On Blowing a Horn

EDITORIAL ON BLOWING A HORN One can only speculate about the feelings of the primitive man who first broke the tip from his horn cup and discovered that, al- though he could no longer use it for drinking, he could make a gorgeous noise with it. Presumably, however, he was delighted, for the descendants of the first hornblower have delighted in blowing the horn ever since. When Joshua's nomad army burst into history, blowing rams' horn shofars at Jericho, "the walls came tumblin' down." And the blasts on the rams' horns of Gideon's 300 routed the Midi- anites, so that, in their panic flight, "there fell an hundred and twenty thousand men that drew sword." Brazen trumpets rang down the centuries with the armies of Egypt, Assyria, Rome and Greece. The brass buccina sounded the night watches for the Roman legions; the fanfare of the lituus spurred the Roman cavalry. The bugle and the trumpet blared through the centuries with medieval chivalry. The armies of the Incas and of ancient China marched to conquest with conch shell and copper horns. From time immemorial, the horn of the hunter has sounded on the hill. Uncounted generations of swineherds have had their horns. For long, American men timed their farming and their laboring by the blowing of the dinner horn. Sailors sought safety at sea through the fog horn. Today, we snarl or speed our motor traffic by the horn. We dine and dance to the song of the horn. We have name bands galore; and their records and the making of musical instruments form a multimillion-dollar business. The musicians' union is one of the most powerful. Coliege and school bands have mushroomed across the country. School music has become a respectable teaching specialty. In the hamlets, the town band with its horns remains a civic, social and fraternal institution. When the rams' horn shofars blow on Rosh Hashanah and Yore Kippur to summon the pious Jew to welcome the new year, or to atone, men join in the oldest ceremonials of the Western World to worship at the sound of the world's most primitive horn. And 162 EDITORIAL CO~r when the bugle slowly rings out taps, the end of the day and the end of life are signaled by the horn. Since homo paleol~thicus made his clamorous discovery, men have fought, worked, played and worshipped to the note of the horn. Doubtless they will continue to do so until Gabriel--or the hydrogen atom--sounds the last one. Man's most triumphal music is the horn. Doubtle,ss it was not his earliest; there must have been millenia when the paean of tri- umph was a healthy, savage sell. And doubtless it is not his loud- est; though, as every musician knows, it was not the carefree bass drummer but the frustrated tuba player who found 4,000 other pieces in Heaven's orchestra (but no tuba)--only to hear the Angel Gabriel's : "Hush, hush, not so loud l" And perhaps the sound of the horn is not man's bravest music; tell none who stir to the Highland pipes that the Scots could have raised the seige of Ladysmith with trumpets. And tell no one who has heard the fife that the Spirit of '76 could have .marched to the bugle. It is likely true that man cannot play every instrument in the orchestra, and it may be true, as some of the benighted hold, that the strings are the backbone of the symphony, though that is not the role that "catgut" implies. But if backbone the strings be, the brasses are the soul, the loud, clear, ringing voice, the word and the spirit. One would not deny the strings' kinship. As the brasses derive from the ram's noble brow, ~so the strings--cry like cats as they may--derive also, if from less noble parts, from the sheep. And what are the wood winds but ill-born horns, illegiti- mate crosses between bugle and pipes--masquerade as the flute and piccolo may in the noble metal of their superiors. One may place the valiant brass behind the jealous strings and lowly wood winds, back it with clamorous percussion, reduce its numbers to one in 10; and "the surge and thunder," the struggle and the tri- umph will still rise on high from tuba and trombone, trumpet and horn. There is something in man's nature, we think, which calls for the blowing of a horn. Since recorded ~ime began, kings and con- querors, small bo~s and swineherds have blown their horns. Her- alds and herald angels blow their horn.s; and, in the land where one shouts, not, ~' There goes ~he so-and-so," but ' ~Tallyho," red- coated riders hunt the fox with the horn. The automobile, the Diesel locomotive and the milling Times Square crowds at New V,DITOm~ COMMENT 163 Year's have their horns. And it is traditional American hypocrisy for men to deplore, and, at the same time, practice, blowing their own horns. It may be profitable to consider the psychodynamics of blowing the horn. We make no pretense of deep analysis; our considera- tions are fragmentary and theoretical, and we should be glad of supportive or contradictory clinical material; but it seems to us that there is almost a royal ,sublimation of aggression in the blowing of the horn. The horn offers sublimation of more varieties of aggression than ,any other human activity which comes readily to mind. The horn sublimates phallic aggression, oral aggression and anal. It diverts, in manner socially-acceptable, some of the most primitive and ineradicable destructive forces which animate mankind. That the horn is, psychoanalytically, a genital symbol is a postu- late which needs no belaboring. Its bell exposed, the orchestral horn or the horn of plenty is the female symbol, the place from. which all things arise. One suspects that Pandora's box may have been a horn. But that the horn as aggression, the horn as musical instrument or as weapon, is masculine is--to the unconscious at least-- as plainly evident. We may suggest, without attempt to demonstrate it, that the horn one blows and the horn on the ram's head are, unconsciously, identical. The ram, with which the legions battered the walls of Rome's enemies, is frequently pictured, not as the whole animal, but as ,a tremendous timber adorned with ram's horns. The steel ram of the ancients' galleys--and of the Merrimac--was not the animal in tote but the animal's horn. And the "Ram-Burst-All" of Near East folklore was the phallus in guise of the horn. Plain enough also are other identifications. Most men have seen ribald warnings in certain public places to "bucks with short horns." "Horny" used to be a common vulgar term for rut. Gabriel blows a horn. The devil--by displacement --wears horns. And the betrayed husband--by a psychodynamic displacement so fantastic it could have been dreamed up as re- venge--is depicted jeeringly with horns. Worn on the head or blown, there is no doubt of the phallic aggression of the horn. But if the horn is a weapon of phallic aggression, phallic exhibi- tionism also finds an instrument without price in the horn. We do not propose here to disertss the dynamias concerned. Clinical in- vestigation suggests that much more may be involved than simple 16~ EDITORIAL GO !~ t~E l~T sublimation of a child's frustrated desire to display himself. But, whatever the clinical facts may be, what could be more obvious compensation for the almost universal ",small-penis complex" than blowing the tuba, the biggest of the horns? And what could be more exhibitionistic defiance of parental prohibition than the blare of the trumpet--or the groaning slide of the trombone, which re- produces, in less than classical music, not only the motions of the sex act but the sounds which may accompany it ? The unconscious of the hornblower is well aware of this phallic significance. As musicians will testify, there is a peculiar variety of stagefright to which hornblowers are subject. The victim who may have done perfectly in practice--may become unsteady in performance; when he comes to handle his instrument in public, his fingers misbehave. The tryant .super-ego has recalled, "Mustn't touch," at the most embarrassing moment. The orality of the horn requires no elaborate demonstration. Without delving into the deeper layer,s of the unconscious, one can see the oral hornblower of full triumphal music performing (without, we hasten to note, the knowledge or permission of the author) Edmund Bergler's positive magic gesture of "Bad mother, this is how I wanted to be treated." Or one can see the comfort-giving horn as the now-inexhaustible breast, yielding generously the joy once denied the .frustrated infant. In this sense, the hornblower achieves positive and pleasurable autarchy. One cannot, of course, neglect the perverse aspects of any oral activity. The analogy of the instrument in the mouth and certain homosexual practices is too obvious to overlook. But .almost no- body insults the brass. It is the w.ood winds which from time be- yond the memory of man have served the human taste for insults. The bassoon is the "fagot," (Fagotit or fagotto) the derivation of which we may leave to the student of the: German and Italian vernacular, but the current meaning of which in musical, and in "gay" circles is unmistakable. The clarinet is the "licorice stick," also unmistakable.

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