Horn (instrument)

A natural horn, with central crook: a cor solo, Raoux, Paris, 1797

A horn is any of a family of musical instruments made of a tube, usually made of metal and often curved in various ways, with one narrow end into which the musician blows, and a wide end from which sound emerges. In horns, unlike some other brass instruments such as the trumpet, the bore gradually increases in width through most of its length—that is to say, it is conical rather than cylindrical.[1] In jazz and popular-music contexts, the word may be used loosely to refer to any wind instrument, and a section of brass or woodwind instruments, or a mixture of the two, is called a horn section in these contexts.

  1. ^ Willi Apel, Harvard Dictionary of Music (1969), p. 874, noting that the trumpet is "cylindrical for about three-fourths its length", and identifying this as one of the characteristics that "distinguish it from the horn, which has a prevailingly conical bore".

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