The problem may be that Alexs vary so much from horn to horn, from the truly sublime to the utterly ridiculous. I've played at least 20 103s since the time I entered music school in 1972. Of those 20, I've only liked three or four. Of those three or four, two were (and are) absolutely superb instruments. I've owned them both. One is a wonderful 70 to 80 year old 103 that I still own and play in chamber settings and the other is excellent 103 built in the late 1960s (I sold it a few years ago to a good friend). I can't say enough good things about these two horns. They speak very easily--effortless pianissimos. Intonation is correct throughout the range. They produce liquid slurs and fluid legatos. They have that inimitable Alexander sound--how can I describe it? Velvety, full, a dark core with hints of brightness around the edges. Brighter as the volume increases, but never losing the velvety, dark center.

Well, that's the two that I've owned, leaving us with at least 18 other horns to consider. Several were OK--not good, not bad, not worth buying. The rest, it pains me to say, were pretty awful, conforming to two, three, four, or more of the negative stereotypes that we on this side of the Atlantic have all heard about Alexs--stuffy, out of tune, lacking a low range, unreliable in the high range, incapable of a true fortissimo, etc. and so on. I suspect that this is the way many Americans think about Alexs because they've never come across one of the good ones. (I have a horn tech friend who claims the Germans keep the good ones for themselves; the British get second choice; the Yanks get the runts of the litter.)

I know that every manufacturer produces horns that are better or worse than others of the same model. Yamaha 667s do not all play exactly alike, or Holton 179s, or Conn 8Ds, or Paxman 25s... Even Lawsons vary. But in my experience other horn makers turn out instruments that are much more consistent from horn to horn than Alexander does. It's odd, but I can honestly say that the best professional quality horn I've ever played and the worst were both Alex 103s.

"Three cheers for Alexander!! I have been in love with their horns since my college days in the 1960's, but never had enough money to buy one. When I finally got one in a trade twenty years later (for a Finke Triple), it played well, but not as well as I remembered. A friend had just put a Lawson pipe on her Alexander, so I was able to try and buy her old Alex pipe. The horn now played great."

I studied with Francis Bradley at the G.S.M.in London in the early sixties and can confirm that the Alex 103 was THE horn of choice then. It was not considered a classic then even though it has been around for a long time in Germany - (it was patented in 1912, I believe). At that time there was a lot of experimenting with Bb/A and descant horns but this never replaced the trusty old double horn. Bb/A horns with an F extension were favoured by some players. James Diack former principal of the London Mozart Players had a Bb/A Alex with the short quick action valve levers which were very fast.

When I needed to upgrade my instrument Francis got me Patrick Strevens' 103 which was built in the late 40's. It was 12 years old and I paid 100 pounds for it. As Wilbert Kimple found, you can get great value if you are willing to wait for the right instrument and seek a little advice from your hornplaying friends.

I virtually wore out the lead pipe until it was almost paper thin and had to have a new one installed by Paxmans. Lead pipes just as bocals (crooks) in bassoons and cor anglais are very important to the tone and response of an instrument so dont mess with them unless you really have a problem. I have now virtually worn the bell out but it still plays beautifully. I think the hand engraved german silver caps are really what distinguishes the old 103's.

Before you all go rushing off to find old 103's remember that as with all handmade instruments each instrument will have its own characteristics so try them out before you invest. I believe someone on this list said that one of the best and one of the worst horns he had ever played was an Alexander. There are great makers and great horns - in the end its the horn that counts - given that the player is a constant :)

Regards to all

One aspect of being a horn player that fascinates me is the acoustics of how the things work.

I have a couple of questions for the group.

1. Split/missed notes; what is actually happening when we try to "start up" a horn on a high note?

   If we do it well we produce from thin air - say - a high F (for example Bruckner 4 opening solo) and if things go wrong a different note appears. I have pondered the theory that to "start up" a horn on a high harmonic we have to pass through all the others to get to it and if our lips are not stimulating the correct frequency through the correct tension, air pressure etc, it results in a missed note being produced.

2. Tuning notes; how is it possible - in physics terms - to change the pitch produced by a set length of horn by adjusting lip tension ? how do our lips drive the horn away from its resonant frequency ?

As I understand it, the length of the vibrating air column in a horn is not the same as the physical length of the tube because the bell flare generates a "virtual tube end" somewhere beyond the bell. The position of this virtual tube end is not fixed so that there is no single resonant frequency for the horn, although the instrument construction means that certain positions are favoured. The resonator in a horn is our lips, and when we adjust lip tension we actually move the virtual tube end to adapt the resonant frequency to the lip frequency. If the actual tube end position coincides with a position favoured by the horn construction, the note is centred. There are limits to how much the virtual tube end will move, so as you lip further away from a note centre, you reach a point where you flip over to the next closest frequency, which is why it is so hard to do a smooth glissando on a non-trombone.

I'm not a physicist and I may be wrong, but then someone on the list will probably put me right.

But you can play high notes on the horn without the hand. Tony Halstead showed me how to improve my high notes by placing my hand flat to the inside of the bell, thus constricting the opening less. What makes the horn work in the higher overtone range is mainly the small mouthpiece, helped by the narrow bore of the lead pipe. If you adapted a horn mouthpiece to a bass tuba by fitting a tapered lead pipe, you could make it produce sounds in the usual horn register.

The common parlance, that closed pipes produce only the odd overtones, is useful for indicating the reason for the relationship of the resonant frequencies, since one can analyse the closed pipe of constant cross-section as half an open pipe of twice the length with a node at the centre. However, when considering the design of a musical instrument, this way of thinking can mislead. If you were to make an oboe of rubber so that you could gradually distort its shape from conical to parallel while blowing it, the ratio of the frequencies of the first two modes of vibration would gradually change from 2 to 3 so, in a certain sense, the octave on the oboe corresponds to the twelfth on the clarinet. The horn consists of a mixture of tapered and parallel bore so adjusted that the modes give harmonically related frequencies in the ratios 2:3:4:5:6 etc. However, making a tapered lead pipe and flared bell combine with a parallel middle section to give the same acoustic effect as the plain conical alpenhorn is a bit of a trick which works best when the length of parallel tubing is somewhere near the middle of the range (about F on the usual double horn in F/Bb). For lesser amounts of parallel tubing, the overall flare is excessive and the overtone series becomes compressed, while for extra amounts the characteristics of the instrument move in the direction of the straight tube and the overtone series expands. This is why low notes on the Bb horn tend to be sharp. Of course we bring them into tune with hand and lip and are scarcely conscious of the effect most of the time, but playing to a frequency meter in the middle of the note with a constant hand position will show it clearly. The converse effect, that low notes on the C and B basso horns (1+3 and 1+2+3 on the F horn) are flat, is compensated by the combination tubing length being slightly too small.

According to Benade (it may have been in a Scientific American article called "Physics of Brasses") the true fundamental of horns is about a third flat. Pedal notes are in tune because second and third harmonics of the lip motion lock into the second and third resonances of the tube. The fundamental being a different frequency probably contributes to the instability of these notes: on both the open Bb of my Bb and F alto Alexander and on my natural horn crooked in Bb alto, there are good pedal Bbs which (with lip alone) I can easily push down to Ab, with difficulty to G, and no further.

Effective horn length:

The effective horn length (the length that is involved in the resonance of the note being considered) starts slightly inside the mouth - my thoughts as follows; imagine a 3m/9ft long rope stretched between two points, in order to resonate it without using to much energy I hold it 6 inches along from the end and cultivate the fundamental resonant frequency (each end still, and the middle moving) If I try to cultivate resonance from the fixed end nothing will happen, in this model we have to put energy into the resonator from within the resonators length.

Now, apply this model to the horn, our lips vibrate and they are part way down the resonating tube, this position could be variable - I would speculate that two things control this, one - our lip muscles, two - the air chamber inside the lips which could include mouth, throat, lungs etc. This variance could contribute to our ability to drive a horn away from its resonant frequency.

The bell end of the horn has been described best I think by Richard Merewether and I rehash briefly his model: The horn behaves as a quarter length resonator (the fundamental tone is four times the horns length) the combination of a horn bell flair and a well placed hand make the effective length change with pitch, the low notes effectively end deep in the bell, and as the pitch goes up this end point move towards the hand reaching it at about high G on the F slide.

Now the clever bit is that the quarter tone generator produces an even harmonics series which do not reinforce each other and by changing the effective length of the horn we shrink these into being an odd harmonic series which does reinforce itself, therefore when we play one note all the others can be present at a lower amplitude and it is these that give the horn its magnificent tone. Just think when four horns on open F slides play a C major chord how rich the chord is, now just imagine all the harmonics from all the horns interacting and reinforcing each other, you can feel this happening with your lips being exposed to the reflections traveling into the horn and your hand on the bell as it picks up the other players notes.

Starting up a horn:

When we start up a horn on a high note what happens ? Try this model:

Our lips are still, the air column is still, then we tense our muscles, blow and pop a series of packets of air into the horn, they come out at a particular rate and each one is at a high air pressure compared to the outside air, by controlling the air pressure we control the sound volume, by controlling the rate of packets released we control the pitch (frequency).

Now these pressure packets start traveling down the tube, when the first one gets to the end the horn starts to sound at the pitch we want BUT as it reaches the end some of the energy is reflected back as a returning pressure packet (this assumes that the end of the tube reflects) this returning packet then keeps hitting the outgoing packets, if they interfere to produce a standing wave than we have a note, if they interfere destructively then we have a split/clamp/flubb. With a standing wave which extends slightly past our lips we can make it go louder or quieter, higher or lower, all with lip control.

Driving the horn off it resonant frequency:

I can see two possible models for this:

Using the "lips within the effective tube length" model we may be able to alter how far along the virtual tube our lips are thus altering the length and the resonant frequency.

Or we can force the horn off its resonant frequency a little, I suspect that this results in a more limited amplitude (we can only do this at lowish volumes) and that the resonance of other harmonics is disrupted (this will make the tone less rich/intense)

If anybody has got this far without hitting the Delete key thank you for reading my efforts. I must thank Charles Turner, Chris Stratton, Howard Gilbert, Francis Markey, and Bob Marsteller for giving me new perspectives on horn acoustics.

Howard Gilbert wrote at length that when he attempted to move from C to D on the F horn by increasing air velocity, that he achieved a louder C, and his lips opened somewhat.

Therein lies the rub. Differentiating between air velocity and air volume. Farkas, Jacobs et al discovered that a given note at a given decibel level requires the same amount of air pressure (velocity), measured with an anemometer inside the mouth, on all brass instruments. Higher notes require higher air pressure, whereas lower notes require greater air volume. How can you raise air velocity without increasing air volume? Two ways: control the size of the aperture (embouchure opening) and control the size of the air stream. Farkas experimented with controlling the air stream with the glottis. A less tension-provoking method is to control it with the position of the tongue: low "ah" for low register, high "ee" for upper register.

All of these methods are interrelated, and should be used in conjunction with one another. My separating them was only for demonstration purposes.

With the basic horn physics out of the way, we can procede with some more interesting aspects. Without solving the problems let me just pose a few interesting problems for horn physics students. (Answers not supplied):

1. Where are the best nodal points along the tubing that could be strongly clamped, braced, or patched to strengthen harmonic vibrations?
2. Approximately where are the nodal points within reach of the right hand inside the bell?
3. In Lowell Greer's recent interview reprinted on this list he made a passing observation that as our lungs become increasingly full of carbon dioxide the pitch goes down. What concentration of carbon dioxide would it take to drop the pitch by a quarter tone.
4. A trick question: Would the density of air blown through the horn affect whether the horn is a half length or quarter length resonator?
5. Would low density air blown through the horn make high notes easier to produce?

The lungs take oxygen and replace it with carbon dioxide and some water. We mostly burn sugars with the proportions C, 2H, O according to an equation like:

CH20 + O2 -> CO2 + H2O,

O2 : 32; N2 : 28; CO2 : 44; H2O : 18

I believe that a proportion of CO2 in the lungs as high as 5% (ie replacing about 1/4 of the oxygen) is very uncomfortable. Of course professional wind instrumentalists become tolerant of higher quantities than the general public.

My conclusion: pitch may be very slightly lowered (or raised because of water vapour) at the end of a long note, but you need to measure the chemical composition of exhaled breath to see how much and in what direction: calculations can't tell you.

I am a 13-year-old junior high student (so please be patient with me, please) and have enjoyed playing the horn for 6 years. Recently our science teacher gave us an assignment requiring us to come up with an experiment, do trials, make tables and graphs, etc. I decided to use my horn (since I love it so much) in my experiment.

Still, in order to conduct a successful experiment, one must obtain information on the subject/s which you are experimenting. I've surfed the web near and far, looked in encyclopedias, and still am unable to find the needed information. Can anyone help me? I need to basically have detailed answers to the following questions:

• How do sound waves behave when a note is sharp or flat?
• How do sound waves behave when a note is changing from sharp to flat or vice versa?
• How do sound waves behave in rooms of different volume (say, a concert hall and a practice room, for example)?

IT IS WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!!!

The only good advice there is to look in a book on acoustics. The speed of sound does NOT depend on the pitch or amplitude of the sound. For our purposes it is constant.

Yesterday, I contacted our young friend Zyta with some information and suggestions, and will not repeat that here on the list. I suggested that Zyta find and read Arthur Benade's book, "Horns, Strings and Harmony." I very strongly suggest that M Coco do the same. It is an excellent book

For our younger listers, here are some basic facts:

1. Sound is waves of pressure traveling through the air.
2. Higher pitch (sharper) corresponds to higher frequency/shorter wavelength (frequency is the number of vibrations per second, and wavelength is the the distance between two successive peaks or troughs of pressure).
3. Lower pitch (flatter) corresponds to lower frequency/longer wavelength.
4. frequency times wavelength (F * L) = speed of sound, about 1087 feet/sec.
5. Louder corresponds to greater difference in pressure between minima and maxima.

I quote here two excerpts from M Coco's message:

Said layperson is incorrectly informed.

M Coco, sorry if I've hurt your feelings, but this egregious misinformation had to be put right. I will be glad to answer questions which you might have. In addition, there are others on the horn list who are more qualified than I to explain the physics of acoustics.

----------------

Fasman, Mark J.  

Brass bibliography : sources on the history, literature, pedagogy,
performance, and acoustics of brass instruments
ML128.W5 F3 1990 
------------------

Backus, John

The acoustical foundations of music
ML3805.B245 A3 1977 
-----------------------

Benade, Arthur H. 

Fundamentals of musical acoustics
ML3805 .B328 

Horns, strings, and harmony
ML3805 .B33 
--------------------------

These days your library probably has some kind of computerized card catalog that you could search. For example, I just searched for 'Architectural Acoustics' in my library and got 48 hits.

Sound is not a transverse wave, nor is it a lateral wave.
Sound is a longitudinal mechanical wave.
What does this mean?

Here's a loose quote from an introductory physics book, which might help: Imagine a piston at one end of a long tube filled with air. If we push the piston forward, the layers of air in front of it are compressed. These layers in turn will compress layers further along the tube, and a wave of compression travels down the tube. If we quickly withdraw the piston, the layers of air in front of it expand and a pulse of rarefaction travels down the tube from layer to layer. If the piston oscillates back and forth, a continuous train of compressions and rarefactions will travel along the tube. This is a longitudinal wave train - sound. The particles of the medium (air) are traveling back and forth along the direction of sound propagation, that is, in a longitudinal direction.

Let's do another little thought-experiment. Suppose there is a source of sound producing a concert A (440 Hz). Now freeze time, and measure the air pressure along a line between the sound source and a listener. Starting at some point where the pressure is highest, as you move either backward or forward from that point, you will find that the pressure decreases until it is lowest about 15 inches from the high pressure point. From there, the pressure will increase again, until it reaches a high point just under 30 inches (the wavelength of 440 Hz from the original starting point.

So what's a transverse wave?
Imagine a vibrating violin string. In this case, the particles of the medium (sections of the string) travel from side to side at right angles to the direction of wave propagation (which is along the length of the string), that is, in a transverse direction. The waves you see on the string are transverse waves. As the string vibrates, it pushes on the surrounding air just like the piston mentioned above, generating the longitudinal pressure waves of sound.

You can make both kinds of waves with a Slinky.
Shake one end from side to side, and you will see transverse waves travel down the Slinky. Push and pull one end back and forth, and you will see longitudinal waves travel down it.

If there is still some confusion, perhaps a well-known physics teacher on the list could state things more clearly than I, who have never taught acoustics. However, I am always willing to answer questions.

Now, how about the effect of temperature??

When it's a chilly room, I always have to push my tuning slide in - right? (or am I untalented and desperate for an honest teacher?)? Is it that cooler air is denser and the waves are closer together?

Yes. Cooler air is denser, so sound travels slower, so the wavelength corresponding to a given frequency is shorter.

For every drop in temperature of 1 degree C, the speed of sound in air decreases by about 2 ft/second. Suppose your horn is 12.48 ft long, corresponding to frequency (1090 ft/sec) / (12.48 ft) = 87.31 Hz (F). Now cool the air in the horn by 10 C. The speed of sound is now 20 ft/sec less, or 1070 ft/sec. Let's assume that the length of the horn doesn't change (is thus true?). The new frequency is 1070/12.48 = 85.7 Hz. By golly, you're way flat!

How much will you have to compensate with your tuning slide? You want to bring the frequency back up to 87.31 Hz. The wavelength of 87.31 Hz in the cooler air is (1070 ft/sec) / (87.3 Hz) = 12.26 ft. So, the horn needs to shorten by 12.48 ft - 12.26 ft = 2.6 inches. The slide needs to go in 1.3". That's a lot!

Now let's test the assumption. How much will the horn change in length? The coefficient of thermal expansion for brass is about 1.9 x 10^-5. That is, for every 1 degree C drop in temperature, the horn shortens by about 19 parts per million. So, if we cool the instrument by 10 C, it will shrink by 190 ppm, or by 12.48 ft * 190/1000000 = 0.03 inches. Far less than the effect of air temperature (and in the other direction).

BTW, if you check the numbers above, you'll find rounding errors here & there which won't affect the basic results. Someone else (Chris?) can explain how sound actually resonates inside a horn.

The moral is - don't believe everything you read.
A second one is - proofread everything you write.

During our intial warm-up, we're also changing the temperature of the horn itself, so by the time we're ready to tune to others, the slide will likely not have to go in nearly as far as it would while the instrument was dead cold.

Thanks for the numbers and the conversion to slide length. I thought it was very interesting. I don't think that the rounding will be a problem as five out of four people have problems with fractions anyway.

Later,

Reproduced from The Daily Telegraph without permission

By JOHN WADE

Alan Civil, who has died aged 60, was one of Britain's most distinguished horn players and a splendidly Falstaffian character.

A former Army band-boy, he was a pupil of Aubrey Brain (father of Dennis) and of Willy von Stemm in Hamburg before going on to become principal horn of the BBC Symphony Orchestra for 22 years until retiring in 1988. He had a full and rounded tone, as can be heard in his recordings of Mozart concertos and especially of Britten's Serenade with the tenor Robert Tear and the Northern Sinfonia.

In his orchestral work Civil played on a modern German Alexander double horn, but used a single model for concertos and other solo works and also had a collection of natural horns which he used for early music, in which he had a special interest.

Alan Civil was born at Northampton in 1928 and joined the Army as a band-boy. He used to tell the story of how he changed from his Army uniform into white tie and tails in the train on his way to do his first concert for Sir Thomas Beecham.

The conductor recruited him to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from 1953 to 1955 as second horn to Dennis Brain and Civil became principal in 1954 when Brain joined the Philharmonia. In 1955, when the Philharmonia toured America under Herbert von Karajan, Civil went with them as third horn and remained with this orchestra after the tour as co-principal with Dennis Brain. In 1957 the Philharmonia gave three concerts at the Edinburgh Festival. Driving back to his home after the final concert on the Saturday, Brain was killed when his car crashed. The orchestra was due to record Strauss's opera Capriccio with Wolfgang Sawallisch in London on the Monday and Civil took over as first horn. It is his fine playing which is heard where the horn has a particularly important and exposed part in the final scene.

When in 1964 Walter Legge suspended the Philharmonia and attempted to disband it, Civil was offered a post with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra by Karajan. He was the first player from outside Germany ever to have been honoured by such an approach and he would have accepted had not the Philharmonia players decided to become self-governing and re-form as the New Philharmonia.

Civil became one of the first members of the governing body of five players and stayed with the orchestra until 1966, when he became first horn of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and a professor at the Royal College of Music. Besides his orchestral work Civil was a member of the London Wind Players, the Music Group of London, the London Wind Quintet and even played 'obligato' horn with the Beatles on one occasion. He also formed the Alan Civil horn Trio and from 1979 was president of the BRITISH horn SOCIETY. He had a profound knowledge of the history and development of his instrument. He had most of the major concertos in his repertoire, several of which he recorded, and he toured as a soloist in America, Europe and Asia. Civil was also a composer before his orchestral career began in earnest. Among his works are a symphony for brass and percussion (1950), a wind quintet and wind octet (both 1951) and a horn trio (1952).

He was appointed OBE in 1985. Civil is survived by three sons and three daughters.

It would be unrealistic to gloss over the fact that Alan Civil enjoyed a drink. Apart from the Savage Club in which he felt he could truly relax, he could match anyone's knowledge of pubs and landlords.

If he discovered what he called 'a real pub' - with good beer, no canned music and no gambling machines - he would delight in sharing it. He cared about food and wine and the prospect of a concert tour abroad could either fill him with joy or despondency, depending on the time available to spend in good restaurants.

He played under the greatest conductors and yet had an encyclopaedic knowledge of radio dance-bands and comedy shows. His humour was acerbic, yet he could quote from memory an act of Max Miller's seen in a music hall a couple of decades previously.

It was sometimes difficult to reconcile the eminent international horn-player with the jolly chap playing the piano, leading chorus singing. He was that rare person who enjoyed listening as well as talking. Alan was the retailer and subject of numerous Savage anecdotes, such as the time he arrived fresh from an Underground station where a busker had been playing the French horn accompanied by one of Civil's own recordings. Once on a train bound for Leeds he sat opposite a young girl who was wearing headphones from which hissed a sound unacceptable for a long journey. When asked to turn the volume down she refused, adding that it was a free country. Alan proceeded to take his horn from its case and to play Mozart loudly. The girl then left the carriage to the applause of the other occupants.

Probably ©The Daily Telegraph