Laurence Osborn Halali, or, e Kill

for Solo French Horn

Halali, or, e Kill

Instrumentation

Solo French Horn

Duration

7 minutes is part is transposed.

Commissioned by Smorgaschord Festival, with generous support from the Vaughan Williams Foundation. First performance given by Ben Goldscheider at Chapter House, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, 17th June 2023 as part of Smorgaschord Festival.

Performance Directions

e structure of this piece is dictated by the use of implied pedal tones in the highest range of the instrument. As a single instrument, the solo horn switches between melody and pedal tone, but in some sense — in the mind of the performer, the listener, or both — it should be implied that both are happening simultaneously. e pitch of the pedal tones is incrementally sharpened or fla ened through the use of different partials along the harmonic series. e instrument therefore switches between its ‘valve’ and ‘natural’ functions throughout the piece. When the horn is being used as a ‘natural horn’, the fundamental, fingering, and partial are always given. e precise pitch notation of each partial is given below, with its corresponding fundamental.

Programme Note

It was such a gi to be able to write this piece. Everything about the horn is extraordinary and fascinating. ere is something prehistoric about the sound, as if it has erupted from the lungs of something long-extinct. I am not a physicist, and to me the mechanism of the instrument is pure sorcery, an enchanted tunnel that transforms the tiny vibrations of the lip into preternatural song. Even the look of the thing: tangled, overgrown, pulled from the viscera of an impossible mechanical animal. I love everything about it.

e horn begins as a signalling tool in hunting. is function permits it to enter art music through the back-door as a shorthand for the hunt in seventeenth-century opera. Consequently, the horn takes on various associations to do with heroism, conquest and militarism in the centuries that follow. Alongside the history of the instrument lies a parallel history of human bloodlust.

e ‘Halali’ in the title of this piece refers to a call that appears in numerous collections of hunting calls from seventeeth-century France. ‘Halali’ is called as the exhausted animal is surrounded and killed by huntsmen with knives. e reality of the hunt — ritualised slaughter with the veneer of nobility — is important to this piece. But so are the immediate, embodied aspects of horn-playing, the physical exertion that the music demands, and the progressive exhaustion wri en into the music’s incrementally fla ening pedal tones.