Trombone

• 1. Introduction

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  The trombone has been announcing the arrival of important people since the 16th century. In German city-states, trombonists were stationed in city towers to herald dignitaries, a duty that signalled wealth and civic power. The instrument they played was not quite the trombone we know today. It was the sackbut, a slightly narrower, less flared ancestor whose name first appears in English court records in 1495 as "shakbusshe". The French had called it "saqueboute" as early as 1466, and the Spanish "sacabuche" in 1478. What is this instrument, and how did it travel from a Renaissance watchtower to symphony halls, jazz clubs, and video game soundtracks? Those are the questions worth pursuing.

• 2. From Sackbut to Trombone

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  The sackbut emerged in the 15th century and spread across Europe, serving outdoor ceremonies, court concerts, and church services alike. Its principal role in a dance band was the contratenor part. Towns and courts sponsored ensembles of sackbuts alongside shawms, and more skilled players performed in groups like the alta capella wind ensembles and the first orchestral ensembles at places such as St Mark's Basilica in Venice in the early 17th century. Composers of that era who wrote for the instrument include Claudio Monteverdi, Heinrich Schutz, Giovanni Gabrieli, and his uncle Andrea Gabrieli. The sackbut declined across much of Europe by the mid to late 17th century. When it returned to common use in England in the 18th century, Italian music was so dominant that the instrument simply adopted its Italian name: trombone. That name is itself a compound of tromba, the Italian word for trumpet, and the augmentative suffix -one, meaning large. The word is an honest description: a large trumpet.

• 3. Bach, Gluck, and the Classical Stage

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  Johann Sebastian Bach called for a tromba di tirarsi, which may have been a form of the closely related slide trumpet, to carry the cantus firmus in liturgical cantatas. He also deployed a choir of four trombones to double the chorus in three cantatas: BWV 2, BWV 21, and BWV 38. George Frideric Handel also used trombones, though rarely. Christoph Willibald Gluck became the first major composer to feature the trombone in an opera overture, in his 1767 opera Alceste. He returned to it in Orfeo ed Euridice, Iphigenie en Tauride in 1779, and Echo et Narcisse. The earliest known independent trombone concerto is probably the Concerto for Alto Trombone and Strings in B-flat by Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, dating to 1769. Mozart used the instrument famously in Don Giovanni, where it appears in scenes featuring the Commendatore, and the solo trombone part in the Tuba Mirum of his Requiem became a standard audition piece. The earliest known symphony to include a trombone section is the Symphony in C minor by Anton Zimmermann, most probably from the 1770s, and the earliest confident date for the trombone's entry into the symphony is tied to Zimmermann's death in 1781.

• 4. Romantic Expansion

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  Symphony in E-flat by the Swedish composer Joachim Nicolas Eggert, written in 1807, featured an independent trombone part. Ludwig van Beethoven is sometimes mistakenly credited as the first to bring trombones into the orchestra; he used them in his Symphony No. 5 in C minor in 1808, his Symphony No. 6, and his Symphony No. 9. By the Romantic era, the trombone appeared in works by Felix Mendelssohn, Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, Gioacchino Rossini, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, and others. The standard section that took hold by the mid-19th century in most countries was two tenor trombones and one bass. The Germans and Austrians kept the alto trombone somewhat longer than the French, who preferred three tenors until after the Second World War. Richard Wagner pushed further, adding a contrabass trombone to Der Ring des Nibelungen, and both Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss added a second bass trombone to the conventional trio. The majority of orchestral works today are still scored for the mid- to late-19th-century arrangement of two tenor trombones, one bass trombone, and one tuba.

• 5. Leipzig, Pedagogy, and Sattler

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  Leipzig became a hub of trombone teaching in the Romantic era, anchored by the Musikhochschule that Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy founded. Mendelssohn's own bass trombonist, Karl Traugott Queisser, became the first in a distinguished line of professors there. Several composers wrote works for Queisser, among them Mendelssohn's concertmaster Ferdinand David, who composed his Concertino for Trombone and Orchestra in 1837, as well as Ernst Sachse and Friedrich August Belcke. Queisser also championed the tenor-bass trombone designed by Christian Friedrich Sattler during the 1840s, spreading its use through orchestras across Germany and Austria. Sattler's influence on the instrument's physical form was substantial: he introduced a significantly larger bore, which the source describes as the most important innovation since the Renaissance, along with Schlangenverzierungen (snake decorations), the bell garland, and a wide bell flare. These features were widely copied in the 19th century and remain characteristic of German-made trombones. Sattler also developed the valve attachment in the late 1830s for a B-flat tenor trombone he had built with wider bore and larger bell. His attachment added roughly three feet of tubing to lower the fundamental pitch from B-flat to F, controlled by a rotary valve, and the design is essentially unchanged in modern instruments.

• 6. Wind Bands, Jazz, and Virtuosi

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  Wind bands began taking shape during the French Revolution of 1791 and have always included trombones in some form. By the 19th century, these ensembles included circus bands, military bands, brass bands centred primarily in the United Kingdom, and town bands centred primarily in the United States. Berlioz's 1840 Grande symphonie funebre et triomphale gave the trombone the entirety of its second movement as a solo. Toward the end of the 19th century, trombone soloists began appearing in American wind bands, and Arthur Pryor, who played in John Philip Sousa's band before forming his own, was among the most celebrated. In the early 20th century, the instrument and the tuba were taking bass lines and outlining chords to support improvisation by higher-pitched players. The trombone began to emerge as a solo voice during the swing era of the mid-1920s, with Jack Teagarden and J. J. Johnson among the earliest prominent soloists. In contemporary experimental music, John Cage's collaboration with Frank Rehak, Solo for sliding trombone, written in 1957-58, and Luciano Berio's Sequenza V for solo trombone in 1966 influenced a generation of composers and performers including Stuart Dempster, Vinko Globokar, and Mike Svoboda.

• 7. The Slide and How It Works

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  The trombone's defining feature is its telescoping slide, which lengthens the tubing and lowers the pitch. The modern system of seven chromatic slide positions was first described by Andre Braun around 1795. Joseph Frohlich wrote in 1811 on the difference between this system and an older approach using four diatonic positions, in which the instrument was typically keyed to A. Each successive position outward lowers the note by one semitone when played in the same partial. The slide enables one of the instrument's most distinctive effects: the glissando. Because the airflow and sound production are uninterrupted, the trombone can produce a true glissando across a continuous range. Every pitch in a glissando must share the same harmonic number, and a tritone is the largest interval achievable. The trombone glissando appears in jazz, popular music, and most famously in the song "The Stripper" by David Rose and his orchestra. The same cylindrical bore that enables the slide also allows microtonality in contemporary experimental playing. Trills, by contrast, are genuinely difficult: a trill on B-flat 3 and C4 is essentially impossible because the slide must move two full positions, but an octave higher those same notes can both be reached in first position as a lip trill.

• 8. The Trombone's Many Faces

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  The contrabass trombone, the lowest of the family, first appeared in B-flat-flat an octave below the tenor with a double slide. Wagner commissioned that design in the 1870s for his Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle. Since the late 20th century it has been largely replaced by a single-slide instrument pitched in F, and the contrabass has found a revival in the 21st century in film and video game soundtracks. The cimbasso, covering the same range as a tuba or contrabass trombone, traces back to early 19th-century Italian opera scores. The modern cimbasso first appeared as the trombone basso Verdi in the 1880s and has similarly found a 21st-century home in film, television, and video game music. Soprano trombones have seldom been used since their first known appearance in 1677, except in Moravian Church trombone choirs, though jazz artists Wycliffe Gordon and Christian Scott are among a small number of contemporary advocates. The pBone and Tromba plastic trombone emerged in the 2010s as cheaper, more robust alternatives; initially viewed as novelties, they have since become recognised as practice tools and affordable entry instruments. At the Romantic-era end of the curiosity spectrum sits the buccin, a French tenor trombone with a bell terminating in a zoomorphic dragon or serpent head, for which Berlioz wrote in his Messe solennelle of 1824.