Horn fifths

Beginning of Beethoven's sonata Les Adieux . The first three melodies of the right hand form a typical horn passage.

Horn fifths in the finale of Beethoven's 9th Symphony ( listen ^{? / I} )

In music, horn fifths (also: horn gait ) are a special type of two-part voice leading using the limited tones of the natural horn , on which you can only play tones of the natural tone series . The name comes from the fact that here, coming from below, there is a unidirectional progression from a sixth to a fifth or, coming from above, from a third to a fifth. In traditional sentence theory, this case applies to the Mozart fifths as an exception to the ban on (hidden) fifths parallels .

The typical sound that results from this two-part voice evokes associations such as French horn , hunting or fanfare in most listeners , even when it is played on non-brass instruments, such as in the Caprice No. 9, La chasse (Eng .: the hunt), by Niccolò Paganini on the violin .

During the Renaissance and Baroque periods, horn fifths were used as a style element in pieces that deal with real or virtual armed conflict and often have names like Bataglia or Batalla . In organ pieces of this type, the passages are often performed on a register of the trumpet family, if available a horizontal trumpet .