Western European
France

Brass
ca. 1841
Height: 16 in
Wind Instruments – Brasswinds – Cornets/Cornopeans

This neocor from ca. 1841 is signed ‘Paridaens a Paris,’ displays a lyre and two crooks.  Around 1814, Heinrich Stölzel built a two-valve chromatic horn, but it was not until 1818, that Stölzel and Friedrich Blühmel patented the design of added valves to a horn.

This is a four-piece, three-Stölzel valve neocor with numbers displayed on each valve. It has a double-loop brass body and two crooks for changing the six-foot tubing by lengthening and altering overtones/pitches. The spring is enclosed in the barrel at the top. Unique to the Stölzel valves is that the main tubing enters the piston from below, unlike the Périnet valves by François Périnet (patented in 1838) and the Berlin valves (developed in Berlin both in 1827 by Heinrich Stölzel and independently in 1833 by Wilhelm Wieprecht). The neocor predates the saxhorns.

Resources: http://www.blackdiamondbrass.com/tpthist/trpthist.htm; http://www.usd.edu/smm/UtleyPages/Utleyfaq/brassfaqBerlin.html http://www.usd.edu/smm/UtleyPages/Utleyfaq/brassfaqStoelzel.html#earlyStoelzel