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I recently had several natural horn related questions forwarded by a blog reader, one of which was about if right hand technique was used on the Baroque horn.
Conventional wisdom would be that players in the Baroque did not use right hand technique. The first time I picked up a copy of a Baroque horn in my own hands to play it I assumed from what I had read in older sources that it was not designed for hand-stopping and that it would be difficult to insert the hand in the bell. Which was not the case at all; actually it would be very possible to play using hand horn technique on a Baroque horn, which would be quite handy for correcting the natural intonation problems of harmonics on the natural horn.
There is ample evidence available today to say that hand horn technique was known by ca. 1720, well before the end of the Baroque. One of my favorite Horn Call articles ever covers this topic in some depth, “Nodal Venting on the Baroque Horn: A Study in Non-Historical Performance Practice” by Richard Seraphinoff. Vent holes are used by some players to correct for intonation problems on Baroque horns, but are in fact a modern invention and are not authentic to the period. He covers this topic quite thoroughly, this quote being a favorite of mine,
My own approach to the Baroque horn is that I will play with vent holes when requested by a conductor or leader of an early instrument group. But when given the choice, I prefer to work under the assumption that by using hand stopping, I am emulating the technique of the best horn players of the Baroque era. We must give the players of that period the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were clever enough to try the experiment of putting the hand into the bell to correct intonation when asked by a conductor or violinist or oboist to “please do something about those out of tune notes,” a request that was probably made more than once in the early part of the eighteenth century. Job security has always been the mother of invention.
Hand horn technique was certainly known in some form very early on.
UPDATE: For more on this topic see this article.
