The Alphorn is not just a Swiss folk-musical instrument, it is the Swiss national instrument.
Picture postcards with alporn-blowers can be bought at any station bookstall ; the alphon is there, waiting to be played at any alpine festival; it can be heard at some urban festivals, too; young children already like to draw it ; commercial artists decorate chocolate and cheese boxes with the symbol of Swiss dairy produce, the alphorn ; and its strange shape inspires the cartoonist, too. How surprising after all: famous though the Swiss alphorn may be, little is known about its history.

This book is intended to fill this gap:
The different shapes of the Swiss alphorn are represented by specimens in museums and private collections.  Best known is the classical shape of the Swiss alphorn: a long conical tube, curved at the end like a knee.  As a hobby instrument this kind of wooden trumpet is now spread over the whole of Switzerland.  Formerly it was familiar only in the canton of Appenzell, in the Bernese Oberland and, exceptionally, in the central part of Switzerland.  The so-called “herdsman's horn” is shorter and slightly curved.  It is obsolescent, but was played in every alpine region of Switzerland at one time.  The straight, conical type - about 4 feet long - was constructed alongside the curved herdsman's horn.  It is the typical shape of the Rhine Valley in the canton of the Grisons.  The herdsmen of this valley played the “Tiba” until 193o.  This hom was often made of sheet metal .  The straight, slightly conical and elegant shape is called “Stockbüchel”.  This instrument has become rare.  The last was built by a carpenter in the canton of Schwyz 20 years ago. In the cantons surrounding Lake Lucerne the “Büchel”, an alphom twisted like a trumpet, is better known

At one time every herdsman used to make his alphorn himself.  In the last century carpenters in the central part of Switzerland started to manufacture alphons, and today there are about 40 alphom-makers working in Switzerland.  Most of them - farmers and carpenters - make alphorns as a side-line.

The shape of the curved alphorn is a gift from nature:

A young pine-tree, which has grown curved under the pressure of the snow on a hill-side, is felled, the bark is removed and the tree is cut into two halves.  Today's alphornmakers prefer to this natural form wood of a better quality, which they glue together and carve afterwards in the shape of an alphorn .  For both methods the hollowing-out that follows, piece by piece, is the same long-drawn-out labour with a round plane and a gouge to a wall thickness of 4 to 7 mm - more than 75 hours of work
The hollowed-out pieces are stuck together and held in place with several wooden rings .  A small wooden foot in the bend allows the alphorn to be rested on the ground .  Afterwards, the alphorns are bound with rattan, but formerly other materials were used: string , wire , strips of linen soaked in pitch, willow shoots, metal rings, bone, strips of wood, cherry and birch bark trees.  The bark of the birch-tree is still used to wind round the “Büchel”.  In early summer, when the sap rises, “Büchel-maker” Imhof in Muotathal climbs a birch-tree and detaches long strips of bark, which he winds directly round the instrument.  To make an alphorn is a feat of patience, but to make a "Büchel" is an industriel art.  As a tube of wood can't be curved like a tube of brass, the “Büchel” has to be composed of three pieces, halved, hollowed-out and stuck together .
The “Büchel” has a higher pitch than the classical alphorn, because it is shorter.
When we watch alphorn-makers in their old-fashioned workshops handling traditional tools, when we look at museum pieces, we get the feeling that alphorn-shapes and alphornmaking have not changed for centuries, and we will find that today's alphorn-manufacture has not changed, when we read the first description of an alphorn, to be found in a I555 edition of Conrad Gesner's “De raris et admirandibus plantis”.  Gesner tells us that, climbing Mount Pilatus, he discovered the “lituum alpinum - longum fere ad pedes undecim, duobus lignis modice incurvis et excavatis compactum et viminibus scite obligatu “. (The 11 feet long alphorn was composed of two slightly curved blocks of wood, hollowed and bound together by wiflow shoots.) Two hundred years later, the scientist Moritz Anton Cappeler mentions the alphorn, too.  But he says that the “cornu alpinum” was made “in variae longitudinis” (in différent lengths, that is between 4 and 12 feet) -
Among pictures of fossil forms we find the etching of a small curved horn and the earliest notation of a Swiss alphorn melody

In 1817 johann Rudolf Wyss, a fosterer of Bernese civilization, described, for the first time in German, how to make an alphorn.  But at the same time, the Bernese painter F. N. König complains of the alphorn losing ground more and more.  Other travellers' descriptions, too, proove that the alphorn had become rare by the beginning of the last century.
So the organizers of the first herdsmen's festival at Unspunnen near Interlaken, a festival which was meant to reunite the canton of Berne after political troubles, but was also a festival reviving old herdsmen's games - putting the stone, wrestling, blowing the alphorn inscribed the following on the commemorative medal: “Zut Ehre des Alphorns” (In Praise of the Alphorn).
What we are shown in an etching, of this Unspunnen Festival by the above-mentioned painter König , is confirmed in the festival's report: only two candidates appeared for the alphorn competition.  So they received the only two trophies, a medal and a black sheep each, without anv competition.  But the festival itself was such a success, more than three thousand herdsmen and guests from the whole of Western Europe turned up, that it had to be repeated in 18o8.
The organizers were clever enough to change the inscription on the medal to “Zut Ehre der Heimat” (In Praise of out Country) because there was only one successful player at this self-same alphorn competition.

We owe it to the Bernese govemor, Niklaus von Mülinen, that the alphon is still alive: he had the idea to send a young musician who was able to play the alphorn to Grindelwald to pick out several singers and teach them play the alphorn.  These courses took place in 1826 and I827 and inspires the Swiss painter Vollmar to illustrate an alphorn lesson .
Alphorn-courses are still common practice today on summer Sunday aftemoons .

These Sunday afternoon courses somewhere in a wood or in the fields are attended by players organized in music societies, free-lance players, too.  They play the alphorn the way their fathers and grandfathers played it, the way the old Roman herdsman played it, as is shown by a mosaic at Boszéaz near Orbe in the French part of Switzerland.  Whether this man is playing a real wooden trumpet, whether those rings are bark strips and not just decoration we shall never know, we only know that this striding man with his stick and horn could be a herdsman gathering his herd .  Etymological studies - the term “Büchel” derives from the latin “bucina”, which means trumpet, and we recognize the term “lituum” still in the dialect form “Liti” used in the canton of Unterwalden - lead us to believe that the origin of the Swiss alphorn could be the Roman brass horn, copied in the material available, wood.
A 16th century drawing by Daniel Lindtmayr illustrates how the alphorn not only was played but used in the dairy.  One herdsman is playing the alphorn to soothe the cows being milked by the other herdsman.  This method of calming and charming cows is described in a letter of 1563 to the Prince of Orléans, who had asked for a Swiss alphornplayer as a musician at his court, from the governor of Neuchâtel.  The latter wrote: “qu'il avait trouvé un cornet de Schwyz... vous luy pourrez faire dire chansons sur son cornet, qu'il a accoustumé faire à ces vaches pour leur faire leur désjeuné bon.”

Several iconographical sources, e. g. a 16th-century stained glass from the canton of Glarus, prove the alphorn's importance for the herdsman .  The alphorn was not only the instrument to calm cows but a way of signalling danger, illness or an accident to the inhabitants of the valley, to greet one's mother, one's fiancée, or the herdsman on another hillside.
The signal-function of the alphorn is obsolete.  But the alphorn still resounds in many valleys in Switzerland, and more and more out of cellars in blocks of flats, for the alphorn bas become a hobby instrument of urban inhabitants.  But not only in out century was the alphorn played in towns: the German composer and author of books on music Michael Praetorius informs us that as early as 1619 there were long, wooden trumpets bound in bast, with which the Swiss shepherds use to wander about the cities in search of food .  It iS known that the alphorn-playing herdsman went begging in the towns in wintertime.  The first mention of the Swiss alphorn, after all, is a gift of two pennies to a herdsman from the canton of Wallis with his alphorn, entered in the 1527 account-book of the monastery of St. Urban in the canton of Lucerne.
From those roving herdsmen or a court musician Swiss soldiers in foreign service could hear alphorn melodies abroad, which caused such homesickness that more than one tried to desert, like the unhappy soldier in Strassburg who, before suffering the death penalty, sang: “Brethren, you see me for the last time before I die.  It's the alphorn played by the shepherd which caused this harm to me, and it's the alphorn I accuse.”
Today's alphorn is known as a tourist attraction.  Already in the 19 th century the alphorn was being played for entertainment.
An etching dated 1828 shows us the alphorn in a carnival procession in Rheinfelden , then in 1833 one in the “fête des vignerons” procession in Vevey .  Later lithos illustrate the alphorn being blown for tourists, just to enhance the impression of a sun-set, to accompany the sound of a waterfall, just to make money .
The alphorn is a natural instrument, that means an instrument the air-columm of which cannot be changed by closed or opened fingerholes, keys or valves.  According to the sligthly conical bore and the length the alphorn is a horn, the shorter “Buchel” a trumpet.  For physical reasons, a long, wide tube bas a low key, and a higher key is got by a shorter alphorn.  The different tunings of the alphorn - they come in f, g, b flat and c - arise from different sizes.
In former times it was the length of the pine-tree which dictated the key - today measurements are devised which produce alphorns of the key desired.  Polyphonic playing bas been possible since then, and is so often practised that the first competition in polyphonic alphorn-playing took place two years ago.
If the lips of an alphorn-player vibrate quickly, the air-column vibrates quickly, too.
The natural pitch sounds as high as the vibrations are quick. The carrying over of the lip vibration into the air-column is facilitated by a boxwood mouthpiece in shape and size like that of a trombone. Early alphorns had no separate mouthpiece, but a thicker wall and a throat of short diameter.
An alphorn player is generally able to find I3 tones of the natural harmonic scale.  The 7th and the 11th tones are not in tune.  The 11th, too high for “f” but not “f sharp”, is the socalled “alphom fa”.  Alphorn melodies are improvised or played by heart from known melodies.  The alphorn is an open-air instrument and is never played from sheet music.
In the 18th century, musiciens started to write down these alphorn tunes.  The earliest example noted by Cappeler has already been mentioned.  The most famous was written down on a postcard by johannes Brahms when he climbed the Rigi on September I2th 1868.  This postcard was sent to Clara Schumann for her birthday, but 8 years later the birthday tune of the Swiss alphorn player is found again in the fourth movement of the first symphony by Brahms.
The reverberation and melancholy sound of the alphorn bas inspired many other composers, such as Liszt, Wagner, Rossini.  It was not until I970 that Swiss composers started to compose for the alphorn in the concert hall.  Through Jean Daetwyler, Etienne Isoz and André Besançon the Swiss alphorn came back into favour as honourably as the organizers of the herdsmen's festival in Unspunnen could have wished.

Dr. Brigitte BACHMANN-GEISER.