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This past week I helped my niece purchase a new flute. At the store the manager asked her if she had named her old flute and told her to be sure to name the new one, because without a name “it won’t sing for you.”
I have never been one much for naming horns, but that thought got me thinking a bit. I may have named my first horn, a Holton H-177, but I am not entirely sure. The instrument that replaced the Holton was a 500,000 series Conn 8D. That horn was not named but had a second best, I memorized the serial number. I could easily tell you right now in fact the serial number of that horn but of no other horn I have ever owned.
The next horn purchased was a Yamaha 667, seen in this moody photo taken when I was a Doctoral student. I had plenty of hair back in that day! This horn had no name, and the same story repeats itself with every horn since. But still, I come back to that thought from the music store this week. “It won’t sing for you.”
English is a fairly gender neutral language, we don’t use feminine and masculine pronouns to describe inanimate objects of the type frequently seen in other languages. But there are exceptions. For example train locomotives were traditionally by engineers thought of as being female, although books like the Thomas the Tank Engine series have confused that traditional identity a bit.
So what about French horns? Google was not a lot of help on this one. The sense I got from the random sources I found is that high pitch instruments are more feminine and lower pitched instruments are more masculine. This does not help us much on horn as we are what I like to call “middle brass,” or in more conventional terms alto range. We horn players occupy a place in the middle somewhere in other words.
I have heard a few names that horns have been given by others, and they have included male and female first names. But some think bigger. One well known player I was told had a horn that was named “Thor” and it was replaced later by an instrument they named “Excalibur.”
In short I think we are pretty safe as English speakers to consider horns as being either male or female depending on what your horn seems to be.
