Notes in e flat major2/10/2024 ![]() ![]() Then, too, the valve horn’s facility came at a price-in this case, a straitening of the instrument’s evocative timbre and in particular a smoothing out of the veiled, muted quality that ensued when a player inserted his hand into the instrument’s bell to alter the pitch. Brahms got pretty good at it, and in the late 1850s he played first horn in the orchestra at Detmold. It was a rather quaint decision in 1865 some years had passed since the valve system had been perfected, enabling hornists to alter the length of the instrument’s tubes-and thereby broaden its chromatic possibilities-with the flick of a finger.īut the natural horn exerted a pull-on Brahms, perhaps partly because his father, himself a professional hornist, had given his young son lessons in playing that old-fashioned instrument. Brahms (1833–97) must have considered this when he denoted that the piece was for natural horn (or “hand horn,” as he termed it) rather than for the newfangled valve horn. Indeed, an imprudent horn player can easily overwhelm the texture, especially when the piece is played on a modern horn, as it usually is today. He found the combination of horn, violin, and piano to be indefensibly unwieldy. One early critic encountering Brahms’s Horn Trio was so taken aback by its unusual instrumentation that he declined to accept it as a legitimate piece of chamber music. ![]()
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