Heinrich David Stölzel (7 September 1777 – 16 February 1844) was a
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
** Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
horn player who developed some of the first
valves
A valve is a device or natural object that regulates, directs or controls the flow of a fluid (gases, liquids, fluidized solids, or slurries) by opening, closing, or partially obstructing various passageways. Valves are technically fitting ...
for
brass instrument
A brass instrument is a musical instrument that produces sound by sympathetic vibration of air in a tubular resonator in sympathy with the vibration of the player's lips. Brass instruments are also called labrosones or labrophones, from Latin a ...
s. He developed the first valve for a brass
musical instrument
A musical instrument is a device created or adapted to make musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can be considered a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. A person who pl ...
, the Stölzel valve, in 1818, and went on to develop various other designs, some jointly with other inventor musicians.
Biography
Stölzel was born in
Schneeberg, Saxony
Schneeberg is a town in Saxony’s district of Erzgebirgskreis. It has roughly 16,400 inhabitants and belongs to the Town League of Silberberg (''Städtebund Silberberg''). It lies 4 km west of Aue, and southeast of Zwickau.
Geography
L ...
. His father was also a musician, and as a young man he learnt to play numerous instruments, including
harp
The harp is a stringed musical instrument that has a number of individual strings running at an angle to its soundboard; the strings are plucked with the fingers. Harps can be made and played in various ways, standing or sitting, and in orche ...
,
violin
The violin, sometimes known as a ''fiddle'', is a wooden chordophone (string instrument) in the violin family. Most violins have a hollow wooden body. It is the smallest and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in the family in regular ...
,
trumpet
The trumpet is a brass instrument commonly used in classical and jazz ensembles. The trumpet group ranges from the piccolo trumpet—with the highest register in the brass family—to the bass trumpet, pitched one octave below the standard ...
and
horn
Horn most often refers to:
*Horn (acoustic), a conical or bell shaped aperture used to guide sound
** Horn (instrument), collective name for tube-shaped wind musical instruments
*Horn (anatomy), a pointed, bony projection on the head of various ...
. From 1800 he was employed as a military musician for the
Duke
Duke is a male title either of a monarch ruling over a duchy, or of a member of royalty, or nobility. As rulers, dukes are ranked below emperors, kings, grand princes, grand dukes, and sovereign princes. As royalty or nobility, they are ran ...
of
Pless, Silesia, mainly playing the horn.
During this time, the horn used was essentially a
natural horn
The natural horn is a musical instrument that is the predecessor to the modern-day (French) horn (differentiated by its lack of valves). Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century the natural horn evolved as a separation from the trump ...
, which restricted the range of notes that were able to be easily used to only those in the instrument's natural
harmonic series, and variations thereof created by using the hand in the bell to alter the pitch. German musicians also used an ''Inventionshorn'', which allowed some further range of notes by manually inserting extra crooks.
Stölzel dedicated himself to the further development of the instrument, and experimented with adding valves that redirected the air stream into different lengths of tubing, to lengthen the sections of tubing available and thereby created more (and lower) usable harmonic series. His system featured two valves; the first lowered the instrument's fundamental pitch by a tone, the second by a semitone. Depressing both at once lowered the fundamental by a tone and a half. By 1814 he had developed a playable valve horn, able to play a chromatic series in the instrument's upper register.
Stölzel reportedly wrote directly to King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia to publicise his invention, and musical director Gottlob Benedikt Bierey of the Beslau City Theatre wrote in the ''Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung'' on 3 May 1815: "Heinrich Stölzel, the chamber musician from Pless in Upper Silesia, in order to perfect the Waldhorn, has succeeded in attaching a simple mechanism to the instrument, thanks to which he has obtained all the notes of the chromatic scale in a range of almost three octaves, with a good, strong and pure tone. All the artificial notes – which, as is well known, were previously produced by stopping the bell with the right hand, and can now be produced merely with two levers, controlled by two fingers of the right hand – are identical in sound to the natural notes and thus preserve the character of the Waldhorn. Any Waldhorn player will, with practice, be able to play on it."
Why Valves Were Invented
/ref>
Fellow inventor and musician Friedrich Blühmel
Friedrich Blühmel (born 1777, died before 1845) was a German horn player and musical instrument builder. He is credited as one of the earliest inventors of brass instrument valves.
Biography
Friedrich Blühmel initially worked as a coal miner, w ...
also designed a similar valve system independently of Stölzel around the same time. On 12 April 1818, Stölzel and Blühmel registered a joint patent for ten years.
The same year, on 16 October 1818, the first work for valved horn was performed - the ''Concertino für drei Waldhörner und ein chromatisches Ventilhorn'', written by composer and horn player Georg Abraham Schneider
Georg Abraham Schneider (19 April 1770 - 19 January 1839) was a German musician and composer.
Biography
Schneider was born in Darmstadt, where he originally learnt music as a member of the city's alta cappella. From 1787 he played horn in the c ...
.
Stölzel's early two-valve horn design was soon expanded to three by instrument builder Christian Friedrich Sattler
Christian Friedrich Sattler (1778–1842) was a brass instrument maker and inventor in Leipzig, Germany. In 1821 Sattler became renowned for two inventions: the chromatic valve trumpet which applied three valves to the natural trumpet to provide ...
of Leipzig, and the first valve trumpets were built in 1820. As the system was further developed by other inventors, similar valves were eventually built into almost all members of the brass instrument
A brass instrument is a musical instrument that produces sound by sympathetic vibration of air in a tubular resonator in sympathy with the vibration of the player's lips. Brass instruments are also called labrosones or labrophones, from Latin a ...
family.
Stölzel died in Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...
in 1844.
References
External links
Early Valve Designs, John Ericson
1777 births
1844 deaths
German male musicians
19th-century German inventors
Horn players
German musical instrument makers
People from Schneeberg, Saxony
{{Germany-musician-stub