Stupid French Horn Tricks a.k.a Why I Hate Transposing Instruments

Weird thing I saw today (well okay, actually this was several days ago, because these take me a while to write): A horn player using the 3rd valve all by itself, a fingering I was taught never to use. And then I started noticing other WTFery.

Granted, all of my horn playing was in middle school and high school, and I never actually got to the Advanced Private Lessons stage, this being merely the instrument I played so that I could be in the band (as opposed to piano which is what I cared about, but is kind of useless in a band), so maybe they would have covered these sorts of fingering nuances if I'd gotten that far. But I didn't.

And wikipedia is no help. They seem to think the '3' and '12' fingerings are equivalent, which they aren't, but that's wikipedia for you. It's also quite possible these are questions that simply don't have answers beyond, "It sounds better that way." (File under: Why Music Theory Isn't a Science). But I think there's room to beat on some things, so …

You can see what I'm talking about here (in which Radek Baborák does Richard Strauss's 2nd horn concerto, which is apparently the most popular version on YouTube at the moment. You should, of course, listen to the whole thing, but for this you can go 8m26s in, if the t= parameter isn't working for you).

The sequence of pitches up to the point where everything resolves is as follows (note that even just to say what the pitches are I have to digress on pretty much everything that is screwed up about the French Horn … and me):

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