Alp horns

Tell me if you agree: playing for yourself versus playing with others are two completely different types of musicianship.

As a singer myself, I am almost always with other people when I make music. Sure, I sing in my car or the shower or whatever, but most of my music-making is with choirs or instrumentalists like guitars or pianos.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Elaine Crumb, who plays what is among the most solitary instruments in the world... but it turns out she is navigating exactly that dichotomy in her art!

Welcome to the world of the Alp horn...

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What is an Alp horn?

If you've ever seen the Ricola commercials, that's usually how I describe it. It's a very long wooden horn from Switzerland-ish. It has no keys or valves; it's a 12-foot plus wooden, conical instrument. Traditionally it's the size of two grown men, but today with standardized pitching, it's 11.5 or 12.5 feet depending on the key.

Traditionally, alphorns were made from trees growing out of the side of mountains. So if you think about the shape and the curve of that bell, that's just the tree growing out and upwards from a mountainside. They'd cut it at the base, saw it in half, hollow it out, and then wrap it together with twine or copper wire or whatever they had. These days they're made by machines, and they typically come apart in three to four pieces, and you plug them together.

The alphorn specifically is from the Alpine mountains, and was originally used as a communication device. Shepherds would use them to call their cows back in for feeding and milking and whatnot, as well as to communicate with the communities in the valleys below or on neighboring mountainsides. The sound travels really quite far when you're up on a mountaintop!

The idea of a conical wind instrument is not specific to the region, but the shepherd use is quite Swiss.

When did you first encounter it?

I was in college and I went to a French horn convention (I'm super cool), and there was a woman who was giving a lecture on alphorns. She asked if anyone wanted to try after the lecture, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, hell yeah." I played it, and she gave me a little miniature tutorial. I just totally fell in love with it then and there.

I bought mine probably two-ish years after that. I went to Switzerland to study and play with some people there, and bought my horn there. In the meantime, I had rented a horn the person who gave that lecture, and tested a couple horns at Alphorn gatherings before I got my own.

I did recently buy a telescoping carbon fiber alphorn, which is my new favorite toy.

How do you play it?

An embouchure is the shape of your mouth muscles when you're buzzing on a mouthpiece. An aperture is the size of the hole through which you're blowing air. Both of those things on a brass instrument are how you control dynamics and pitch. And for an alphorn, where you have no keys, it's how you change notes. For example, if you're going higher, you might want to have a smaller aperture so that your air speed is faster.

For an alphorn, how long the instrument is determines what key it's in.

If you've ever blown over a glass bottle and made a pitch, and then you blow faster and it makes a higher pitch, that's the harmonic series. The really basic definition is "the notes that you can get from blowing over or into a single thing." It's a naturally occurring series of pitches that are founded on a single core pitch, which you could think of as the key.

If you're starting on a low C, you'd have an octave higher, and that's your root. Then you'll have one, three, five (1st/3rd/5th scale degrees). Then you'll have a flat seven, which is very "out of key" to our well-tempered ears. Then in the next octaveyou have one, two, three, a very out of tune sharp four, five, six, seven. It's kind of wonky up there! And then your high octave.

A partial is just referring to the slot in the harmonic series. The higher you get, the closer together those partials become.

The alphorn doesn't fit into the classical sense of tonality with these particular partials that are wildly "out of tune" if you were playing with another instrument.

You have a little bit of control, but not very much. You don't have much control over the tuning of the partials themselves. You can lip slur here and there, but not dramatically.

Playing the note that you want to play is the hard part! It is mostly muscle memory.

Conventions and meetups

There are conventions or meetups all over the US. There's a company that operates out of Utah, and they host gatherings in a few places. There's quite a few other people, independent groups. I've gone to some that are at a ski resort in the summer, so there's great mountainsides to play on.

I did a wonderful one a couple years ago in West Virginia that was just gorgeous, and, we took some amazing hikes and played over gorgeous valleys.

There's tons in Switzerland. If you want to go to Switzerland, you got options!

I'll say between 20 and 30 people-ish attend. A lot of them are repeat customers. The Alp horn community in the US is bigger than you'd think, but still fairly small.

It's a really wonderful community.

What types of repertoire?

When you're talking about Alp horn music, there's three-ish groups:

Traditional calls
Contemporary solo and small group or alphorn choir compositions
Contemporary classical works written for alphorn and orchestra.

A call is a short little ditty. It's a single melody, maybe a melody with some variations. There are hundreds of calls from different regions in Switzerland and across the Alps, and hundreds of variations on those calls.

If you think about those traditional settings where you're a shepherd on your mountain, you have a call that has a function: calling the cows, calling down to your family in the valley below to tell them "Everything's groovy up here. Don't worry about me," or "Hey, the cows are coming down." Another really common call is an evening prayer.

Some of them don't have functional purposes per se, but are music for the sake of music, prayer or meditation.

There's a little book called Das Alphornbüechli, the "Little Book of Alphorn." It was written by this guy who went all over Switzerland and transcribed traditional calls from the various regions. He documented how to play the alphorn and different techniques. It's a pretty foundational book for a lot of alphorn players. I play from that a lot because it's nice, well-rounded, solo alphorn works and traditional calls, and some original compositions. It's fun.

The contemporary stuff I find really fun, because people go wild with the alphorn and they're not adhering to the standards of those traditional Swiss calls. They're really experimenting with the instrument. There's even some alphorn jazz works! People have a lot of fun with it, and it's wonderful.

You can buy contemporary music for alphorn from various composers. I love Laura Nelson's work. She's a friend of mine, and I think she's a very creative and meditative composer, so I frequently come back to her. There's also a very famous alphorn composer named Hans-Jürg Sommer, I love playing his stuff. He writes a lot of duets for himself and a man named Emil Fry. Hans-Jürg's works are some of the most gorgeous Alphorn stuff ever.

There are alphorn symphonies! I've never heard them performed live. I only know one person who's ever done that - it's not very common a) that you get a symphony who wants to do that, and b) to find an alphorn player who can. It's very physically taxing!

Where have you played?

I don't fly with my main alphorn because it's too big to fit in overhead spaces and it's quite delicate. But the carbon fiber one collapses into a tight little package, and it's very, very light. So I take that hiking a lot, and anytime I travel. It's is just super fun, you can go anywhere.

I'm usually just playing for me in my backyard or on a hike. I like to do like an "on and off" style of playing: I bring a book or have some watercolors or writing. I set up and play a couple tunes, work on a few things, take a break, do something else, come back to it, and repeat.

I love playing on bodies of water! The reverb is really, really present and magical on a lake, or playing into a cove where there's a lot of immediate bounce back.

I recently had a very fun encounter where I was in Hawaii playing on a beach in Maui at sunset. It was gorgeous and very peaceful, though very out of place culturally. This guy came up to me and he was like, "I cannot believe what I just heard." He was out snorkeling in the reef, underwater. Turns out he was from Switzerland traveling in Maui, and he heard the alphorn while he was underwater, and he was like, "Whatttt am I hearing? Is this an alphorn???" He tracked me down on the beach and was like, "What are you doing here?" That was a very fun encounter.

When I was in Switzerland traveling and buying my alphorn, it was incredible to get to play it in that environment. Truly playing in the Alps and having the local people know what I'm playing and appreciate it as a preservation of their culture.

I had a, a super cool experience where a friend of a friend was like, "Oh, you've got to go see this guy while you're hiking." We found him, and he let us play the oldest remaining alphorn in Switzerland! It was this really short instrument, probably two and a half feet long. That was a remarkable historic experience.

What are you working on?

I will forever be figuring out how to play. My personal solo playing is very meditative. I appreciate about the alp horn that there's very little meter. You're not having to align with a downbeat. It's just very meditative, magical, and personal. It feels like a suspension of time and space in nature to me.

I'm trying to balance that with my desire to play with people and engage with the alp horn community. There are wonderful people, wonderful friends who go to these conferences, and I've stopped going to a lot of them because the actual playing is just not what I personally love about the alp horn. You have to have a downbeat. But I think in order to see my alp horn friends, I have to play more polkas!

What's a recent (or memorable) Zeitgeist Moment for you?

Pretty much every time I play the alphorn, I feel connected to something bigger.

I think one of the things that's quite unique about the alphorn is that when you play, someone can hear you! I try to keep that in mind when I'm playing.

I have a very fond memory: when I was in college and first playing the alphorn, I used to play at this local reservoir, There was this guy who lived nearby, so he could just hear me when I started playing. He would ride up on his bike every time I started playing to just sit and chill, and we'd talk in between calls. We had a nice little friendship.

But that was a really good reminder that someone's listening. I'm a pretty shy musician, and I'm very awkward when people come up and talk to me, but I appreciate that they are listening and hopefully enjoy it. But it's definitely, for me, not possible to play the alphorn without feeling connected to my fellow beings, both human and non.

Where can people get more alphorn?

There's some great alphorn players on YouTube! I love the Alpine Sisters: They're a group of international women French horn players who have formed this alphorn group, and they're awesome.

If you are looking to play the alphorn, I would recommend going to one of these conferences. Usually you can rent a horn for the week or the weekend or however long it is.

I think I mentioned that before, Hans-Jörg Sommer and Emil Frey. They're a great alphorn duo. Their (sheet) music is also out there if you have a friend (or a loop pedal!).

Thank you to Elaine Crumb for a fantastic conversation!

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