Upside down? They are not often seen, but there is more than one way to make a horn, and one of the ways used back in the day to make single F horns looks “upside down” to us.
I have three horns of this general design in my modest collection. All of them have hand hammered bells and some nice construction details, but I suspect all were also aimed at younger students rather than adults.
The Huttl
This horn I’ve posted about before, but it’s been a few years. Most recently, here:
It’s probably the newest of the three horns of this type I now own, and also the only one that is not a “stencil” horn. More on that in a bit. For comparison with the other horns, two views of it are below. Notice how the main slide has a loop in it (to stand in F) and is on the front of the horn instead of the back. That is why I say these horns visually look upside down (or maybe backwards), we expect the main slide to be on the back, not the front. With an oddly bent lead pipe to make it work.
This horn, on receiver of the leadpipe, is marked Czecho-Slovakia, which would indicate it was made after 1918. As noted in the 2021 article, I replaced the first portion of the leadpipe, which helped it play a bit better but still, of the three, it is not really as playable as I would like.
The left-hand position for me is very cramped, it would work much better if I had smaller hands, which is why I believe this was aimed at younger students.
The Kalashen
This was an eBay find and is older than the other two. It is a “stencil” horn; Mark Kalashen was an instrument importer in New York City. What a number of firms did at the time was import horns with no markings from Europe and add their own markings to the instrument. It obscures the underlying maker and is thankfully a trade practice of long ago. This horn was probably made sometime not long after 1910. There is a nice PDF document on Kalashen brass to be found here.
That said, this horn has several interesting details and of the three is the most comfortable to play. Left hand position is a bit smaller than I’d really like, so maybe still it was built for students, but still workable for an adult. This one also has the original Eb crook, which is a double loop main slide.
If you compare it to the other horns the proportions are a bit different, but the biggest difference is the valve section. It doesn’t show up as well as I might like in these following photos, but it is a different type of rotary valve than used today. The action is really light and fast, much lighter and faster than any double horn valve. Great for fast technical passage work! The valve opens from the “bottom” and is considerably easier to disassemble than a modern rotary valve as well.
The mighty Majestic
This horn is also a stencil horn, and I would guess it was actually made by Huttl, it is very close to the same design. As with the Huttl, on the leadpipe it is marked Czecho-Slovakia, which again indicates a date of construction after 1918.
A very interesting aspect of this horn to me is when I got it (off eBay) and took it apart, clearly the horn had rebuilt valves! Someone before me put time/money into making this horn have nice tight valves. That said, there were still some big problems to fix. It needed among other things a big patch on the bell and there were two missing braces.
With the tight valves this horn really is rather nice. The big problem for me is the left-hand position is really small; it was made for someone with small hands.
This horn had another curiosity worth mentioning – it was very flat, and it was easy to tell it was a couple inches longer than the Huttl. I ended up cutting it down around the main slide and the horn is a player now for sure.
All three horns don’t fit in a standard horn case. I keep them in gig bags.
Wall hangers?
Of course, all three horns are mostly only of collector interest now, and most would probably only consider them to be wall hangers. But I still enjoy having them in the rotation of horns I might use to warm up or play a few etudes.
