Janet Beat: Hunting Horns are Memories

For horn and tape, composed 1977, and first performed by Morag Campbell, Glasgow, 21 April 1978.

Duration: 21 minutes.

“The ideas explored on the tape for Hunting Horns are Memories are based on the horn's origins, repertoire and mechanism. Moreover, in the days before instant access through walkmans and Radio 3, my childhood memories of listening to music were from 78 rpm disks and searching for music broadcasts from foreign radio stations dimly heard through static crackles and frequency distortions. Some of this background sounds and crackles are incorporated into the sounds on the tape.

All the sounds on the tape are derived from the horn itself. These are based not only on played notes (including quarter tones and quarter tone chords), but also the noises which horn players usually try to avoid, such as rattling the slides and valves, clicking and popping sounds, and the bubbling of condensation collected in the valve tubes. These were then processed by a variety of tape recording techniques and multi-layered.

The title of the piece is an inversion of Apollinaire's lines: 'Memories are hunting horns / whose sounds die on the wind'.”