The horn as a left-handed instrument
Kayla.jpg

Are you dextrous or sinister? The origins of these words are opposites: the Latin words dexter – right, and sinestra – left, but such was the superstition of yesteryear that nowadays the meanings of dextrous and sinister have evolved to be quite unrelated. Left-handedness was regarded as clumsy, unlucky and, well, sinister: even as recently as my mother’s upbringing in England, her innate left-handedness was frowned upon, and when she attempted to pick up a pencil in her left hand she was admonished and the pencil was transferred to her right.

gfparade29.jpg

So with that linguistic background, and the natural tendency of a right-handed person to use their right hand for single-handed tasks, why is the French horn almost totally a left-handed instrument, and furthermore unique in that respect amongst all musical instruments? The answer, I believe, lies in the horn’s origins as a natural horn. When the hunting horn was first lengthened and rotated from the forward position to the modern side position, the obvious direction was to the non-superstitious right.

With the right hand hovering around the bell to support the horn, it was left to Anton Joseph Hampel around 1755 to use it in a highly important advance to manufacture a chromatic scale, and at that stage the left hand still had nothing to do except hold the horn. Hampel taught the technique to Giovanni Punto, who improved it and toured Europe and England, eventually meeting Mozart in Paris in 1778. Perhaps Mozart's horn player friend Joseph Leutgeb picked up the idea at this time, and only five years later Mozart composed his Horn Concerto No.2 (actually his first) which demands mastery of hand stopped tuning.

Holton-hatbox-horn.jpg

Now entrenched, the direction of the horn was unlikely to change when pistons were introduced in 1817, even though this transfered most of the job of picking notes to the left hand. One can imagine horn sections in the first decades of brass instrument piston technology in which a mix of natural and piston horns were used by different players.

Nonetheless, some early piston horns were in fact right-handed, like this second hand Holton to the left on offer from Horn-u-copia at time of writing.

I have no idea if the proportion of left handed horn players is higher than the nominal 10% of left handers in the general population, but it would make sense if it is. I also wonder if horn players as a group might be more right-brained than the typical musician.

The left-handedness of the horn certainly suits me: I am very left-handed and had a difficult time learning the piano.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License