amed.

[Sidenote: _The French horn._]

[Sidenote: _Manipulation of the French horn._]

The French horn (Plate IX.), as it is called in the orchestra, is the
sweetest and mellowest of all the wind instruments. In Beethoven's
time it was but little else than the old hunting-horn, which, for the
convenience of the mounted hunter, was arranged in spiral
convolutions that it might be slipped over the head and carried
resting on one shoulder and under the opposite arm. The Germans still
call it the _Waldhorn_, _i.e._, "forest horn;" the old French name was
_cor de chasse_, the Italian _corno di caccia_. In this instrument
formerly the tones which were not the natural resonances of the
harmonic division of the tube were helped out by partly closing the
bell with the right hand, it having been discovered accidentally that
by putting the hand into the lower end of the tube--the flaring part
called the bell--the pitch of a tone was raised. Players still make
use of this method for convenience, and sometimes because a composer
wishes to employ the slightly muffled effect of these tones; but since
valves have been added to the instrument, it is possible to play a
chromatic scale in what are called the unstopped or open tones.

[Sidenote: _Kinds of horns._]

[Sidenote: _The trumpet._]

[Sidenote: _The cornet._]

Formerly it was necessary to use horns of different pitch, and
composers still respect this tradition, and designate the key of the
horns which they wish to have employed; but so skilful have the
players become that, as a rule, they use horns whose fundamental tone
is F for all keys, and achieve the old purpose by simply transposing
the music as they read it. If these most graceful instruments were
straightened out they would be seventeen feet long. The convolutions
of the horn and the many turns of the trumpet are all the fruit of
necessity; they could not be manipulated to produce the tones that are
asked of them if they were not bent and curved. The trumpet, when its
tube is lengthened by the addition of crooks for its lowest key, is
eight feet long; the tuba, sixteen. In most orchestras (in all of
those in the United States, in fact, except the Boston and Chicago
Orchestras and the Symphony Society of New York) the word trumpet is
merely a euphemism for cornet, the familiar leading instrument of the
brass band, which, while it falls short of the trumpet in the quality
of its tone, in the upper registers especial