(Ger.: ‘hunt music’).
The German application of the term denotes the entire code of musical signals for the hunt, but more particularly that body of harmonic hunting music which relates specifically to the horn, and which has been exploited for its symbolism of the outdoors by composers from the mid-18th century to the present day. The earliest collections of hunting-calls include Dame Juliana Berners’s Book of Hawkinge, Hunting and Fysshing (c1345), Trésor de vénerie by Hardouin de Fontaines-Guérin (1394), La vénerie by Jacques du Fouilloux (Poitiers, ?1561) and Sir George Turbervile's The Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting (London, 1576). Each consists of single-pitch signals in a rhythmic tablature. In the 17th century there grew up a practice known as ‘jerking’, whereby single or double acciaccaturas from a neighbouring overtone were supposedly sounded before the beat in repeated-note calls (ex.1).
Single-pitch signals predominated until the second half of the 17th century, although the increase in the tube length of some hunting instruments and the advent of the cor à plusieurs tours in France towards the end of the 16th century also made available a larger number of pitches in the overtone series (see Horn, §2(i)). Mersenne described in Harmonie universelle (1636–7) and Harmonicorum libri XII (1648) how chordal signals might be produced by manufacturing four or more single-note horns of different sizes and sounding them simultaneously. He also noted that some horn players commanded the same range as trumpeters. The features characteristic of later hunting horn music – triadic figures and the dactyls of 6/8 metre – are found in a number of 17th-century pieces of programme music scored for strings only, including the ‘Chiamata a la caccia’ in Cavalli’s opera Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo (1639) these pieces also indicate that, in both form and melody, the early triadic horn signals were borrowings from the contemporary trumpet signal known as the Chiamata. Lully employed a similar idiom in the five-part piece entitled ‘Le[s] cors de chasse’ in Les plaisirs de l'Ile enchantée (1664), adding to the strings the sounding of single-pitch trompes at some cadences. In Vienna, C.A. Badia included triadic signals in an obbligato for horn pitched in F in Diana rappacificata con Venere e con Amore (1700).
In 1705 André Danican Philidor l’aîné, Louis XIV’s music librarian at Versailles, transcribed the trompe de chasse signals of the French court hunt and added a further set of signals of his own composition (F-V 1163). Both sets include signals containing conjunct movement in the higher clarino range in addition to movement in the lower traidic range. J.-B. Morin used some of these signals in the divertissement La chasse du cerf (1708), as did J.-B. Prin in his collections of music for the trumpet marine. By the second quarter of the 18th century the Marquis de Dampierre, master of the hunt to Louis XV, composed a body of hunting music in which the idiom of the various hunting signals found perfect alliance with the musical properties of the cor de chasse. From Dampierre’s fanfares and flourishes all later hunting music derives. A large collection of his fanfares was published in Serré de Rieux’s Les dons des enfants de Latone (Paris, 1734). Dampierre’s hunting-calls were introduced to Bohemia by Franz Anton, Count Sporck, and published by him in various anthologies, from 1701 to 1725, with their texts translated into German. Bach drew upon this hunting music for his horn parts. In the ‘Hunting’ Cantata bwv208 the French practice of ‘tayauté’ is retained (ex.2), and the Brandeiser Jägerlied which Sporck made popular appears unaltered in Bach’s ‘Peasant’ Cantata bwv212. Horn-calls deriving from Sporck’s collections are to be found in Keiser’s opera Octavia (1705) and in many of Handel’s operas, most notably Giulio Cesare. Fux wrote a fanfare for two horns in his overture to M.A. Ziani’s opera Meleagro (1706) which resembles the opening fanfare in Bach’s first Brandenburg Concerto.
From the mid-18th century onwards composers began to adopt these calls in increasingly abstract form. Early examples of this process include the Jagdsinfonie (1755) by Leopold Mozart, the Symphony in D (‘La chasse’, 1772) by Carl Stamitz and the Symphony no.73 (‘La chasse’, 1782) by Haydn. The hunting music style was adapted to string and vocal music and used to evoke an outdoor atmosphere, as in the opening bars of Mozart’s ‘Hunt’ Quartet k458 and the final movements of his horn concertos which again borrow directly from Sporck and Dampierre. Various early hunting flourishes appear in the ‘Herbst’ section of Haydn’s oratorio Die Jahreszeiten (1801). Weber’s opera Der Freischütz (1821) abounds with four-part horn-calls in the 18th-century idiom; its famous Hunting Chorus is a direct descendant of that in Fux’s Elisa of 1719.
The horn parts of Brahms’s symphonies contain quotations from these earlier calls, however abstract; in the final movement of the Horn Trio op.40 many fanfares appear. The animated outdoor manner pervades Schumann’s Conzertstück for four horns and orchestra (1849), while hunting symbolism is used poetically in the Royal Hunt and Storm in Berlioz’s Les Troyens (1863). Smetana reverted to the traditional keys of C and D for his richly pictorial hunting fanfares of Má vlast (1874). The earlier idiom is completely integrated into the horn parts of Richard Strauss’s music and finds its ultimate parody in the horn-call from Till Eulenspiegel. Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings relies much on the music of the hunt for its effect; other 20th-century examples of the hunting-music idiom include the final movements of the horn quartets by Hindemith and Tippett.
Jagdmusik can also mean an ensemble, usually of horns, for playing the music of the hunt. Augustus the Strong of Saxony maintained an octet for this purpose, as did Emperor Charles VI of Austria. After 1700 two oboes were added to the usual assortment of horns at the court of the Elector of Brandenburg, and after about 1725 the combination of two horns, two oboes and two bassoons was understood to form a Jagdmusik. In the last decades of the century two clarinets were added, but by this time a type of chamber music specifically for this ensemble had grown up and it was known more commonly as a Harmonie (see Harmoniemusik). In recent years Ernst Paul of Vienna has revived the old imperial hunting ensemble as the Lainzer Jagdmusik. In the 1860s Bismarck suppressed the harmonic hunting-calls and the practice of playing them on the 16' horn and substituted the 2' Fürst-Pless-Horn. A new code of calls was introduced for greater ease in playing on this limited instrument. The instrument and its music have gained considerable popularity, but this later tradition is not to be confused with that of the 18th century.
See also Signal (i), §2.
F. Piersig: Die Einführung des Hornes in die Kunstmusik und seine Verwendung bis zum Tode Johann Sebastian Bachs (Halle, 1927)
K. Taut: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Jagdmusik (Leipzig, 1927)
E. Halfpenny: ‘Tantivy: an Exposition of the “Ancient Hunting Notes”’, PRMA, lxxx (1953–4), 43–58
H. Wagner: Jägerbrauch (Vienna, 1957)
M. Tilmouth: ‘A Calendar of References to Music in Newspapers. Published in London and the Provinces (1660–1719)’, RMARC, no.1 (1961), 1–107, esp.54
K. Janetzky and B. Brüchle: The Horn (London, 1988), 38–9
A. Baines: Brass Instruments (London, 1978), 146–56
C. Adkins and A. Dickinson: A Trumpet by Any Other Name: a History of the Trumpet Marine (Buren, 1991), 240–42, 245–7
E.M. Heater: ‘Early Hunting Horn Calls and their Transmission: Some new Discoveries’, HBSJ, vii (1995), 123–41
HORACE FITZPATRICK/PETER DOWNEY