Horn (instrument) a mixture of the two, is called a horn section in these contexts. Variations include: As the name indicates, people originally used to blow on the actual horns of animals before starting to emulate them in metal or other materials. This original usage survives in the shofar (), a ram's horn, which plays an important role in Jewish religious rituals. The genus of animal-horn instruments to which the shofar belongs is called ("keren") in Hebrew, "qarnu" in Akkadian, and ("keras") in Greek. The "olifant" or "oliphant" (an abbreviation of the French "cor d'olifant"/"oliphant", "elephant horn") was the name applied in
Horn (instrument) Johann Beer, for "corne de chasse", posthorn, two violins, and basso continuo. Ironically, Beer died in a hunting accident in 1700. His concerto not only combines two different kinds of horn, but the "corne de chasse" part is the earliest solo example of a horn in F (sounding a fifth lower than written), which came to be the "classical" size of the instrument. The F horn appears again soon afterward in an aria from Carlo Agostino Badia's opera "Diana rappacificata" (Vienna, 1700), where two horns play typical triple-time fanfares. By 1705 the horn was also being used in church music,