- - Please visit: Legacy Horn Experience - -
Working through organizing my files I found notes I put together back in 1989 about the lengths of natural horns in all keys. I was using the info to derive a plan for the crooks and couplers for my first natural horn build, working with Richard Seraphinoff. As I’m working on finishing up another horn, these numbers are again helpful ones, and I thought might also be of interest to horn matters readers as I don’t believe they are easily found in any online reference.
How long are the various crooks?
It took some digging to find my source again, but the following is based on the chart in the “Horn” article in the 1954 edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians — generally confirmed further by measurements I took from another natural horn that Rick was working on of a similar design to what I was then planning to build. I see a footnote in their article that the chart there is calculated for A=435. In any case, the general chart of natural horn lengths would be as follows, in traditional feet and inches:
C alto – 8 foot 2 1/8 inch**
Bb alto – 9 foot 2 ½ inch
A – 9 foot 9 inch
G –10 foot 11 inch
F – 12 foot 3 ½ inch
E — 13 feet
Eb – 13 foot 9 ¼ inch
D – 14 foot 7 ¼ inch
C basso 16 foot 4 ¼ inch
Bb basso – 18 foot 5 inch
**UPDATE: Based on being half of C basso, in the published chart they simply call this “8-foot-C.” Also, the overall chart is primarily aimed at showing the harmonic series of each fingering, illustrating all the theoretical alternate fingerings; I suspect that the numbers are not all exactly correct, but served their purposes as illustrations in a chart.
If you wish to compare these numbers to realities of horns in your possession, a tape measure may be used, holding it to the outer surface of the tubes. It just takes a bit of math to work out the approximate length of crooks and couplers in relation to each other. The body of the horn being another element to measure — the total length of a crook and the body of the horn would be approximately the number in the chart above.
Relationships
It is an interesting chart to ponder, as several relationships can be seen. A big one is that C basso and Bb basso are both twice as long at their alto counterparts! That is a lot of tubing.
From experience with the valved horn, you should be able to visualize as well that each half step is a bit longer than the previous one (that is why the F horn second valve is longer than the Bb horn second valve). And all the various standard natural horn crook lengths (besides the longest and shortest on the chart) are available as fingerings on a double horn.
In any case, I used the chart above to work out what the crook and coupler system of the first natural horn I built. The goal was to match the crook and coupler system seen in a photo I found of a horn by William Shaw, London. The horn I made then (as a Doctoral project) is described further in this article:
Bringing it to today
This morning I confirmed that the coupler I had bent last year (not yet finished) was meant to take my current project horn from F to D. I also had enough time to finally finish the scraping and sanding the F, E, and Eb crooks (seen below); they are prepped for buffing soon! Nice to see some progress, I’m hoping to finish this project overall (and more) before I have to close down the garage shop for the summer.
