Flugelhorn Instruments
Flugelhorn Fast Facts
Horn players, particularly third and fourth horns, get long periods of rest in the course of certain pieces of music. They probably rank second only to percussion players for the amount of bars rest they have. On the other hand, the flugelhorns also have some of the most cruelly exposed solo passages in the repertoire, for example the notorious cadenza in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and usually earn their rest.
A Brief History of Flugelhorn Musical Instruments
We mentioned previously some of the early horns, but it is doubtful whether they had any direct influence on the immediate predecessors of modern horns, namely the hunting horns dating from the sixteenth century, whose distinctive feature was the fact that they were coiled. In the mid-seventeenth century several attempts were made in France to improve the instruments, and instead of several coils, two were used and, towards the end of the century, one only. Horns suffered from the same problem as early trumpets, namely that they could only be used in one key. One answer was to have several horns, and another was to have coiled crooks of different lengths which fitted between the mouthpiece and the instrument proper. This still had its disadvantages, however, since it was obviously a very cumbersome system, and it would not have survived into the days of frequent modulation or changes of tonality within a single piece of music.
Then in the middle of the eighteenth century a horn player from Dresden, Anton Josef Hampel, discovered during experimentation with mutes that if he pushed a mute, in this case a wad of cotton, into the bell, the pitch of the instrument dropped, then when the wad was in as far as it would go, the pitch rose a semitone. He found that he achieved exactly the same effect with his hand without the cotton, and that the tone of the instrument was much smoother. This, then, is how the flugelhorn technique evolved. Following on from there, Hampel saw that the question of changing crooks was impossible if both hands were to be occupied – one to hold the instrument and the other to mute it – so he redesigned the instrument with a fixed mouthpiece and crooks in the center of the coil. This had the disadvantage that the muted notes sounded wildly different from the open or unmated notes. The valve was once more the savior of the situation, however, and it was quickly brought into use for the flugelhorn. One of the most frequently adopted solutions nowadays is that of the double horn – in other words an instrument with a set of coils for a horn in F and a set of coils for a horn in Bb, operated by three valves, with a fourth valve, operated by the thumb, to switch from one to the other.
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