Hand-stopping is a technique by which a natural horn can be made to produce notes outside of its normal harmonic series. The natural horn is a musical instrument that is the ancestor of the modern-day horn, and is differentiated by its lack of valves See Harmonic series (mathematics for the (related mathematical concept 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 before the invention of piston and valve horns in the early 19th Century.
The technique was invented in Europe in the mid 18th Century, and its first celebrated exponent was Giovanni Punto, who learned the technique from A. J. Hampel and subsequently taught it to the Court orchestra of George III. Giovanni Punto (born Jan Václav Stich) ( September 28, 1746 – February 16, 1803) was a horn player (more correctly he Anton Joseph (A J Hampel (born Prague, 1710 died 30 March 1771 was a horn player from Dresden, Germany, who is generally credited with George III (George William Frederick 4 June 1738 George III's long reign was marked by a series of military conflicts involving his kingdom much of the rest of Europe and places
In addition to the change in pitch, the timbre is changed, sounding somewhat muted. Some pieces call for notes to be played stopped (sometimes written as gestopft in the score) specifically in order to produce this muted tone. This can clearly be heard on recordings of natural horns playing baroque repertoire such as the Weber concertino (a recording by Anthony Halstead and the Hanover Band is available which demonstrates this to particularly good effect). Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber ( 18 December 1786 in Eutin, Holstein, Germany - 5 June 1826 in London The Concertino for Horn by Carl Maria von Weber is an extremely taxing work for the French horn. Anthony Halstead (born 1945 in Manchester, The Hanover Band founded by Caroline Brown in 1980 is a British period-instrument orchestra widely acclaimed as one of the leading period-instrument orchestras in
The pitch control is affected by the degree of closing the bell with the right hand. As the palm closes the bell, the effective tube length is increased, lowering the pitch (up to about a semitone for horns in the range D through G). But when the hand stops the bell completely, the tube length is shortened, raising pitch about a semitone for horns tuned near to the key of F.
References
- Encyclopaedia Britannica online, 2007
- The Evolution of the Modern French Horn from 1750 to the Present Day R. Morley-Pegge Proceedings of the Musical Association, 69th Sess. , 1942 - 1943 (1942 - 1943), pp. 34-55
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