Re: Notation of french horn

[Josiah Boothby]

>>> That would be hilarious. I would pay you twenty-five cents to arrange
>>> the horn parts to, say, Tristan und Isolde so that each new fingering
>>> is notated as a crook change. I'd pay fifty cents if it was actually
>>> legible.

>> Wagner sometimes got close to this. Look at the first horn part to
>> Lohengrin. Especially the beginning of act 3:
>> http://imslp.org/wiki/Lohengrin,_WWV_75_(Wagner,_Richard). It's silly.

> Amazing.  It's like Wagner was being charged double for every ledger
> line, and used crook changes and clef changes to avoid them.  The
> trumpet part has as many changes as the horn part.
>
> I do have to say that I don't intuitively understand why no key
> signatures were used.  I understand it is tradition, but I don't see why
> an exception was needed.

You're not far off, actually, and Wagner did this for his horns and
trumpets (and Wagner tubas). He knew he was writing extraordinarily
difficult horn parts for players who were playing technologically new
instruments, and he knew that early adopters of the valves were very
accustomed to transposing. So not only did he end up eschewing key
signatures (they would only confuse the poor horn players!), but he
took advantage of our little mind games: writing for Horn in A or Bb
doesn't actually make the high notes easier for a valved horn, but
horn players seem less likely to choke on the high notes when they
don't have ledger lines to scare them.