century was provided with a mouthpiece,[1] judging from a carved specimen on an ivory capsa or pyxis dating from the period immediately preceding the fall of the Roman Empire, preserved among the precious relics at Xanten.
 |
| From Conrad Cichorius, Die Reliefs der Traiansäule, by permission of Georg Reimer. Fig. 1.–Roman Cornua and Buccina. |
After the fall of the Roman Empire, when instrumental music had fallen into disrepute and had been placed under a ban by the church, the art of playing upon such highly-developed instruments gradually died out in western Europe. With the disappearance of the civilization and culture of the Romans, the skilled crafts also gradually vanished, and the art of making metal pipes of delicate calibre and of bending them was completely forgotten, and had to be reacquired step by step during the middle ages from the more enlightened East. The names of the instruments and representations of them survived in MSS. and monuments of art, and as long as the West was content to turn to late Roman and Romano-Christian art for its models, no difficulties were created for the future archaeologist. By the time the Western races had begun to express themselves and to develop their own characteristics, in the 11th century, the arts of Persia, Arabia and the Byzantine Empire had laid their mark upon the West, and confusion of models, and more especially of names, ensued. The greatest confusion of all was created by the numerous translations and glosses of the Bible and by the attempts of miniaturists to illustrate the principal scenes. In Revelation, for instance (ch. viii.), the seven angels with their trumpets are diversely represented with long tubas, with curved horns of various lengths, and with the buisine, busaun or posaune, the descendant of the buccina.
We know from the colouring used in illuminated MSS., gold and pale blue, that horns were made of metal early in the middle ages. The metal was not cast in moulds but hammered into shape. Viollet-le-Duc[2] reproduces a miniature from a MS. of the end of the 13th century (Paris, Bibliothèque du corps législatif), in which two metal-workers are shown hammering two large horns.
Fig. 2.–Medieval Hunting-Horn with the
Tablature in use in the 14th Century.
The early medieval horns had no mouthpieces, the narrow end
being merely finished with a rim on which the lips rested. The tone
suffered in
consequence, being
uncertain, rough and
tremulous, wherefore
it was indicated
by the neume
known as quilisma:
“Est vox tremula;
sicut est sonus
flatus tubae vel
cornu et designatur
per neumam, quae
vocatur quilisma.”[3]
During the middle ages the bugle-horn or bull’s horn was extensively used as a signal instrument on land and sea (see Bugle), by the night-watchmen in cities, in the watch tower of the feudal castle and by foresters and huntsmen. The hunting-horn was generally represented as small in the hunting scenes which abound in illuminated MSS. and early printed books; it was crescent-shaped and was worn slung by a leather strap over one shoulder and resting on the opposite hip. When played it was held with the wide end curving upwards in front of the huntsman’s head. A kind of tablature for the horn was in use in France in the 14th century; an example of it is here reproduced (fig. 2) from a 14th-century French MS. treatise on venery.[4] Only one note is indicated, the various calls and signals being based chiefly on rhythm, and the notes being left to the taste and skill of the huntsman. The interpretation[5] of the Cornure de chasse de veue seen in the figure is as follows:
| First line= |  |
| Second line= |  |
| Third line= |  |
In the first poem is given a list of these signs with the names by which they were known in venery.
In the 16th century in England the hunting-horn sometimes had a spiral turn in the centre, half-way between mouthpiece and bell end; the extra length was apparently added solely in order to lower the pitch, the higher harmonics not being used for the hunting calls. In George Turbevile’s Noble Arte of Venerie (1576, facsimile reprint, Oxford, 1908) the “measures of blowing according to the order which is observed at these dayes in this Realme of Englande” are given for the horn in D. One of these, given in fig. 3, is the English 16th-century hunting call, corresponding to the 14th-century French Cornure de chasse de veue given above.
 |
| From Turbevile’s Noble Arte of Venerie (1576), by permission of the Clarendon Press. |
| Fig. 3.–Hunting Call. |
The hunting-horn, whether in its simplest form or with the one spiral, was held with the bell upwards on a level with the huntsman’s head or just above it.[6]
A horn of the same fine calibre as the French horn, 3 or 4 ft. in length, slightly bent to take the curve of the body, was in use in Italy, it would seem, in the 15th century.[7] It was held slanting across the body with the bell already slightly parabolic, at arm’s length to the left side.
The hunting- and post-horns were favourite emblems on medieval coats of arms, more especially in Germany[8] and Bohemia.
It is necessary at this point to draw attention to the fact that the French horn is a hybrid having affinities with both trumpet and primitive animal horn, or with buccina and cornu, and that both types, although frequently misnamed and confused by medieval writers and miniaturists, subsisted side by side, evolving independently until they merged in the so-called French horn. Both buccina and cornu after the fall of the Roman Empire, while Western arts and
- ↑ See Bock, “Gebrauch der Hörner im Mittelalter,” in Gustav Heider’s Mittelalterliche Kunstdenkmäler Österreichs (Stuttgart, 1858–1860).
- ↑ Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français (Paris, 1889), ii. p. 246.
- ↑ Engelbertus Admontensis in De Musica Scriptores, by Martin Gerbert, Bd. ii. lib. ii. cap. 29; and Edward Buhle, Die Musikalischen Instrumente in den Miniaturen des frühen Mittelalters, pt. i., “Die Blasinstrumente” (Leipzig, 1903), p. 16.
- ↑ Le Trésor de vénerie par Hardouin, seigneur de Fontaines-Guérin (edited by H. Michelant, Metz, 1856); the first part was edited by Jérome Pichon (Paris, 1855), with an historical introduction by Bottée de Toulmon.
- ↑ As worked out by Edward Buhle, op. cit., p. 23.
- ↑ See Turbevile, op. cit., also J. du Fouilloux, La Vénerie (Paris, 1628), p. 70; cf. also editions of 1650 and of 1562, where the horn is called trompe, used with the verb corner; Juliana Bernes, Boke of St Albans (1496), the frontispiece of which is a hunting scene showing a horn of very wide bore, without bell. Only half the instrument is visible.
- ↑ See “Reliure italienne du xve siècle en argent niellé. Collection du Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild, Vienne,” in Gazette archéologique (Paris, 1880), xiii. p. 295, pl. 38, where other instruments are also represented.
- ↑ See Jost Amman, Wappen und Stammbuch (1589). A reprint in facsimile has been published by Georg Hirth as vol. iii. of Liebhaber Bibliothek (Munich, 1881). See arms of Sultzberger aus Tirol (p. 52), “Ein Jägerhörnlin,” and of the Herzog von Wirtenberg; cf. the latter with the arms of Wurthemberch in pl. xxii. vol. ii. of Gelre’s Wappenboek ou armorial de 1334 à 1372 (miniatures of coats of arms in facsimile), edited by Victor Bouton (Paris, 1883).
