Elizabeth Irvin Senior Thesis Recital February 26, 2010
The very sound of the French horn conjures images stored in the collective psyche. It’s an instrument that invites us to “dream backward to the ancient time.” John Williams
Long before its introduction into the orchestra, the horn was a faithful companion of the night watchman, the woodsman and the hunter. Rough and boisterous, without the valves and slides of the modern instrument, it made its home first in the forests of medieval Europe, and then increasingly at the courts of the continent’s wealthy nobles. By the mid-seventeenth century, the horn was making cameo appearances in operas, and within the following century became a regular in the developing symphony orchestra.
Limited technical capabilities—a result of the instrument’s rustic, unrefined design—contributed to the early horn being typecast as an instrument of the primitive forest. For the better part of two centuries, the horn remained something of a curiosity, used by composers to convey a mood or capture a special effect. Gradually, the construction of the horn became more refined and composers demanded more from its players. And yet, even as technology has domesticated the horn into an instrument capable of matching the dexterity of the clarinet and the chromaticism of the piano, it still retains some element of its distant primordial past. Twentieth-century composers in particular, fascinated by the fading echoes of the hunting horn, have gone to great lengths to coax ancient sounds out of modern instruments in everything from chamber music to film scores.
The five pieces on this recital demonstrate, each in its own way, some aspect of the horn’s transformation from a primitive instrument of the forest to the noble and refined denizen of the concert hall…and back again. Through the juxtaposition of old and new, it becomes clear that every note that emerges from the bell of a modern horn rings with the overtones of nearly four hundred years of history.
Benjamin Britten: Serenade for Horn, Tenor, and Strings
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) was one member of a generation of composers including Elgar, Tippett, Holst, and Vaughn Williams who revived the British tradition of classical music in the 20th century. He is best known for his monumental works, including his War Requiem and Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, as well as his operas, such as Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Screw. Though these pieces may have made Britten’s reputation, some of his most beautiful and enduring compositions are song cycles for varied combinations of voices and instruments. In these intimate pieces, often featuring a tenor soloist (a role frequently filled by Britten’s partner Peter Pears), Britten explored texts ranging from the story of Abraham and Isaac to the poetry of Thomas Hardy.
Britten wrote Serenade for Horn, Tenor and Strings in 1943 for Pears and the legendary British horn player Dennis Brain. Within the bookends of two unaccompanied horn solos, Britten set six poems by British writers: Cotton, Tennyson, Blake, an anonymous 15th-century poet, Jonson, and Keats. Though during the composition process Britten described the Serenade to a friend as “not important stuff, but quite pleasant,” the finished work was an immediate critical success that has become a standard of both the horn and tenor repertoire. Britten himself re-evaluated the piece in an article mourning the sudden and tragic death of Brain in 1957:
Some of my happiest musical experiences were conducting this work for him and Peter Pears—a succession of wonderful performances progressing from the youthful exuberance and brilliance of the early days to the maturity and deep understanding of the last few years.
Brain approached Britten about writing him a solo during a late night wartime radio broadcast. Norman Del Mar, another member of the horn section, recounted Britten’s reaction to the request in the book Letters from A Life: “Britten responded to this immediate invitation – characteristic of Brain it seems – by questioning him in detail about the technical potential of the horn and what special effects might be persuaded from it.” Britten clearly paid close attention, for the Serenade is particularly notable for its innovative use of a wide range of techniques unique to the horn.
I. “Prologue” and II. “Pastoral” The work’s Prologue and Epilogue are identical unaccompanied solos written for the natural horn, using only those pitches—the harmonic series built on a pedal F (the F an octave above, the C the fifth above that, the F a fourth above that, etc., in increasingly smaller intervals)—that would have been playable on the earliest of horns. Because of the physical properties of the harmonic series, some of these pitches sound out of tune to ears used to the even-tempering of the modern piano. (For example, the seventh, eleventh, and fourteenth harmonics are all noticeably flat, while the thirteenth is almost a quarter-tone sharp.) Britten was well aware of this effect and used it intentionally, taking a reviewer to task for criticizing Brain’s intonation and claiming that “anyone who plays it ‘in tune’ is going directly against my wishes!” Brain was a master of natural horn technique, once performing a Leopold Mozart concerto on a garden hose.
In this afternoon’s recital, both the Prologue and Epilogue will be played on an alphorn. Britten did not write these movements for alphorn, but the instrument is ideally suited for both their dramatic character and melodic substance. Although more technically refined than Brain’s rubber instrument, the alphorn represents the oldest ancestor of the natural horn and the more modern valve horn. Incredibly, if one were to uncoil a modern horn, it would be twelve feet long, precisely the same length and therefore in the same key, as the alphorn being used this afternoon. Several composers have been inspired by alphorn music, most notably Brahms, whose first symphony contains a horn solo directly transcribed from an alphorn melody.
The second movement, Pastoral, sets text from Charles Cotton’s “Evening Quatrains.” This movement is written for a valved horn, but yet Britten continues to use large arpeggios to evoke the rustic sound of the horn as it would have existed in the 17th and early 18th centuries. In setting the text, Britten conjures the horn Cotton might have encountered, one that would have been played more often on horseback through the forest than in the concert hall.
Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto in F Major for Two Horns, RV 538
There is good reason to give Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) credit for inaugurating the tradition of soloistic instrumental writing as we know it today. Though the term “concerto” had certainly been in use prior to the eighteenth century, it was Vivaldi who transformed the concerto from what was essentially chamber music into a form that highlights the skills of one or two players against the background of an orchestra. His prolific output of nearly four hundred solo and double concertos for a wide variety and combination of instruments forms the foundation of a tradition that continued through Mozart and Brahms to the present day.
Of these roughly four hundred concertos, more than two hundred feature solo violin, while only two are written for horn – and both of these are double concertos for two horns and orchestra. The comparative scarcity of horn solos is a direct reflection of the intended purpose of most of these concertos; they were intended for performance by the wards of the Pietá, a Venetian girls’ orphanage. While the study of string instruments and woodwinds was considered an appropriate and even laudable occupation for these girls, the study of brass instruments was viewed as vaguely scandalous. The horn was frowned upon even more than the trumpet, and was not introduced to the Pietá until 1747, six years after Vivaldi’s death. Michael Talbot, a Vivaldi biographer, explains its exclusion as follows:
The governors may have considered [horns] unladylike if not profane, for although the trumpet had long been used in sacred music as well as in pageantry, the horn was still associated with the worldly culture of courts and their favourite pastime of hunting.
But even without relying on such historical guesswork as to the motives of the Pietá’s governors, it is clear that Vivaldi composed this double concerto with the hunting horn in mind. The piece begins with an emphatic statement of F major throughout the ensemble in a jaunty rhythm that would not have sounded out of place coming from a hunter on horseback. When the horns take over, the solo parts consist almost entirely of repeated tones, arpeggiations, and the occasional trill. Indeed, in the first movement the only time either horn plays a note that is not a part of a dominant or tonic harmony is in the form of a trill, while the rest of the orchestra is sequencing through more distant keys.
The lack of harmonic variety in Vivaldi’s horn writing is directly tied to the technical capabilities of the 18th-century horn. He writes only repeated tones and arpeggios for the same reason that hunting calls contained only repeated tones and arpeggios – the horn could do nothing else without rocketing into the extreme limit of the instrument’s range. This technical limitation is made abundantly clear in the slower middle movement of the concerto, in which the horns vanish and the solo is taken up by a cello. The short movement is simple enough, but the mere presence of stepwise motion, minor keys, and the odd chromatic pitch make it utterly unplayable on a natural F horn.
Theorists have been less than impressed with the double horn concerto, and indeed with most of Vivaldi’s double concertos. Talbot complains that Vivaldi’s duettists “may perform more in dialogue than as a pair, one instrument repeating immediately whatever the other plays [or] they may move in endless chains of thirds as if unable to escape from one another.” Though Vivaldi does use these two compositional strategies almost exclusively in this concerto, the result is anything but bland. The composer manages to quite accurately translate the previous repertoire of the horn into an entirely new medium. The horns call back and forth as if answering each other across a vast wood or as if a single call is echoing off craggy bluffs.
Benjamin Britten: III. “Nocturne” from Serenade for Horn, Tenor, and Strings
There are clear parallels between Vivaldi’s horn writing and Britten’s use of the instrument in Nocturne. Tennyson’s text is explicit: the voice commands a bugle to sound across the darkening countryside. In each of three key areas, the horn responds with ever-expanding arpeggiations of the same chord. The climax of the movement, however, trades open fifths for the dissonance of the tritone, perhaps yet another reference to the unique intonation of the natural horn. Altering the open fifths of the traditional horn call becomes a common twentieth-century method for juxtaposing tradition and modernity.
Ludwig van Beethoven: Horn Sonata, Op. 17
By most every account, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is one of the most important figures in Western music history. Many critics cite his Third Symphony as a watershed moment in the arc of music history, marking the beginning of Romanticism. If this is the case, then a horn player may have been Romanticism’s first victim. According to anecdotes of the first rehearsal of the Third Symphony, published in the book Beethoven Remembered, the second horn player was excoriated by the rest of the musicians when he entered precisely on cue, two measures ahead of the rest of the orchestra in the now famous false recapitulation. Despite this inauspicious beginning, horn players owe a debt to Beethoven for composing many of the first great orchestral horn parts. All of his symphonies contain solo or soli moments for the horn section, an expanded section that now often consisted of three or four players as opposed to the standard pair.
Part of the reason for the dramatic increase of the horn’s prominence in the 19th-century orchestra is the evolution in playing techniques that began in the mid-18th century. Around the year 1760, horn players in Dresden discovered that, by inserting the right hand into the bell and closing (“stopping”) the opening to varying degrees, all manner of chromatic pitches could be obtained. Suddenly horn players were no longer limited to playing the pitches of the harmonic series, but could play increasingly difficult melodic passages. Masters of this new technique became international touring sensations.
Beethoven’s Sonata for Horn in F, premiered on April 18th, 1800 was written for the most famous of these hand horn virtuosos, Giovanni Punto. According to the historical record, Beethoven composed the sonata in less than a day and personally accompanied the soloist at the piano. The tight deadline and limited rehearsal time available for the piece meant that, though the writing demands a high degree of facility with hand horn technique, it would not have presented any extraordinary challenges to a player like Punto. As such, analyzing this sonata is an excellent way to get a sense of the technical capabilities of the early 19th-century horn.
From the opening measures of the sonata, it is clear that one compositional strategy had remained popular from the days of Vivaldi: arpeggios. Arpeggios had become something of a trademark of horn players, particularly those who specialized in the low register. Beethoven takes full advantage of the instrument’s low range, even calling for a nearly unplayable pedal C. The novel chromatic pitches stick out of the texture with their distinctive stopped tone as they intensify key pitches or cascade in previously unplayable runs.
However, it is obvious even in the first movement that the development of hand stopping technique did not enable Beethoven to overcome all of the limitations of the early horn. Though hand horn technique allowed the horn to approximate a chromatic scale throughout all of its registers, the jarring difference between mellow open tones and piercing stopped notes still meant that chromatic pitches were more suited to function as passing tones or inflections, not as ways to explore entirely new key areas. Unlike his symphonies with their lengthy journeys away from the home key, Beethoven’s development section in this sonata form is a paltry thirty-six measures out of 180. The slow movement is equally comical in its brevity; in its not quite eighteen measures, the horn plays a total of only seven different pitches and spends the last third of the movement on a pedal C, anticipating the transition back to the home key for the final rondo. Even Beethoven’s compositional genius could not liberate the horn from its technical restraints.
In order to give an approximation of what an early 19th-century performance of this piece might have sounded like, this afternoon’s performance will be played on a Vienna horn. Now played almost exclusively by members of Vienna Philharmonic, the Vienna horn was designed to remain as true to its natural ancestor as possible. Although a modern instrument equipped with piston valves, the smaller size of the bell and lighter frame makes it much easier to forgo the assistance of valves and rely on hand horn technique alone. In fact, when these instruments were first invented, players used the valves simply to add the bit of tubing that would pitch the horn in a different key and spare the hassle of picking up a different instrument or assembling a different set of crooks. Special thanks to Orlando Pandolfi for lending his instrument.
Benjamin Britten: IV. “Elegy” and V. “Dirge” from Serenade for Horn, Tenor, and Strings
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the “Elegy” and “Dirge,” the central two movements of the Serenade, may have been the first two composed. At that first meeting between Britten and Brain, Del Mar observed the composer asking about very specific effects: “if he could hit a top C directly out of the blue (i.e. without approaching it), for example, and […] about the fluctuating pitch that can be produced by stopping and unstopping with the hand, from a closed to an open position in the bell.” Both of these effects are on display in the Elegy. The horn spins out a series of descending half steps that range from pedal tones to the infamous top C. In the wake of the horn’s most explosive entrance, the tenor ominously intones the text of Blake’s famous poem “The Sick Rose,” The horn repeats the same series of chromatic sighs, but with a slight alteration. In the final measure, Britten gives away his compositional inspiration for the movement – the horn performs the same descending semitone gesture, but this time by opening and closing the hand in the bell. The tenor picks up this semitone gesture in the Dirge, transforming it into an eerie ostinato lament. Beneath this soaring vocal line, a rumbling fugue builds. The horn enters at the climax, and then the piece descends back into bleak silence. Regardless of the order in which these movements were composed, the mid-point of the Serenade uses both the darkest texts and the most unique horn techniques to create the mood of blackest midnight.
Olivier Messiaen: VI. Appel Interstellaire from Des canyons aux étoiles…
There aren’t any modal composers, tonal composers, or serial composers. There is only music that is colored and music that isn’t. Olivier Messiaen
Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was a part of a long line of French composers including Debussy, Ravel, and Dukas who were fascinated with musical color. Messiaen takes the work of these other composers one step further; instead of simply adding chromatic pitches to create exotic versions of diatonic chords, Messiaen builds and orchestrates chords that are meant to contrast with each other on a level beyond dominant/tonic relationships. When pressed by Claude Samuel to describe his theory of music, he answered, “The classic tonalities had a tonic. The ancient modes had a final. My modes have neither a tonic nor a final; they are colors. The classical chords have attractions and resolutions. My chords are colors.” Nowhere is this colorful approach to composition more on display than in his large instrumental works, where Messiaen has as his palette all of the timbres of the symphony orchestra.
Des canyons aux étoiles…(From the Canyons to the Stars), premiered in 1974, is perhaps the best example of Messiaen’s use of unusual, colorful sounds in a large orchestral piece. The piece is scored for full orchestra, percussion, and a curious combination of soloists: piano, glockenspiel, xylorimba, and horn. Commissioned by Alice Tully and premiered in New York City, the work depicts the desolately beautiful landscape of the American West. As is typical of many of Messiaen’s works, beneath this surface imagery is a meditation on the loneliness of the human condition and the spirituality of the unknown. The first movement opens with a few bars of unaccompanied horn solo, and at pivotal moments throughout the work, horn entrances serve as structural pillars. In a demonstration of just how important the horn is to the work as a whole, the central movement (6th out of 12), Appel Interstellaire (Interstellar Call), is scored for only solo horn.
Messiaen had a lot to say about Appel Interstellaire. According to the composer, it was inspired by two biblical passages: Psalm 147:3 “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. He determines the number of the stars and gives to all of them their names” and Job 16:18 “O earth, cover not my blood, and let my cry find no resting place!” The horn represents humanity in its quest to find some meaning in the suffering of the world. In the middle of the piece, Messsiaen instructs the horn player to adopt “the fingering of the horn in D, going back to its original nature: the hunting horn. Its calls become more and more hoarse and heart-rending: no answer! The calls are lost in the silence.”
Clearly, then, Messiaen is relying on some of the standard tropes of natural horn playing to achieve dramatic effect, including open harmonics, stopped tones, and echoes. Like Britten, however, Messiaen’s horn calls are not based on traditional open fifths, but dissonant tritones and ninths. In pursuit of novel timbres, he sometimes combines effects, calling for stopped trills and flutter- tongued (an extended technique that requires the player to make a “rolled r” sound while playing a note) glissandi (quick slides between two pitches, hitting the notes in between). In addition to altering ancient techniques, Messiaen also produces some effects that are curiously his own, most notably some sections where the player is instructed to only push the valves down halfway, producing an effect “whose timbre,” in the words of Messiaen, “Americans would describe as a dog with a headache […] or if you prefer another comparison, these sounds resemble the song of whales.” All of these unconventional sounds do a great job of capturing the isolation of humanity that Messiaen gleans from the two biblical passages. The fact that he connects so many of these sounds to the cries of different animals may explain why he chose the horn as a soloist in this piece: because of its ability to mimic the range of the human voice. Perhaps recognition of this same singing quality of the horn’s tone is why Britten wrote three different song cycles for the unusual partnership of tenor and horn.
In tone this piece has much in common with the melancholy movements of Britten’s Serenade that concluded the first half. Messiaen, however, reads comfort into the bleak silences and horn’s anguished cries:
And of this piece, which sums up all the questioning about misfortune and suffering, it can be said that the entire work answers it by showing, alongside the atrocities surrounding us, the miraculous beauties of our planet and the hope of still greater beauties after death.
Benjamin Britten: VI. “Hymn” from Serenade for Horn, Tenor, and Strings
The sixth movement of the Serenade, Hymn, is an ode to the Roman goddess of the hunt and the moon, Diana. The music is an equal partner with the text in evoking the image of a brisk ride through the forest. Britten adds complexity to the common compositional practice of using a lilting compound meter to depict a galloping horse; the tenor and piano mark eighth notes in steady simple time as the horn canters away. While the tenor performs winding runs, the horn calls the chase with ever increasing insistence. The movement screeches to an almost comical halt with the horn player in the instrument’s extreme low register.
Carl Maria von Weber: Polacca from Concertino for Horn in E
Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) was, along with Beethoven, a part of the earliest generation of German Romantic composers. In 1859, when the battle lines were drawn between the New German School of Wagner and Liszt and Brahms and other proponents of “absolute music,” Neo-German partisan Franz Brendel credited both Beethoven and Weber for providing the foundations of the “purely German opera.” Although Weber’s reputation today is not as formidable as his fellow countryman’s, he is still particularly well known for his vocal writing, particularly his operas. Along with Der Freischütz, Oberon, and several other well-received operas, Weber composed hundreds of works for various combinations of voices. In addition to vocal writing, Weber composed a small number of pieces featuring instrumental soloists. In these circles he is particularly known for his clarinet writing, as his two concertos and concertino are all standard pieces in that instrument’s solo repertoire.
Originally composed in 1806 but revised in 1815, Weber’s Concertino for Horn in E both prefigures and resembles his Clarinet Concertino composed in 1811. Critics and biographers have tended to treat the piece as a less refined version of the work for clarinet, including Weber biographer John Warrack who lamented that “the result is considerably more stilted than in the Clarinet Concertino. Weber had not then mastered the art of linking contrasting sections: […] the final Polacca chiefly tests [the horn’s] ability to make quick accurate leaps.” But even if Weber was imagining a clarinetist or an operatic tenor when he began writing the Concertino, the final product is very idiomatic to the early 19th-century horn. The piece was both written for and revised in consultation with virtuoso horn players, and Weber clearly had a very good idea of exactly how far he could push the instrument’s playing technique.
Although written less than fifteen years after Beethoven’s Horn Sonata, the harmonic complexity of the Concertino indicates how established hand horn technique had become in the intervening decade. In this piece, the horn does its best to escape from the monotony of dominant and tonic chord tones. The slow middle section in E minor is particularly famous for including elements that would be considered extended techniques even today, especially when, at the end of this section, Weber asks the horn player to produce chords by playing one note while simultaneously humming another.
But even in the final, less harmonically adventurous Polacca, Weber is clearly pushing horn technique to a higher level. For material he uses the tropes of horn playing that reach back to Vivaldi, including copious arpeggios, pedal tones, and trills. Weber also takes advantage of the concerto form to create a texture full of echoes. The piano repeats each statement of the jaunty theme as one would expect, but toward the middle of the piece, the horn begins to take over the job of echoing itself. As the movement rushes toward its explosive conclusion, the echoes disappear and turn into ever-lengthening phrases. When it seems that the intensity cannot build any further, the horn begins a series of seemingly endless chromatic trills that lead into a final flurry of sixteenth note runs. While these trills might be standard elements of concertos for other instruments, the ability to move through a chromatic sequence that intensifies the final coda was a new development in horn literature.
This piece, like Beethoven’s, was composed for a hand horn, albeit a slightly longer one pitched in the key of E. The original technique would have been nearly identical to that used by Punto, but it does not take much imagination to realize exactly how difficult it would have been to play these runs and trills on such an instrument. Even the most skilled of hand horn players would not have been able to play this piece with an even tone quality because the plethora of chromatic pitches— with their resultant different tone color— would have stuck out of the texture. In order for the horn to remain a relevant instrument in the Romantic era, something had to change. The natural horn had reached its technical limit; the era of the valve horn was about to dawn. In 1818, three years after Weber’s revised Concertino was premiered, Heinrich Stolzel and Friedrich Bluhmel were granted a joint patent for a horn with two piston valves. Thirty years later, Robert Schumann composed Adagio and Allegro, the first major solo work for valve horn, while the iconic orchestral horn parts of Strauss, Mahler, and Wagner were not far behind.
Benjamin Britten: VII. “Sonnet” and VIII. “Epilogue” from Serenade for Horn, Tenor, and Strings
The tenor takes center stage in the breathtakingly beautiful penultimate movement. In contrast with the dark intensity of the fourth and fifth movements and the joyous outburst of the sixth, the Sonnet is essentially a lullaby. The singer repeatedly lingers on a pitch after the piano has moved to the next chord, as if he is lulling himself to sleep. Indeed, sleep overtakes him in the final measures of the movement as he trails off on an exquisite major chord. The alphorn, from somewhere offstage, welcomes the tenor to the dream world, ending the piece precisely where it began, somewhere far in the past. A special thanks to Christina Knapp, ’13 for loaning her instrument for this recital.