lot of orchestral music, the skill of reading key signatures can actually get rusty!
Tradition? Why?
To the topic of that tradition, there is a great quote from Richard Strauss in his annotations to Berlioz’s Instrumentationslehre [Treatise on Instrumentation] (1905). Strauss, in the following passage, makes observations on both his compositional practices and on the choices of equipment by horn players of the period. You will see that he assumes that players regularly used the E and F crooks on single horns — which explains a lot about why he calls for horn in E so much too.
Although horn players now use almost exclusively the horns in E, F, high A and high B-flat (incidentally, it requires practice to change the bright and sharp tone of the horn in B-flat into the soft and noble timbre of the horn in F), it is nevertheless advisable to retain Richard Wagner’s method of indicating the key of the horn according to the changes of key in the music. It is true that horn players do not observe these different keys any more; but they are accustomed to transpose any key instantly into the key of the horn they are using, and they much prefer this method to being forced to read all the time in F, for instance, with a great number of accidentals (sharps, double sharps, etc.). Hence, composers should indicate: horn in E-flat, D, D-flat as they see fit. In my opinion, this has the advantage of a clearer appearance of the score. Personally I prefer to read the horns in the different keys and to transpose them (habit may have something to do with this, too). The score is much clearer on first sight, since the staves of the horns and trumpets at once stand out plastically in contrast to the staves of the wood-winds and strings with their transpositions and numerous accidentals.
[For a longer version, check that book or my article in The Horn Call Annual 4 (1992).]
[What about valved horns in F/E etc? To learn more about a horn built with crooks that could be crooked in multiple keys (like a natural horn) see this article.]
The staves … stand out plastically?
That is the key thing in the quote — Strauss liked (as a conductor) how it was visually easy to find the horn and trumpet parts in a score as they did not have key signatures. But that tradition is dead now.
You do need to read key signatures well
What I personally find to be helpful for working on key signatures are the etudes of Maxime-Alphonse. But you can work on anything with key signatures really. Back when I was a student one of my early teachers had me use the venerable Pares Scales book; there are many resources for technical study that have key signatures and work systematically through all the keys. Use a few and get up to speed! I might boldly suggest my own book as a possible resource.
When the series returns, we turn to the topic of sight reading.
