List of compositions for horn

This is a selected list of musical compositions that feature a prominent part for the natural horn or the French horn, sorted by era and then by composer.

Baroque

Horn Concerto (Carter)

The 'Concerto for Horn and Orchestra is a horn concerto by the American composer Elliott Carter. The work was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the horn player James Sommerville. It was first performed on November 15, 2007 in Boston by Sommerville and the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the conductor James Levine.

Composition

The concerto has a duration of 12 minutes and is composed in seven short connected sections, which Carter described in the program note as "presenting the many different facets of the horn, which are most remarkable and beautiful."

Instrumentation

The work is scored for solo horn and an orchestra comprising two piccolos, flute, two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, three percussionists, piano, and strings.

Reception

Reviewing the world premiere, Jeremy Eichler of The Boston Globe praised the concerto, writing:

Reviewing the United Kingdom premiere of the work (performed alongside Carter's Cello Concerto and Boston Concerto), Geoffrey Norris of The Daily Telegraph opined, "Both the Cello Concerto (with soloist Anssi Karttunen) and the Horn Concerto (Martin Owen) identified Carter's innate feel for instrumental timbre, his ability to tap, through his characteristic blend of complexity and clarity, the distinctive personality that an instrument possesses." Fiona Maddocks of The Guardian similarly remarked, "these late works confirmed a new brilliance and drama in Carter's musical voice."

Horn

Horn or Horns may refer to:

Audio

Musical instruments

Literature

Concerto

A concerto (from the Italian: concerto, plural concerti or, often, the anglicised form concertos) is a musical composition, whose characteristics have changed over time. In the 17th century, "sacred works for voices and orchestra were typically called concertos." J. S. Bach "was thus reflecting a long-standing tradition when he used the title `concerto' for many of the works that we know as cantatas.". But in recent centuries, up to the present, a concerto is a piece usually composed in three parts or movements, in which (usually) one solo instrument (for instance, a piano, violin, cello or flute) is accompanied by an orchestra or concert band.

The etymology is uncertain, but the word seems to have originated from the conjunction of the two Latin words conserere (meaning to tie, to join, to weave) and certamen (competition, fight): the idea is that the two parts in a concerto, the soloist and the orchestra or concert band, alternate episodes of opposition, cooperation, and independence in the creation of the music flow.

1 (number)

1 (one; /ˈwʌn/ or UK /ˈwɒn/, also called unit, unity, and (multiplicative) identity), is a number, a numeral, and the name of the glyph representing that number. It represents a single entity, the unit of counting or measurement. For example, a line segment of unit length is a line segment of length 1.

As a number

One, sometimes referred to as unity, is the integer before two and after zero. One is the first non-zero number in the natural numbers as well as the first odd number in the natural numbers.

Any number multiplied by one is that number, as one is the identity for multiplication. As a result, one is its own factorial, its own square, its own cube, and so on. One is also the result of the empty product, as any number multiplied by one is itself. It is also the only natural number that is neither composite nor prime with respect to division, but instead considered a unit.

As a digit

The glyph used today in the Western world to represent the number 1, a vertical line, often with a serif at the top and sometimes a short horizontal line at the bottom, traces its roots back to the Indians, who wrote 1 as a horizontal line, much like the Chinese character 一. The Gupta wrote it as a curved line, and the Nagari sometimes added a small circle on the left (rotated a quarter turn to the right, this 9-look-alike became the present day numeral 1 in the Gujarati and Punjabi scripts). The Nepali also rotated it to the right but kept the circle small. This eventually became the top serif in the modern numeral, but the occasional short horizontal line at the bottom probably originates from similarity with the Roman numeral I. In some countries, the little serif at the top is sometimes extended into a long upstroke, sometimes as long as the vertical line, which can lead to confusion with the glyph for seven in other countries. Where the 1 is written with a long upstroke, the number 7 has a horizontal stroke through the vertical line.