This is an interesting discussion, but can somebody please provide a bit of background as to why there exists literature in which only the horn parts would be written without a key signature?
Liudas
Coming to this thread late, after yesterday's successful concert! Not just horns. Typical for natural trumpets as well.
The short answer is to suggest looking at the 17th and 18th century history of those instruments and their introduction into orchestral ensembles. Because they were natural instruments, playing only the notes of the harmonic series, the composer had to specify which key the instruments should be crooked into. And that automatically put the PARTS they were reading from into C major. (This goes back even further to late 16th century notation for trumpet corps, which I won't get into.)
Now it's clear from Mozart's use of notes outside the harmonic series that horn players, if not trumpeters, were quite capable of lipping a lot of additional notes, but the notes of the harmonic series were still the best sounding notes on the instrument. (And please don't bring up the Haydn and Hummel trumpet concertos, because those were written for a keyed trumpet. Think of a saxophone played with a trumpet mouthpiece. Or, if you have a weak stomach, DON'T think of it!) And there's also the fact that instruments crooked in different keys had remarkably different sounds. Even when played on F horns, the tessitura of the horns in A in Beethoven's 7th give a brilliance to the music that horns in D or Eb would never have.
By the end of Beethoven's life, valved instruments were being produced, but they didn't catch on real fast, and composers were still writing for natural instruments. Berlioz specifically recommended using 2 pairs of horns in 2 different keys so you could write more different notes by trading off horns. (And this is also the beginning of the tradition of having high specialists and low specialists in the horn section, with 1st and 3rd, not 1st and 2nd, being the high specialists.)
After that it simply became a matter of tradition. Brahms wrote for horn in B natural in one of his symphonies--a tritone transposition on F horn!--even though the part is only playable on a valved horn.
John
-- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
