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Accuracy Encyclopedia: F is for F Horn

John Ericson
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There are so many topics that fall under the letter F that this is the first of four articles relating to “F” topics, with multiple elephants in the room to consider. A first elephant in the room being the F horn as a practice tool.

The case for F horn practice

The basic argument is that the F horn enforces a “more correct” approach to tonguing and embouchure setup in every aspect, and this will enhance your accuracy with standard fingerings later.

What about beginners?

Certainly, the F horn is more demanding and less forgiving. This is one of the reasons I don’t actually recommend the single F horn for the beginners of today, as it can leave them more likely to quit playing horn at all. I feel like a voice in the wilderness on this topic at times, but in my opinion it is long past time to stop using the F horn for beginners.

What about more advanced players?

But let’s assume you are a more advanced player wishing to be more accurate. Certainly, you will have to tongue more carefully on the F horn and also adjust the lips more precisely.

For many players and teachers, this means using the F side of your double horn in your warmup and practice. This maintains much of the feel of your regular horn, with it just being more challenging than normal.

Interlude: How about using an actual single F horn for this practice?

You would not want to use the typical beginner horn for your F horn practice. Low dollar, heavy, unresponsive horns are not fun to play on.

However, for those with access to a higher quality single F horn, perhaps from sometime before WWII and in good shape, a really fine single F can be a revelation and even a joy to play on. They are lighter and more responsive than you would ever expect. During the pandemic, as a project, I started doing the majority of my warmup on a single F. That interest has continued, and in my hobby of horn building I’m most interested right now in further exploring vintage single F horn designs.

The case against F horn practice

A contrary opinion would be that playing on the F horn is different in feel in a negative way, and you are better off playing with the normal fingering to further and more closely fine tune and feel accurate with those fingerings. Keep things exactly the same all the time for the most consistent feel that you fine tune more and more with time.

This is a version of the (very valid) argument against buzzing on a mouthpiece for accuracy. While buzzing mirrors horn playing technique, the exact way you buzz on a mouthpiece alone is different than the way you blow on a horn when making a good sound. While not as different, there is a difference you will notice with intentional all F horn fingerings instead of your normal fingerings. Things will feel different, and it may only leave you feeling less secure.

Your mileage will vary

Both approaches have value. As a project, if intentionally using the F horn is not part of your practice routine, you should consider adding it. It does train your chops in an important way that can at least theoretically help accuracy significantly. You may not want to use the F horn much beyond the warmup, but, again, it can be highly beneficial and is worth trying at least when warming up or working on fundamentals, a topic for later in this series.

When this series returns, we have more to explore in the letter F.

Continue in the Accuracy Encyclopedia 

This is an installment of a series on accuracy, drawn from notes developed for a book on the same topic. The series starts here.

Mailbag: The Top 3 Horn Concertos

John Ericson
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A question came in earlier this year asking generally what are the top 3 horn concertos. With the end of the semester for my rep class right on us, it is a good time to finally answer.

Unfortunately, the question is too open to really answer. Top 3 for undergrad auditions? Graduate auditions? Senior recitals? That I might relax and listen to? Most popular with the public?

My personal list

I’m afraid that my personal list is very skewed. Concertos that I might play or listen to for enjoyment are mostly by Haydn or Rosetti, in part because I don’t teach them that often. They are rarely performed in auditions and on recitals – and, unfortunately, are not particularly popular among horn players.

Some top three lists

But for sure there are some popular concertos out there.

For undergrad auditions I’d say these, but with the note that I don’t hear the Franz Strauss very often – but I still think it a good choice, and it might help you stand out from the more typical audition.

Mozart 3 (or 1 or 2)
Franz Strauss Op. 8
Strauss 1

Grad auditions have to my mind three rather good choices:

Gliere
Mozart 4
Strauss 2

All would be perceived to be harder than the undergrad list, and all can show off a lot to the horn teacher. Strauss 2 being the best choice overall, if the technique is under your fingers. Mozart 4, if you bring it for a grad audition, be sure to have a cadenza!

Professional auditions also have a narrow list of concertos to consider.

Mozart 2 or 4
Strauss 1

Strauss 1 may or may not be allowed. Between Mozart 2 and 4, I like both of them equally well for auditions.

Finally, we get to the topic of concertos that are popular generally, and basically all of the concertos mentioned above fall into that list.

The future?

There have been a number of concertos written in recent years. Some, certainly, must be quite good pieces. It will be interesting to watch and see which ones can break through and be performed often by say the middle of this century.

Ultrasonic Cleaning and your Horn [UPDATED]

John Ericson
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You know that you need to keep your horn clean. If you are proactive about maintenance you will hardly ever need to have your horn cleaned professionally. But sometimes it needs a deeper cleaning.

A piece of good advice from my first band director

My first band director was named Conrad Steinel. His advice was that if you clean the leadpipe out with a snake and blow water through the horn you will get most of what is in it out.

That advice remains really true. Whenever you have a good block of time – certainly at least every 3 months or so on a horn you play daily – snake out the leadpipe, blow water in the horn, and lube the valves and slides. If you do that reasonably regularly (oiling the valves every week!) you will have very little need of a professional cleaning.

What if your valves are sticking or dragging?

This is a sign that there is likely green corrosion on the rotor or on the casing of the valve. No amount of valve oil will solve this problem. This corrosion needs to be removed.

Warning: Don’t make your valves super clean either

Some readers are handy enough to disassemble a rotary valve. You can clean the rotor yourself fairly easily. A gentle cleaning is fine, and actually you can often make valves work significantly better by just wiping them off well and putting them back in with fresh oil. But if you are tempted to polish them up shiny and bright with brass polish, please don’t!

There is a stable surface to be found in the non-shiny brass patina that naturally forms. Don’t be tempted to polish your valve beyond that point. Sometimes I see someone post a photo on social media of their valve that they cleaned to be really shiny, and I cringe. There are thousandths of an inch tolerances in your valve, you don’t want to take off any more material than necessary. That is one of the general reasons for the popularity of ultrasonic cleaning.

Why ultrasonic?

A primary reason to use ultrasonic rather than chem cleaning is that chem cleaning actively takes off metal, and ultrasonic just bombards the horn with sound waves in a cleaning solution. Done right it can’t damage your horn.

What I have found is that my ultrasonic cleaner as set up presently won’t remove all the heavy green corrosion, but it does seem to loosen it up somewhat, so that I can scrape a light coating it off with mostly wooden scrapers (lightly touching the surface with a brass scraper if necessary). Don’t ever use a steel tool on the surface of a valve or the casing (or at least use extreme caution!), it will do damage, as will any abrasive (no sand paper on a valve ever!).

UPDATE: But note, I think many shops say they are doing an ultrasonic cleaning, but that does not mean that they don’t also use chemicals to remove stubborn green scale. Please see the longer update at the end of this article.

Ultrasonic cleaning and the average local shop that cleans a lot of school band instruments, where working with a higher end French horn is a complete novelty

The first two of my horns to run through my own ultrasonic cleaner were my big Paxman 25 and my Patterson Geyer. Each one had slightly sad stories related to being cleaned in a shop that mostly cleans band instruments, which unfolded clearly as I worked on them.

The worst issue on the Paxman was that the lower bearing of the second valve rotor had deep grooves in it. I have no idea why they are there, but I certainly did not do that to the valve. Another almost as bad issue was the spring for the thumb valve, clearly, they had trouble putting it on the instrument, and one side is bent oddly and not functioning as strongly as it did before. It is on one less turn than Paxman intended. This horn is slightly more compact and fit in the cleaner better than the Patterson.

On the Patterson, first I’ll mention how I love this design for working on, a Geyer is not cramped at all with extra tubes and such. The big issue was that the valves are marked clearly that they are built in opposite order. 1 is the thumb valve, and the valves marked as 2-3-4 are the 3-2-1 valves. As you look down at the horn, the valves are marked 4-3-2-1. However, the horn came back to me with the second and third valve rotors and bearings on the wrong valves! My guess is the tech could not comprehend that the first valve was not number 1. And the horn got played for quite a while like that, looking down at the horn the valves were marked 4-2-3-1. They are correct now.

Oh, and while I’m talking about local repair shop people in general, many don’t know how to reassemble a rotary valve properly, leaving the top inner bearing not seated on fully. And the valve works fine even if not assembled properly. This is very bad, and a reason to think about only going to individuals familiar with higher end instruments and rotary valves — or becoming more familiar with the process yourself. At least to the extent that you know the work was done right, or that you do as much as you are comfortable with on your own. Because, as I said earlier, you probably only need to ultrasonic clean a horn when the valves are showing signs of corrosion impacting the valve action.

My 15-liter ultrasonic

I figured out the Patterson valve order issue a while ago, and that was part of what inspired me to buy my own “small” ultrasonic unit. It is a lot bigger than one you would use for jewelry, and I knew through a contact that it would be big enough to submerge the valve section of a horn – but small enough for my shop space.

Without going to a all-out blow by blow on how to ultrasonic clean a horn, the basic thing (which you could pick up from watching Instagram videos posted by some shops) is that you completely disassemble the valves and mechanism before cleaning. If you are not comfortable with that step, all the other steps don’t really matter, and if you are, you can probably come up with how to actually do the cleaning in a cleaner of this size. I will add, though, that the solution I am using presently is a type of Zep cleaner, diluted 50/50 in water. It works better than the Simple Green I used in a prior, small ultrasonic.

Results

The results are the two horns done so far play GREAT afterwards. The best they have felt in years. So now it is …

On to more horns!

I own too many horns probably, but I now have a great project, I’m planning to clean a horn every weekend. Next up will be my triple, I wonder what tales it will tell?

UPDATE

A video

The below was recently posted by Houghton Horns, well worth a watch. A yearly cleaning by a competent shop would be a great plan.

Several interesting things are notable to me. One is they do a combination of ultrasonic and chem cleaning, the rotors are chem cleaned. Another is that they have a “power brush,” a brush in a power drill, to clean down the slide tubes. That might be handy for attacking and preventing the green scale. But be careful, you could damage your valves with the steel wire inside the brush.

More thoughts on green scale

Working on a Yamaha 662 project horn I encountered a lot of green scale. In the photo, I’ve begun work on manually scraping all that off that I could reach with three different tools. Ultrasonic alone only does so much. If I had a way to chem clean this area that should have been able to take it off or loosen the green scale a great deal.

When the 662 came to me, supposedly it had recently been professionally cleaned. And some things were real clean, but they did not do anything about the green scale down in the body of the horn. The photo is of the point when I had most of the scale removed from the third valve ports, and you can see the scale in the 1st and 2nd ports.

This cleaning easily took me 4 hours with multiple times in the ultrasonic. There is a learning process, and this was a good horn to work on more. But it was a bunch of work that would have been avoided if prior owners had cleaned the horn more often, and a level of cleaning that a well equipped shop (one that is familiar with working on higher end horns) should be able to do.

For a final cleaning story see, “Play clean!” 

Geyer Update: Engravings, Serial Numbers, and More

John Ericson
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I could also have titled this article “Things I got wrong” in the Geyer Dreaming series (which starts here), or the related article published in the February 2024 issue of The Horn Call.

An Email from Jonathan Ring

First, I want to thank Jonathan Ring for his very helpful note, which has quite a few details related to engravings, serial numbers and more.

Geyer and the Schmidt family

One key detail I had wondered and I thought I had seen somewhere, but could not subsequently find, was on the question of who exactly Carl Geyer had apprenticed to in Germany. According to Ring,

… Geyer apprenticed with L.A. Schmidt in Köln, Germany. L.A. Schmidt was C.F. Schmidt’s brother and had taken over the business from their father, F.A. Schmidt. This established the connection between Geyer and the Schmidt family which later became the source for many of the parts used by Geyer in the making of his horns.

Things Ericson got wrong

The main thing I got wrong in the article had to do with the serial numbers, with a closely related topic of engravings being one I did not address at all.

A serial number system, but not always followed

During the pandemic Ring worked on a project of cataloging Geyer engravings and serial numbers, crowdsourcing info through the Horn People group. The initial post may be found there on April 10, 2019, and the results are quantified further in PDF document posted on July 3, 2020.

The short answer is while the system as described (by Thomas Bacon) in my article (and also in the original series here) was used on at least some horns, for many — perhaps a majority? — the serial numbers are just numbers, perhaps of significance to the buyer, but it is not entirely clear.

In any case, this is the biggest mistake in the article, and I have encouraged Ring to further catalog his findings for possible publication in The Horn Call, I believe many would be interested in this topic.

Variations in engraving (and bracing) also point to dating of instruments

I should have also stated in the article a not necessarily obvious but important topic, that Geyer did not do his own engraving. All the engraving was done (by hand!) by a third party, certainly several different individuals over all those years of horn making. The differences in the engraving over the many years is a more reliable method of dating a horn generally than the serial number.

Specifically, Geyer 223, featured in the article, based on the engraving and bracing style, Ring believes it dates to the late 1930s or early 1940s. Which would also explain the unusual layout, he would have had more difficulty obtaining parts in that timeframe and had to make use of whatever high-quality valve section he could obtain.

Within the comments of the 2019 Horn People post I would also highlight this important one from the late Lowell Greer, “Most of the engraving was outsources (sic) to a man on Wabash St, but I’ve seen some blind stamped horns and ones with a soldered pre-engraved labels, as well.”

1,400 horns?

While I’m writing, I’ll add this item. Geyer estimated that he made around 1,400 horns over his career. Assuming a working period from about age 20 to 90, that is exactly 20 horns a year. On one hand, that sounds like a very plausible pace for a steady worker, but, on the other hand, Geyer also stated that it took him 3-4 weeks to build a horn. That would indicate no more than about 16 horns a year and a somewhat lower total overall output. Perhaps he included horns from his early apprentice years as well? Whatever the number, he accomplished a great deal as a horn builder!

Adding though, in any scenario, I would bet the total output of double horns was probably less than 1,000, as for sure in any total number of horn produced would include numerous single F and single Bb horns.

Much more to learn

I would close by again noting that there is much more that could be learned about Geyer and his horns, and for sure there are sources alive today that still have firsthand knowledge of Geyer and his shop. Perhaps some enterprising DMA student could think about this as a topic before it is too late?

Revisiting the Art of French Horn on LP Records

John Ericson
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The past year the vast majority of my actual classical music listening has been to LP records. With the recent passing of Hermann Baumann I got out his LP recordings, and then started systematically listening to all of my French horn solo LP records. It has been a wonderful journey.

LP? Records?

I am glad that people do still collect and listen to LP records. My daughter in fact recently purchased a turntable and I set her up with some of my excess records. The general idea is that LP records give you more of an intentional, deep listening experience than other more portable formats.

Plus, many of the older recordings, they have so much heart, there is a quality that has been lost with all the modern technology and ease of editing the product. Something about the actual difficulty of making the recordings impacts the final product in a special way.

My collection

It is not a huge collection by any means – about 60 horn solo recordings – but it is an interesting and eclectic one for sure. Some of the records I bought new and are old friends to my ears, others came from other sources more recently (especially so a group from the late Tom Greer) and were completely new to me.

Most of the records I have listened to both sides, often several times, in recent listening. Others, the Mozart recordings especially, I might just do one side and get the gist of it (there are only so much Mozart I want to hear, and I have at least a dozen different Mozart concertos albums on LP), but the more engaging ones I will listen to all four concertos.

Some thoughts

My starting point was the Baumann recordings. They are all just excellent, and not all of this music is available in other formats today. My favorite recording still is the first one I purchased, seen above, which is certainly what got me interested in historic instrument performance.

This may be a function of I don’t teach them a lot, but I really enjoyed listening to all the Haydn and Rosetti. Several artists recorded them on LP and certainly were trying to generate more interest in these wonderful works – interest that I hope others now might still pick up on. I have a lot of this music, but one surprise was finding a Rosetti that I don’t own the music for. His music is so deserving of being performed more often – do check out Rosetti.

Some of my LPs are pretty common and some must be rare. I’d like to close by mentioning a rare recording that must date to the late 1940s with both (!) of the Danzi sonatas, performed by Viennese hornist Franz Koch and Lola Granetman, piano. The Op. 28 sonata I recorded and has been recorded a few times, but the Op. 44 is a rarity. It is an old LP and the audio quality is not great, but I really appreciate the effort it had to have taken and the heart of the players.

Do give some of the old LPs a chance, there is some fine, even inspirational, playing to be found.

Brief Review: The Horn. The Book You Need

John Ericson
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To open this brief review, I’ll start with a money quote:

The Horn by Renato Meucci and Gabriele Rocchetti is the most significant book on horn history published in the last 50 years. Highly recommended! John Ericson, Horn Matters

A new book on horn history?

The Horn was published in late 2023 as part of the Yale Musical Instrument series. This really is the most significant publication on horn history since Reginald Morley-Pegge, The French Horn, 2nd ed. (London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1973). It has been 50 years! Here is another money quote:

If you are interested at all in horn history you need this book, and it is a must for every collegiate music library. John Ericson, Horn Matters

It is very easy to obtain as well, I purchased my copy from Amazon.

Personal aside: I’m interested in horn history

By the time I was a Doctoral student I was very interested in horn history, and I took a deep dive into all the available resources when I was writing my dissertation (which had the weighty title The Development of Valved Horn Technique in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany: A Survey of Performers and Works Before 1850 With Respect to the use of Crooks, Right-Hand Technique, Transposition, and Valves) and subsequent articles that were published in The Horn Call and the Historic Brass Society Journal.

As part of that personal deep dive I soon realized that a percentage of what various resources contained was based on repeating what other sources had previously said — facts that could and should be revisited.

For a specific example, something I was very excited about in my early publications was I had shown clearly that Auf dem Strom (1828) was not the first work for the valved horn by a major composer (which is what Morley-Pegge had said). Actually, Schubert had previously called for the valved horn in an 1827 work for four horns and men’s chorus, Nachtgesang im Walde. Plus, Auf dem Strom is very playable on natural horn, valves were not necessary in the way they were on the 1827 work. I outlined this all in an article published in The Horn Call Annual 8 (1996) — a version of that is online, [UPDATE] split between the articles below:

I was very glad to see that Meucci and Rocchetti are of the same thinking as I am on the topic of Schubert — and really pretty much every other topic related to areas that I had studied very closely. I don’t know every history topic as well, but it gives me a great feeling for the quality of the overall book, which truly has a lot of ground to cover.

I was also excited to see that I was quoted, cited (in the footnotes, bibliography, and online supplement), and thanked in the acknowledgements. This is a wonderful outcome to see from years of working on topics related to the history of the valved horn in the 19th century.

Setting the record straight

Another important element of this book is that the authors are not afraid at all to set the record straight in relation to misstatements and misunderstandings in older publications. This is so important, as there really are many more sources and resources to consider than existed 50 years ago, and many topics in older publications sorely needed to be revisited in light of recent research.

John meets Renato

One other small aside, I met one of the authors some 25 years ago at an Historic Brass Society event in Paris (I presented on Gumpert), and we even shared a meal there. He was already at work on the book then, which says a lot about how long it takes to write the really serious deep dive book on horn history. I recall that he mentioned he was focusing on citing resources in refereed journals (such as the Historic Brass Society Journal), and he has followed through on that, you won’t see as many references to The Horn Call as the reader in the United States might expect. While this probably limited the number of citations to my own publications, I think this still was a good move, the book is very scholarly but, at the same time, it reads easily and has plenty of footnotes (the best part! I love footnotes).

A minor criticism

In the book you will periodically see text that points you toward supplemental online materials. There is great information to be found in those materials, but it is information that was clearly deemed beyond what they had space to include in the print version.

My understanding is that if you use the Kindle version you will find live links to those materials, but if you are reading in print you need to go to this page:

https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300118933/the-horn/

Scroll down and find the “Appendices & Notes” tab, and that will open up a 238 page, book format online supplement (that is best viewed full screen on a computer). While presently this works great (you could even go read the supplement right now from that link, without buying the book), I worry about the reader that wants to find these same materials thirty years from now. Will they still be online and accessible on whatever type(s) of devices people are using then? Hopefully the publishers will find a way to maintain these important supplemental materials for the future reader.

I’ll be back

To close, this semester I’m teaching my horn repertoire course at Arizona State, and I’ll be reading The Horn very closely as we work our way forward. Early summer I’ll hope to post a supplement to this review, after reflecting on all the materials further.

The update (June 2025)

The one other thing I found personally to be a very unfortunate choice was the use of the term “falsetto” in relation to pitch bending on the natural horn. The authors explain their thinking in the foreword as follows: “The word ‘falsetto’ is also used in this book instead of ‘factitious’ tones (or notes) because it had been used by Praetorius and because it seems to lend itself to a wider meaning than ‘lipped down notes.’”

Unfortunately, factitious tones is in fact the standard term, used in many horn sources, and their term falsetto conjures an immediate meaning and definition in relation to the male singing voice that makes no sense in relation to horn playing. Thus, the section starting on page 84, “The ‘Falsetto,’” is only understandable if the reader understands that the authors don’t mean horn players somehow used a literal falsetto technique.

Of course, the term “factitious tones” is not going to be a very familiar one to new readers on horn history either (even if it is in standard use). But it is to be wished that the authors might have instead used a more descriptive term such as “embouchure tempering” (which is sometimes seen) instead of using a term that, while familiar in English, does not at all convey their intended meaning.

I have more to say in an upcoming review in the Galpin Society Journal. But to close for now, in spite of the above unfortunate choice, I still highly recommend this publication, it is very much worth purchasing.

Accuracy Encyclopedia: Well Duh!?! and More

John Ericson
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Continuing our look at accuracy and the letters D and E, our first topic is the descant horn, which can certainly help accuracy in many situations.

Descant horns

But backing up a step, in recent years the triple horn has had a lot of attention, overshadowing in many respects the descant. A descant is most typically constructed as a double horn in Bb/high F, and a triple is most commonly in F/Bb/high F.

The triple horn is a great, all-purpose instrument for an established orchestral high horn player, as you have the big sound we associate with a double horn but also the high F side available for improved accuracy.

But the descant certainly still has its place in lighter literature in the high range. For just one example, while you could play the Berlioz Queen Mab excerpt on a standard double, it would be better on a triple and better still on a descant. Why? With the descant you not only have the high F side but also it is a lighter instrument, you can really dial the dynamic down and float out the high notes. The only time I ever got a solo acknowledgement on a series concert when I played Third Horn in Nashville was after the Queen Mab Scherzo – which I played on a descant.

Oh, and I have a book on descant and triple horns. More on that here. 

Don’t be a hero

The next topic in my book draft was the simple thought to not be a hero. I still think you will generally be the most accurate if you trust yourself and go for it, but if you know it is not going to come out, as my dad used to say, “discretion is the better part of valor.”

Dynamics

There are some variables that come in with playing at various dynamics which it is worth considering in relation to accuracy.

In particular, pitch level can vary at different dynamics and this element must be under control. This is one of the reasons why long tones with crescendos and diminuendos are absolutely essential exercises; if the pitch drifts at different dynamics, accuracy will suffer. Related to that, when you are in the center of the tone on the horn will have the best tone color. Focus on this tone color, as when you are drifting sharp the tone will get thin.

Well Duh!?!

Some years ago, I posted an article (here) on Horn Matters with the title “Well, Duh!?!, a Key to Accuracy.” The article is one I believe I have considered cutting from the site several times (it is early Horn Matters content, written more like a personal blog post), but the thought it gives on articulation is a solid one that could be expanded upon considerably.

Short version for now is that tonguing is quite impactful on accuracy, and “D” (“Duh”) is a much better default syllable than “T.”

The Ear

A final topic for this installment is the Ear, one touched on already and one that will be touched on more.

This time I would like to highlight that the ear controls your overall pitch level in ways you may not recognize, and may lead you astray. One big example is that you can pull slides out on a horn almost indefinitely and still be sharp if you are simply used to hearing the notes sharp and are using your ear to guide the embouchure to place the notes sharp. A tuner is a great investment! Use it often as it really doesn’t lie; it can be a great tool to retrain your ear.

Related to that thought, I find it interesting that players will tend to drift up in pitch level when playing by themselves as opposed to playing in an ensemble. Holding pitch level well is an important skill to master – you need to stay on pitch and in the center consistently to play the most accurately.

Continue reading in the series

This is an installment of a series on accuracy, drawn from notes developed for a book on the same topic. The series starts here.

AI Recordings of Mozart Horn Concertos

John Ericson
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This year I’ve been listening mostly to LP recordings in my office. In my collection, I have a number of different Mozart concerto recordings, including multiple versions by Alan Civil. Seemed like everyone recorded them in the LP era.

Following the lead of my Horn Matters colleague Bruce Hembd, in the fall I was fiddling around on the Bing AI image creator and had the idea to make LP album covers for various fictional artists. One of them apparently feeling the need to record them twice, but that way we can enjoy his early and later interpretations.

There are some quirky horns and spellings to be sure, AI images have limitations, but I still think an interesting project. Enjoy.

P.S., This first one, if only we could really hear Leuitgeb play Mozart …

 

Vienna Horns, part II: Playing this Vienna Horn

John Ericson
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In Part I (here) I mentioned that I only recently have had the opportunity to play a Vienna horn that, to my feeling of responsiveness, plays well. It is borrowed from a local collection, and I’ve played on it for the majority of my practice in recent weeks.

A key thing was I rebuilt a crook that had been left incomplete by a prior user. The horn itself is a Haagston Pizka model. With the original crook the horn was just stuffy no matter what mouthpiece I used, but the new crook brought things much more into focus. The story of that new crook and rebuilding it is told more fully in my personal blog (here).

I’m enjoying playing this horn, but there are a number of almost “elephant in the room” topics worth looking at one by one. The first one having already been touched on, you need a good crook, it can make a huge difference. Related to that we have

Intonation and fingerings

So, with a modern horn, you pick one up with the very reasonable expectation that if you have the slides adjusted correctly and an appropriate mouthpiece the horn should play in tune.

On the original crook and the new crook there are a couple rather bad notes on this Haagston/Pizka horn. The A on the second space, it is pretty out fingered 12 but is good fingered 3, so that I can work with. (I was interested to see a video of the Vienna Philharmonic playing the opening of Mahler 3, some players fingered the note 12, some 3, must be dependent on the horn what is better).

The really bad note is D on the fourth line. Fingered open it is incredibly sharp and every other alternate fingering is very flat. And you play D a lot! The solution seems to be to play it open (which is very stable) but either bend the note down with the lip or cover it more with the hand (or a combination of both). When it goes by quickly you don’t notice the intonation, most of the correction is done on more sustained, key notes.

Why this note is so bad I have no idea but it must be something to do with the construction of the horn body. This joint being a bit suspect, the ferrule is a bit off, it makes one wonder what is going on inside there acoustically.

For more on the topic of fingerings, see this article for the fingerings used by the great Vienna horn master Roland Berger.

The F on the top of the staff

On this horn the F on the top of the staff is really quite good. Back a year ago I had another article related to Vienna horns, inspired by a quote in an article in the May 2022 issue of The Horn Call on Vienna horns. In a section of tips, authors Kulmer, Dorfmayr, and Nuzzo present a potentially useful trick:

Wire. A trick commonly used on the Wiener Horn is to insert a wire in the tube, just a normal electric wire you can buy in any electrical equipment shop. The reason for this is to adjust the note f” [written F at the top of the staff], which is played by pressing the 1st valve on the Wiener Horn, making it much more centered. This trick, although used by many players, is usually not supported by manufacturers. The fun fact is that it not only fixes the precision of f”, but inexplicably, the sound of the whole instrument is just better. The theory is that the wire helps the soundwave float (or floating knots). As weird as it sounds, but also the fact that the wire is harder, softer, with or without the internal metallic part has a big influence. It is also likely that the induced physical change is actually minimal, yet enough to give the player a better feeling of playing, leading to a better sound.

Again, I feel that F is pretty good on this Haagston/Pizka horn, but I tried the wire anyway, who knows, would it be even better? An electrical wire with the insulation on placed in the first valve crook was really not good, but a wire with the insulation stripped was pretty decent on the F, maybe better. But every action has consequences, the high Bb became very unstable. So, for this horn, no wire is best, but for yours, who knows? They are pretty emphatic about this being helpful.

Adjustments I make (automatically)

The key thing in my personal bag of tricks would be an adjustment I make automatically at this point in how I tongue. This was really perfected when I made my CD on the single F horn and played nothing but that horn for months; I have to tongue lighter and higher in the mouth in the higher range. If I approach it like I would on a double horn, the articulations will be nothing but rough. Related to that, overall, on historic horns I tongue lighter, adjusting to the horn, listening for the results I want.

[The CD is of course on YouTube, the full album is here.]

There is one other adjustment I make automatically that works against me on this horn. Most of the historic horns I use have Seraphinoff tapers in the crooks and have a similar feel and intonation tendencies. Both of the crooks I have for the Haagston/Pizka horn have similar but very different tendencies compared to my other horns, and I have to use a tuner a lot as I sort out those different tendencies.

Valve feel and action

Here is another topic that is a difficult one to describe. When you change valves in slurs, the feel is excellent in terms of the sound. But the valve action itself is slow and heavy, which may be why people have made rotary valve versions of Vienna horns.

If it was all you ever used I’m sure you would get used to it, but I’d really rather not play anything very technical on Vienna valves.

Tone in the upper range

This horn has a lovely tone with the better crook. A common feature I think of all vintage single F horns is that in the upper range the sound is distinctive and unmistakable – it is different than the modern horn for sure.

On the modern double horn, at least as typically used in the USA, we play on the F horn mostly from second line G down, and above that note we play on the Bb horn. The Bb horn has also a very distinctive sound in that range and we are totally used to hearing that as it is normal to us.

You can get some of the impact of that distinctive F horn sound on your double horn by using the F side, but it is not the same as the instrument is heavier and your articulations will have a rougher quality.

To experience this F horn sound is one of the reasons to seek out a Vienna horn or any other quality, crooked horn from the 19th century.

Volume

A final playing topic I’d bring up is volume. It is difficult to quantify exactly in just personal practice in the spaces I use. But I’d offer these observations.

This Vienna horn, relative to my rotary valve single horns, it can also put out a lot of sound without breaking up. I would credit that to the heavy bell present on this horn and the wide nickel silver garland.

That having been said, my perception is that my Patterson Geyer double puts out a LOT more actual sound. Which is to say, there are reasons why you don’t see Vienna horns mixed in sections with conventional double horns or even single horns of different designs. The sound I think would get lost in a conventional, modern orchestral horn section.

Is it a Vienna horn?

This photo brings me back to a topic mentioned in Part I and touched on again above, is a Vienna horn with rotary valves a Vienna horn? This photo is a well-known portrait of the horn section the Johann Strauss orchestra in 1869. From left to right the horn players are Morawetz, Sabaz, Radnitzky, and Schantl – the great Josef Schantl (1842-1902), Principal Horn of the Imperial and Royal Court Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic, credited also with founding the Vienna Waldhornverein. Among many significant performances he performed on the premieres of Brahms second and third symphonies, and also the third and eighth symphonies of Bruckner. Look closely at his horn in the photo – it is one of those rotary valve horns made on the pattern of a Vienna horn. I believe he had no issue blending with these colleagues. And I should add, other portraits of Shantl show him holding a conventional Vienna horn, he made use of both types. A horn merely being a tool in the hands of the artist.

[There is a nice article on a horn of this general type in the R. J. Martz website, which also credits this photo to the Pizka collection, published in the April 1984 issue of The Horn Call.]

In any case, I’m enjoying playing this Vienna horn. Drawing inspiration from Schantl, I’ve been playing his etudes often (especially the ones reprinted as the Pottag Preparatory Melodies and the additional ones I included in my publication, 35 Melodic Etudes) and also excerpts from Brahms and Bruckner. When the series returns, we will look more at where the Vienna horn fits in the musical world of the 19th century.

Continue to Part III of the Vienna Horn series

Vienna Horns, part I: What is (and isn’t) a Vienna Horn

John Ericson
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Astute readers of Horn Matters might have noticed that I have rarely written about Vienna horns. Not that there is no content, but relative to the deep and continued interest in the Vienna horn I have not written much at all.

Like most Horn Matters readers, I first noticed the unique design from videos of the Vienna Philharmonic. A Vienna horn is a single F, but much more exciting than any standard single F you might have played as a beginner.

Blame my dissertation

By the time I was thinking about dissertation topics I had decided to focus on the early valved horn in Germany – which means I was focused mostly on horns with rotary valves. I looked at it all pretty deeply in “The Development of Valved Horn Technique in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany: A Survey of Performers and Works Before 1850 With Respect to the Use of Crooks, Right Hand Technique, Transposition, and Valves” (Indiana University, 1995).

Eventually I recorded a CD on a rotary valve single horn with crooks (more on that here), and I have modified several horns to imitate 19th century rotary horn designs (especially during my sabbatical), including horns with crooks, that I use often and enjoy playing (more here).

So, what is a Vienna horn?

Visually, it is a very 19th-century design. There are a number of features to consider, including the use of a crook, pitch level in F, and the bore and bell size. But when you get to it the most central feature is that a Vienna horn has Vienna valves.

Vienna valves are a type of piston valve, sometimes referred to as double piston valves. They operate as pairs of small valves that are connected together, as seen in this illustration. The historical summary of the design I included in my dissertation (as subsequently posted in Horn Articles Online) is as follows:

This valve design, patented [see endnote] in 1823 by Viennese instrument maker Joseph Riedl (d. 1840) and hornist Josef Kail (1795-1871), had actually been produced as early as 1819 by instrument maker C. F. Sattler (1778-1842) of Leipzig and possibly earlier by Stölzel and Blühmel [Dahlqvist, 111, 114, and 123. Leopold Ulhmann of Vienna also held an 1830 patent on an improved Vienna valve]. The use of two pistons for each valve loop made for a more consistent bore and eliminated the potential problem of back pressure found in the single-piston Stölzel valve. However, when a Vienna valve is depressed it introduces two sharp 90-degree angles into the windway, and also introduces two sudden constrictions of approximately 8% in the bore, neither of which assist in the response of the instrument [Merewether, 31]. It should be noted that the Stölzel valve shares these same defects of design. German players favored the Vienna valve until the 1850s [Carse, 222], while Austrian players continued to used it throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.

SOURCES:

Adam Carse, Musical Wind Instruments (London: Macmillan, 1939; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1965).

Reine Dahlqvist, “Some Notes on the Early Valve,” The Galpin Society Journal 33 (March, 1980), 111-124.

Richard Merewether, “The Vienna-Horn–And Some Thoughts on its Past Fifty Years,” The Horn Call 15, no. 1 (October, 1984), 31-35.

Reflecting now, I’m a bit skeptical of that final statement drawn from Carse, it would be one that could be researched out more. And reality is you don’t notice the 8% constriction that Merewether mentions.

Are there Vienna horns with rotary valves?

Worth also mentioning, there are horns built with the same layout as a Vienna horn, but with rotary valves. They have been around since the early years of valves and are interesting horns for sure. I’d love to own one or build one someday.

Without the distinctive Vienna valves they are not considered by some to be Vienna horns. Vienna horns have Vienna valves! Personally, I would call them a type of Vienna horn, as so many of the other design features are the same — only the valve section is different — and historically these rotary instruments existed alongside the Vienna valve instruments.

However, if the layout of a rotary valve horn is otherwise different, it is not a Vienna horn. It is a crooked, rotary valve horn, of the type that I have worked with the most personally. A rotary valve Vienna horn would certainly have the valve section placed in the same location as the Vienna valves and take exactly the type of crook used on a Vienna horn. If the crook is larger or smaller, the design has clearly diverged significantly away from that of the Vienna horn.

Finally, I would add that this is a topic on which opinions differ, but for sure the pro players of the Vienna horn today all use horns with Vienna valves, and you are safest to stick with that as what we call a Vienna horn today. I’ll have a bit more on this in Part II.

And I didn’t have a Vienna horn

Another reason I have not looked at the Vienna horn that much is I did not have a Vienna horn to use beyond very limited testing.

When one became available to me recently I was also initially not very impressed. I’ll talk about that more in Part II, as I was able to rework an unfinished crook for that horn and it plays rather better on the finished crook! A good crook is a necessity! Made a huge difference. A sneak peek look at that crook may be found here. 

Another introduction to the instrument

To close Part I of this series, Anneke Scott presents a great introduction to the Vienna horn in this video, and I’ll be back soon with Part II.

Continue to Part II of Vienna Horns series

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