Stopper (music)

In brass instruments (especially horns ), plugging refers to a technique in which the pitch is changed by inserting the hand (or an object) into the bell or / and the tone is given a duller or more metallic timbre. This technique was once used to expand the range of natural notes to which all wind instruments without holes, keys, valves, or pulls are limited.

technology

There are two types of tamping:

Half plug / steam

The hand closes the opening by about 1/3 to 2/3, which results in a deepening of up to a major third (depending on the basic pitch and number of the natural tone above the fundamental). In the middle position, the tone is lowered by a semitone. The timbre is darkened. It is linguistically marked with muted, bouché, muted ( bouché is used by many French composers for muted until around 1940 , bouché cuivré for stuffed ). Attenuation is often intended to produce an echo effect. Instead of the hand, a damper (not to be confused with the tamping damper) can be used, but sometimes it cannot be inserted quickly enough for reasons of time. There is no need to transpose when using dampers. Slight dampening by hand is still used today on the valve horn to control the intonation .

Full plug / stopper

Here the hand "closes" the end of the pipe, as it were, and only allows the air to flow through the smallest gaps between the hand and the fall . Thus, the swinging is air column shortened (as opposed to half-caps) mood by just over a half-step increase . The effect depends on the size of the hand: the smaller it is, the more it has to shorten the tube to completely block it. The overtone spectrum is also noticeably changed (amplification of the upper tones with simultaneous attenuation of the fundamental tone and its nearest neighboring tones), whereby the tone sounds "narrower", i.e. no longer as full and round. This technique has been used mainly in music literature since the late 19th century for reasons of sound. A tamping damper can be used instead of the hand.

The stuffed notes are indicated by linguistic instructions ( stuffed, cuivré, bouché, stopped etc.) or a cross (+) above the note, whereby the term cuivré (French: “copper” or “tinny”) requires at least a slight blaring . Claude Debussy uses the sign + in the score of Pelléas et Mélisande , for example, or the instruction cuivrez when the mutes are attached and also in pianissimo to denote a metallic sound.

history

With the natural horn , which was in use in the orchestra until around 1900, only the notes of the natural series can be blown openly. For this reason, horn players changed the pitch around the middle of the 18th century by completely or partially clogging the bell by inserting their hand. With this technique a chromatic game is possible at least in the upper part of the circumference . The very different sound quality of the open and stuffed tones was taken into account by accomplished composers. The great virtuosity that the instrumentalists had achieved with this technique at the beginning of the 19th century meant that some composers not only wrote more stop notes and natural tone decompositions for the horns, but also many melodic passages.

Since the invention of the valves , the natural horns in the orchestra have been supplemented by valve horns, but have not been replaced for a long time. The composer Hector Berlioz warned in 1844 against replacing the natural horns with valve horns because the sound of the muffled notes intended by the composer was lost. He recommended simulating the sound of these notes on the valve horn. It was not until the 20th century that the stopper to change the pitch was not used and was only used to change the sound quality, analogous to the mutes on trumpets and trombones. - The stuffing was used in the 18th century for echo and similar spatial effects, in the 19th century it was given a demonic or grotesque finish, in the "serious music" of the 20th century it was increasingly viewed as a neutral possibility of sound creation.

The Conservatoire de Paris had a class for natural horn until 1903. More recently, natural horn players have been trained again and also used in the orchestra for the classical-romantic repertoire.

Sound spectrum

Schematic representation of the frequencies of a stuffed note

Hand insertion when stuffing should not be confused with the normal position of the horn, because when stuffing, the effective length of the horn is shortened - this makes the tone higher. This change in pitch can be compensated for with a stop valve - or by playing half a tone lower.

The tamping produces a muffled sound, and when the tamping is complete, a pressed tinny sound. The sound spectrum changes significantly. In some places you can see clear weakening of the partials, in other places they are amplified. Overall, the volume becomes lower. There is a noticeable volume gap from the third to the fifth partial tone, which causes the pressed and powerless sound. In contrast, the metallic in the timbre is emphasized by the maximum at 3,000 Hz and the strong partials up to over 10,000 Hz.

literature

• Hector Berlioz: Grand Traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration moderne (1844). German translation: Instrumentation theory , supplemented and revised by Richard Strauss, Leipzig: Peters 1904, Part II, pp. 264–279

Individual evidence

1. ↑ z. B. Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande , Full Score, New York: Dover 1985, p. 66 (3 d. Before 46), p. 47 (2 d. After 36).