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The French horn (since the 1930s known simply as the horn in professional music circles) is a brass instrument made of tubing wrapped into a coil with a flared bell. The double horn in F/B ♭ (technically a variety of German horn) is the horn most often used by players in professional orchestras and bands, although the descant and triple horn have become increasingly popular.
By inserting the hand, cupped, into the bell, the player can reduce the pitch of a note by a semitone or more. This, combined with the use of crooks changing the key of the instrument, allowed composers to write fully chromatic music for the horn and almost fully chromatic music for the trumpet before the invention of piston and valve horns and ...
However, playing a 3rd space C (F-horn, open) and repeating the stopped horn, the pitch will lower a half-step to a B-natural (or 1/2 step above B ♭, the next lower partial). The hand horn technique developed in the classical period, with music pieces requiring the use of covering the bell to various degrees to lower the pitch accordingly.
French horn players can use standard mutes, but often use their hand to mute the sound, a technique known as stopping. By inserting their hand fully into the instrument, airflow is limited, producing a quiet and nasal sound.
Anton Joseph (A. J.) Hampel (1710 – 30 March 1771) was a horn player who is generally credited with having developed, somewhere between 1750 and 1760, the technique of hand-stopping which allows natural horns to play fully chromatically.
The horn is held on a tripod. He does not place a limb inside the bell of the horn, in contrast to the way the instrument is traditionally played, using the left hand to operate the valves and placing the right hand inside the bell. He was born in Göttingen. He began playing the horn at the age of 4. [2]
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A musician who plays the French horn, like the players of the German and Vienna horns (confusingly also sometimes called French horns), is called a horn player (or less frequently, a hornist). Three valves control the flow of air in the single horn, which is tuned to F or less commonly B ♭. Although double French horns do exist, they are rare.