Horn Range

My attempt to keep this brief enough to make it as simple as it seems in my head has been a failure, but I suppose I’ve tried to make this document do three things at once. I wanted to outline the basic registers of the range of the horn along with some timbral and technical considerations that a composer or performer may face. I tried to provide enough detail in doing so that a composer or arranger may make reasonably well-informed decisions about writing for the horn. And finally, although I tried to keep it fairly general, I want it to be something people can look at to help them write for me, so certain lines were drawn in places that are most comfortable for me, as a player. That all said, here is what I have to say about the range of the horn:

Transposing for the horn is simply a matter of writing the notes a perfect fifth higher than they sound. There is an old, out-dated convention about bass clef,1 but I would generally suggest using the same transposition regardless of clef. Horn players generally prefer ledger lines in treble clef than in bass clef, so music in the mid- and mid-low registers are probably better left in treble clef; C below middle C is about as low as my eye can handle ledger lines.

I would say that most horn players of any skill can play mostly anything you throw at them within the range of about three octaves, so long as composers respect our need for rest and consider some basic limitations that the instrument imposes on us (many of which are outlined on this page). Though some hornists may have slightly different edges on the range, this is about where my practical range lays:

Practical Range

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(Note the clef preferences above and the acceptability overlap between bass and treble. I considered fixing the ‘sounding’ line so that it would be easier to read (i.e., fewer ledger lines), but ultimately decided to leave it: if you write in C and let software transpose your music, this may be useful.)


Detailed Break-Down

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The extreme low register is impractical: the response is typically very slow, projection is unpredictable and generally negligible, and sometimes the notes simply refuse to speak, and many players simply cannot play them. They can be useful for timbral purposes and I enjoy playing in that range, but suggest using such low notes on the horn sparingly, if at all. Muting, whether with fiber/wood mutes or with the hand, exacerbates the problems of this part of the horn.

The low register shares some of the problems of the lowest notes, but is usable. Avoid fast technical passages down here. Most horn players will have problems with muting in this range (especially with the hand), no matter the tempo. I have often been a low horn player, and have a special love for playing down here—and have developed some greater proficiency in this area (including hand muting).

The mid-low, middle, and mid-high registers are often what people think of when they think of the horn, and our instruments are optimized to sound good here. As the notes get higher, they get brighter, projection becomes easier and more pronounced, and response is quicker; but higher is also, typically, more tiring, so we need more breaks. Faster passages become more possible, both for the reasons listed as well as the fact that the overtone series gives us more options for fingerings. Hand muting techniques have their greatest possibilities here, and I suggest their use whenever makes sense for coloristic and expressive considerations (though a more full discussion of hand muting should be given its own document!). In short, this portion of the horn’s range is the horn player’s bread and butter.

The high registers are tiring, but have a brilliant, dramatic sound. As with the lowest registers, dynamics become more limited—though in this case, the notes become harder to play quietly—and intonation can be less predictable. Hand muting in the higher registers becomes problematic due to the narrowing of the harmonic series, but a good hornist can generally make it work. For the sake of your horn players’ faces, please use the highest notes very sparingly; long phrases of whole notes and half notes up there are about the most tiring things that we can be given.


Creative Commons License
Horn Range by Josiah Boothby is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please feel free to share this—in whole, in part, or revised—but please credit me if you do. If you want to use any substantial portion of this commercially (e.g., if you plan to make money off of it), please ask me first! We should be able to work something out!

  1. Before valves were invented (and then for another couple generations after), notes in the bass clef were transposed an octave lower than the same notes in treble clef. There were good reasons for it at the time, but for modern purposes, keeping transposition consistent seems more appropriate.

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