Stereotypes are as rampant in music as they are in the rest of human interactions. So when you’re a French Horn, everybody expects you to act like a French Horn.

So, berets, striped shirts, croissants, escargot et vin, oui oui? Nein – lederhosen und bier. The common French horn is actually German. (The English Horn is the French instrument, you silly billy.)

Brass instruments have been around for millennia, and because they have the capacity to be LOUD, they were used to communicate over long distances, either in war (charge! or, retreat!) or in the hunt (we’ve managed to catch a single fox/boar with no less than 20 men and 100 dogs!) To make matters worse, valves (keys) on brass instruments are a relatively new invention (late 19th century); without valves, they are somewhat limited in the number of notes they could play. If you think about the pitches heard in a typical brass fanfare (eg, the theme to Masterpiece Theater), that’s pretty much what brass could do before valves were added. Modern brass instruments are able to play any pitch, and are capable of a huge pallet of tone colors – but it’s hard to shake old stereotypes. They still get more than their fair share of “ta-das” and “too-ta-ti-toos.”

But despite all the negative effects of this musical stereotype, the brass do what they do really well. Fanfare for the Common Man wasn’t written for the glass harmonica, after all. So, here is a rondo from a Mozart horn concerto which makes me want to go and chase foxes. Not boars, though. They’re scary.

If you like this, may I recommend this funny song by Flanders & Swann. It requires a very specific sense of humor, and an acute understanding of British pronunciation – namely, that the English consider “horn” and “gone” to rhyme (not to mention “burglar” & “pergola”)

Quick music lesson. “Rondo” (or its spelling variants) means round.  Not round as in “row-row-row your boat”, but round as in circle. A Rondo is a musical form where you travel around in a circle – always coming back to the same point where you began.

There are tons of pieces in Rondo form. Often, the final movement of a classical symphony or piano sonata is a rondo. For today, here’s the mother of all rondos, from one of Bach‘s partitas for solo violin. The two phrase melody you hear in the first twenty seconds is the main theme – you might call it a refrain. The violin then plays something different for a bit, then returns to the refrain. Again, something new; again, refrain. Different keys, different rhythmic motifs; the refrain keeps coming back.

Rondos are very satisfying to listen to, I believe, because it satisfies two opposing desires we all have: to explore new exciting territory, and to be able to come home to something comfortable that we know.