The flishorn (reed goat horn), also called tungehorn, is a version of the bukkehorn where a small juniper reed produces the sound. Where the trompethorn is blown with the lips, the flishorn has a loose reed fitted to the blowing end, and the horn then works on the same principle as a clarinet: a heteroglot single reed. The sound is sharper and more piercing than the soft tone of its lip-vibrated sibling.
The flishorn has historically been most widespread, and at times completely dominant, in Trøndelag and the eastern parts of Innlandet. It is the oldest Norwegian shepherd's clarinet known, and it probably existed in Norway before the European clarinet arrived (Jenssen 2010). It has even been claimed that the flishorn is the only instrument actually invented in Norway!
What separates the flishorn from the trompethorn?
Bukkehorn is a collective name, and the horn comes in two main types according to how they are blown:
- Trompethorn – the tone is made by lip vibration against a small hole at the pointed end, as on a trumpet. This is the oldest and most widespread type.
- Flishorn (tungehorn) – a juniper reed is lashed to the blowing end, and the reed vibrates like the single reed of a clarinet.
The horn itself is the same: a horn from a billy goat. It is how the tone is made that separates them. The flishorn also usually has more finger holes than the trompethorn.
If you want to read more about the lip-blown variant, I have a separate article on the bukkehorn.
History and age
How old the flishorn is, nobody knows for certain, but much suggests that such reed horns existed in Norway before the European clarinet arrived. Several of the dated flishorns are older than the clarinet in this country, and Bjørn Aksdal points to one specimen dated almost before the clarinet was invented in Germany at all (Aksdal 2023).
The oldest dated flishorns known are a horn from Vågå in Gudbrandsdalen, dated 1693 (five finger holes, now at Maihaugen), and a horn from Solør in Hedmark from 1714 (six finger holes). Reidar Sevåg points out that the clarinet did not gain ground in the rural districts north of Oslo until around the year 1800. The time up until the folk music was collected is then far too short for a completely new instrument to establish itself across such large areas and at the same time displace the old horn type in many districts. This suggests that the flishorn belongs to an older, independent tradition.
But the flishorn does not stand alone as a shepherd's clarinet. It belongs to a small, scattered and motley reed family in the Nordic countries: among others the Meråker clarinet in Trøndelag, and similar reed instruments in Finland, such as sarviklarinetti, mänkeri and liru.
Where the flishorn was at home
The flishorn had its strongest tradition in Trøndelag, and in Innlandet around Gudbrandsdalen, Glåmdalen, Trysil, Solør and the lowland districts around lake Mjøsa. In these areas the flishorn was in later times so dominant that several of the older informants in the folk music collections did not know the lip-blown horn type at all. The trompethorn had probably been known here earlier, but the flishorn took over.
The map below shows where the two horn types were at home. Tap the zones on the map for more information.
Trompethorn area
Hallingdal, Numedal, Telemark, Hordaland, Sogn og Fjordane and Valdres north of Aurdal
The tone is made by lip vibration against the blowing hole, as on a trumpet. The oldest type – it probably once covered the whole country.
Flishorn area (tungehorn)
Trøndelag, Gudbrandsdalen, Glåmdalen, Trysil and the lowland districts around lake Mjøsa
A loose juniper reed makes the horn work like a clarinet. In later times it dominated here so completely that many did not know the lip-blown type at all.
Both types
Agder, Rogaland, Møre og Romsdal and Valdres south of Aurdal – plus Nordland and Troms
Mixed zones where the two horn types lived side by side.
Not specifically described
The districts around the Oslo fjord, and Finnmark
The sources say little about horn traditions in these areas.
Tap the zones on the map for more information.
After Sevåg (1973) and Aksdal (2023). The zone borders are schematic – Aksdal's newer material shows lip-blown horns in the flishorn areas as well.
The borders are schematic. Aksdal's newer material (169 horns) shows the trompethorn in more of the flishorn areas than previously assumed, so the picture is more complex than a clean division.
On the Swedish side the flishorn was all but unknown. The large Swedish museum collections hold only horns without a reed, and from earlier times there are only scattered accounts of reed horns in the border provinces of Jämtland and Värmland. Carl Axel Gottlund heard such a horn in Värmland in 1821 and wrote that the sound «liknade i det mesta en flöjt douce», mostly resembling a recorder (Larsen 1977). There is more about the Swedish vallhorn in the article on the kuhorn.
The only known Swedish flishorn tradition belonged in Rörbäcksnäs, a small border village in western Dalarna with close contact and much intermarriage across the Norwegian border, so the horn probably came there from Norway. Holger Larsen documented the tradition in the 1970s, with Karl-Olgar Arnesson and Per Anton Moberg as his sources. The village was so isolated that the horn makers there did not know horns without a reed existed. Their horns had seven finger holes plus a thumb hole; by comparison, only four of the forty Norwegian reed horns registered by Sevåg have seven finger holes, and only two have a thumb hole. Their scale was an unusually pure harmonic minor scale from c♯¹ to c♯².
The reed
The reed is the heart of the instrument. It is most often made from juniper; knot-free juniper with straight fibres, where the outer wood is best because it is most flexible out at the edge. Atle Lien Jenssen called the material «kjeisse», the local word in Hedmarken. The reed should be paper-thin at the tip and slightly thicker in towards the fastening.
At the blowing end the horn is cut at an angle, and the reed is lashed on with thread over a carved groove so it does not slip. The reed sits on the right side on the vast majority of horns.
The thread was usually ordinary cotton thread, but Bernt Eriksen Skuggerud from Stange (a shoemaker by trade) used pitch thread. It is sticky and tough and easy to tighten without slipping. Today waxed linen thread is common.
If you want to make the reed yourself, I have written a step-by-step guide: how to make a reed for the flishorn.
How the flishorn is made
The horn itself is prepared in the same way as a lip-blown bukkehorn. First the core (the inside of the horn) must come out. I usually boil the horns in water. Once the horn is hollow and clean, I cut the blowing end at an angle. The angle lets the reed bend over the edge and gives the thread a good grip. A groove for the thread keeps the lashing from sliding down. The surface under the reed should curve slightly outwards towards the tip, and the blowing hole under the reed is usually oval or elongated; the shape follows the inner shape of the horn. Finally the horn walls are sometimes sanded down. Acoustically the wall thickness matters less than you might think, but the tradition is to make the walls thin, and it makes the horn easier to blow.
The finger holes are drilled where they work musically. There is plenty of room for trial and error here. Stensrud, who carried the Stange tradition onwards, had no strong opinion on the placement, and felt that both five- and six-hole solutions gave fully satisfactory results.
Read more about how to make a flishorn in Jenssen's master's thesis: Tungehornet i Norge (2010), and see the accompanying video below.
Finger holes and range
On flishorns four to six finger holes are most common, occasionally up to seven or eight. That is a few more than on the trompethorn, which historically most often had three or four. In Sevåg's registration of 96 horns the flishorns are distributed like this:
| Finger holes | Flishorn |
|---|---|
| 0 | 3 |
| 3 | 3 |
| 4 | 11 |
| 5 | 7 |
| 6 | 8 |
| 7 | 4 |
| 8 | 4 |
| Sum | 40 |
Sound and playing technique
On the flishorn you do not need to tense your lips the way you must on the trompethorn. Instead the blowing end is put so far into the mouth that the whole reed vibrates inside the lips. The player thus has no lip control over the reed the way you have on a modern clarinet: the mouth cavity works as an air chamber, and the tone is controlled largely with the breath.
You adjust the pitch with the blowing pressure and by closing the lips at the corner of the mouth, and the low notes are easiest to hit by gliding down from above. The tonality is, as Jenssen writes, «floating to the highest degree». The most important interval is the fifth, which should be pure, while the other steps can vary with the character of the scale. The result leans towards a minor-like character, with the third, fourth, sixth and seventh floating between the tempered notes. This is one of the oldest stylistic traits in Norwegian folk music.
A practical tip from the tradition: several sources say the horn stays easy to play as long as it is kept moist. Stensrud laid the whole horn with the reed in water before playing, and his grandfather kept it standing in a bucket of water.
Use and function
The flishorn belonged to the summer farm and herding culture, like the rest of the horn family. It was easy to carry, and it was used to call and steer the livestock, for agreed signals between the summer farm and the village, and to scare off predators. The «uglier» sound (compared with the trompethorn) worked better against bear and wolf, many in Trøndelag and Innlandet believed, and so it was said that wind instruments should preferably have a reed. Then you could play «ugly tunes» to scare the predators away.
As a pure musical instrument it was used wherever a good player was found, but the repertoire was usually tied to the herding: calling tunes, simple dance tunes and song melodies within the narrow range. The tradition of the bukkehorn as a herding tool ended around the middle of the 19th century, in step with the decline of summer farming.
The tradition bearers
Hedmarken, the lowland districts on the east side of lake Mjøsa, was a core area for the flishorn, and here the line of tradition is unusually well documented – thanks above all to Atle Lien Jenssen. Bernt Eriksen Skuggerud (1864–1950) from Stange was a skilled player who also made horns himself. He passed the craft and the playing on to his grandson, Erik Torbjørn Stensrud (born 1922) from Espa, who as late as 1994 was described as perhaps the only person in Norway with a living bukkehorn tradition.
From Stensrud the folk musician Atle Lien Jenssen (1956–2011) learnt the tradition by direct transmission from 1980 onwards. Jenssen is the central source on the flishorn. He wrote the booklet Bukkehorn traditions in Hedmark (1994) and the master's thesis Tungehornet i Norge: Historie, utbredelse, repertoar, bruk og praktisk instrumentmaking (The Tungehorn in Norway: History, Distribution, Repertoire, Use, and Practical Instrument Making). (2010), in which he covered distribution, kinship, repertoire and instrument making, and collected a large body of empirical material. Together with instrument maker Magnar Storbækken (1956–2022) he also made a film following the whole process from raw horn to finished instrument:
The flishorn today
The flishorn is rarer than the lip-blown bukkehorn today, but it lives on through performers and outreach work. Karl Seglem is one of the most central flishorn players today. Since the early 2000s he has brought the flishorn into the meeting between Norwegian folk music and jazz, often together with tenor saxophone and Hardanger fiddle.
In a separate article, Karl Seglem shows step by step how to play the flishorn, from the very first note to your first tune.
I make flishorns to order, and every horn is different – both because the horn itself varies, and because the reed must be fitted to the individual horn to give the right sound.
Frequently asked questions about the flishorn
What is a flishorn?
A flishorn, or tungehorn, is a Norwegian folk music instrument: a bukkehorn (goat horn) with a loose juniper reed fitted to the blowing end. The reed vibrates like the single reed of a clarinet, so the flishorn is played on the clarinet principle rather than with the lips like the ordinary bukkehorn.
What is the difference between a flishorn and a trompethorn?
Both are made from animal horn, but the tone is produced differently. On the trompethorn you make the tone with your lips. On the flishorn a juniper reed on the blowing end vibrates, and the sound is sharper and more piercing, related to the clarinet.
Why is it called flishorn / tungehorn?
The name comes from the reed: flis is Norwegian for a thin strip of wood, and tunge means tongue. It is this little wooden reed that vibrates and gives the horn its sound. «Flishorn» and «tungehorn» are two names for the same instrument.
What is the reed made of?
The reed is usually cut from juniper, preferably knot-free juniper with straight fibres. It should be paper-thin at the tip and slightly thicker towards the fastening.
How old is the flishorn?
Nobody knows for certain, but it is probably older than the European clarinet in Norway. The oldest dated flishorns are from 1693 (Vågå) and 1714 (Solør), which points to an older, independent tradition.
How many finger holes does a flishorn have?
Usually four to six, occasionally up to seven or eight. That is a few more than on the lip-blown trompethorn, which most often has three or four finger holes. The flishorns I make have 7 or 8 finger holes (incl. thumb hole), depending on the size of the horn.
What does a flishorn sound like?
The flishorn has a sharp, piercing sound related to the clarinet, with a continuous legato tone. The tonality is floating: the fifth is pure, while the other notes drift slightly, giving a minor-like character. You can hear the instrument in the video further up the page.
Sources and further reading:
2023 – Bjørn Aksdal – Bukkehornet: ein gjennomgang og analyse av trompethorn og tungehorn
2016 – Bjørn Aksdal – «I saw it on the telly»: The history and revival of the Meråker clarinet
2010 – Atle Lien Jenssen – Tungehornet i Norge: Historie, utbredelse, repertoar, bruk og praktisk instrumentmaking (The Tungehorn in Norway: History, Distribution, Repertoire, Use, and Practical Instrument Making).
1994 – Atle Lien Jenssen – Bukkehorn traditions in Hedmark
1993 – Atle Lien Jenssen – Østerdalsklarinetten: info, spilleteknikk og mål (Glomdalsmuseet)
1977 – Holger Larsen – Bockhorn med påslående trätunga. En anmälan (Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning 1977:2)
1973 – Reidar Sevåg – Det gjallar og det læt
1999 – Dagfinn Nupen – Eldre folkemusikkinstrument: læring på gamlemåten
