Horns To Be Heard

How do listeners relate to musial instruments that they do not play? This chapter investigates technically mediated modes of listening in the context of Haydn’s horn music. The valveless horns in Haydn’s orchestra had distinctive pitch affordances, which gave rise to several idiomatic figures. This instrumental invariance can shape tonal expectations, affecting how the music appears to listeners. Haydn (and other composers) also used horn calls in compositions for other instrumental forces. If situated listeners are attuned to schematic instrumental textures—if, for example, they can hear virtual horns in a string quartet or piano piece—this implies that their perception is grounded in multimodal experiences of instruments. Like performance, then, listening is both embodied and conditioned by technology.