 Peasant
Alphorn Player at the Wetterhorn, 1904.
Photo by Mildred Cumberland (Mike Cumberland’s Great Grandmother)
© MikeCumberland.com Alphorn
Although born Canadian for many generations, Mike Cumberland has
relatives (an aunt and cousins) still living in Switzerland.
The
alphorn is phenomenal in its size and its limited musical range. The
instrument is one of great antiquity. Its earliest origins are from
the Bronze-Age of Denmark and Northern Germany, ca. 1400 – 800 BC.
Other evidence of the instrument dates from a 9th Century Oslo Viking
ship, where illustrations show a wooden trumpet of moderate size being
used as a summoning device for military purposes.
Traditionally it has been used as a shepherd’s trumpet, made of wood,
found in the Alps, the Carpathians, Lithuania, and the Pyrenees and in
Scandinavia. Shepherds would call their cattle and calm them while
they were being milked. The alphorn is also a signaling instrument
with considerable carrying power and because of this quality it was
used as a message bearer, as a greeting device, to call church
congregations together, and to summon men to battle and strike fear
into the hearts of their opponents. Today, it is mostly used at folk
music competitions and as a tourist attraction.
It has undergone various changes in construction. It is now most
familiar in the form of an upturned bell at the end of a hollowed
wooden tube some twelve feet long. It is traditionally carved from a
four to five-hundred years old fir tree, often spruce, which has grown
out of a mountainside. The one end is bent “from the weight of winter
snows”. The tree in split in half, the centre and outside is carved,
and then it is reattached with wooden rings and rattan. Since the
early nineteenth century the alphorn has also been made in different
keys, to allow a certain amount of ensemble playing possible between
performers on the instrument.
During the 1800’s the alphorn became almost extinct, but in 1826 a
Bern governor sent a young herdsman to Gridlewald to pick six
singers to teach them how to play. Ever since that time the alphorn
has had a strong place in Swiss heritage and culture.
Traditional melodies came from old sequences from the monastery of St.
Gall. These melodies are the origins of what are called the “Ranz des
Vaches”, which are a collection of approximately fifty ancient
mountain melodies. These traditional melodies have been used by many
composers such as: Beethoven, Berlioz, Delius, Grieg, Leopold Mozart,
Rossini, Schumann, Richard Struass and Richard Wagner.
Today many concert pieces are written for solo alphorn, as well as
many other combinations of instruments.
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