Anton Joseph Hampel (1710 – 30 March 1771) was a horn player who is generally credited with having developed, somewhere between 1750 and 1760, the technique of hand-stopping

Hand-stopping

Hand-stopping is a technique by which a natural horn can be made to produce notes outside of its normal harmonic series. By inserting the hand, cupped, into the bell, the player can reduce the pitch of a note by a semitone or more...

 which allows natural horn

Natural horn

The natural horn is a musical instrument that is the ancestor of the modern-day horn, and is differentiated by its lack of valves. It consists of a mouthpiece, some long coiled tubing, and a large flared bell. Pitch changes are made through a few different techniques:* Modulating the lip tension as...

s to play fully chromatically. This was one of the most important innovations in the history of the horn, comparable with Heinrich Stölzel

Heinrich Stölzel

Heinrich David Stölzel was a German horn player who developed some of the first valves for brass instruments. He developed the first valve for a brass instrument, the Stölzel valve, in 1814, and went on to develop various other designs, some jointly with other inventor musicians...

's development of the first valve horn in 1817.

It was this development that enabled the horn repertoire of Mozart, Weber

Carl Maria von Weber

Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber was a German composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist and critic, one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school....

 and others to be written.

Hampel was born in Prague

Prague

Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...

, but worked in Dresden

Dresden

Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....

, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, with instrument maker Johann Werner, collaborating on the design of the so-called Inventionshorn, which used sliding medial crooks

Crook (music)

A crook, also sometimes called a shank, is an exchangeable segment of tubing in a natural horn which is used to change the length of the pipe, altering the fundamental pitch and harmonic series which the instrument can sound, and thus the key in which it plays.-Master crook and coupler...

 inside the hoop in an attempt to achieve a fully chromatic instrument.

Hampel also taught Giovanni Punto

Giovanni Punto

Giovanni Punto was a Czech horn player and a pioneer of the hand-stopping technique which allows natural horns to play a greater number of notes.He was an international celebrity in the 18th and early 19th centuries, known in London,...

, who went on to refine the hand-stopping technique and spread it through Europe, inspiring works from composers such as Beethoven.

External links