Klarinet Archive - Posting 000526.txt from 2002/04

From: Roger Shilcock <roger.shilcock@-----.uk>
Subj: RE: [kl] English/French horns
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 05:38:20 -0400

I'm glad somebody else finds this vaguely plausible. Please believe that
I hadn't actually read this article in "Grove".
One could add that the straight tenor oboe was commonly known as "taille
d'hautbois", for no clear reason, and one (rare?) form was known as "vox humana"
- whether before or after the coming into use of the well-known reed organ
stop, I don't know.
Roger S.

In message <AGEIKNDAJOKEIOHFKLEICEHPCIAA.charette@-----.org writes:
> From The New Grove Online:
>
> (iv) English horn
> (Fr. cor anglais; Ger. englisches Horn, Englisch-Horn, Englischhorn; It.
> corno inglese; in the 18th century the instrument was also known as: Fr.
> hautbois anglois, corne d’anglois, cor de chasse anglais; Ger. englische
> Wald[h]oboe, englisches Waldhorn). The tenor oboe in F, a 5th below the
> oboe, in use from the early 18th century to the present. Its keywork
> corresponds to that of the oboe of its day and the reed is mounted on a
> short crook. It was created when a bulb bell was added to an oboe da caccia
> body shortly after 1720, possibly by J.T. Weigel of Breslau. Late
> 18th-century english horns were more gently curved than Baroque models, and
> by about 1790 some were being made in angular form, resembling contemporary
> basset-horns. Both curved and angular forms were made into the 19th century
> (fig.24e and fig.25).
>
> The open-belled straight tenor oboe and particularly the flare-belled oboe
> da caccia reminded people of the angels’ horns depicted in medieval and
> later religious imagery, especially in German-speaking central Europe. In
> Middle (High) German, the word engellisch meant ‘angelic’ (as engelgleich in
> modern Hochdeutsch). With the Middle German word for ‘England’ being
> Engellant, the word engellisch also meant ‘English’. These dual meanings
> naturally became conflated, and ‘angel's horn’ thus became ‘English horn’.
> This unlikely epithet remained with the curved, bulb-belled tenor oboe even
> after the oboe da caccia had faded (c1760) and in the absence of any better
> denominations.
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>

--
...atque inter silvas academii quaerere verum.
--------- Horace ("Epistolae", II [somewhere])

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