Trumpet

• 1. Introduction

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  The trumpet is a brass instrument with a history stretching back to at least 2000 BC, and yet it took more than three thousand years before anyone thought to use it in music. For most of its existence, it was a tool of war and ritual, a device for sending signals across battlefields and temple courtyards. Tutankhamun was buried with two of them, one bronze and one silver. Salpinx contests were held at the original Olympic Games. The Shofar, made from a ram's horn, still sounds on certain religious days. So what finally pulled the trumpet out of the parade ground and onto the concert stage? And once musicians got hold of it, what did they do with it that nobody had imagined before?

• 2. Ancient Signals

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  Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt held both a bronze and a silver trumpet, placing the instrument in royal burial rites more than three thousand years ago. The Oxus civilization of Central Asia, flourishing in the 3rd millennium BC, produced trumpets with decorated swellings in the middle, formed from a single sheet of metal, a technical achievement considered remarkable for its time. In Scandinavia, bronze lurs served similar ceremonial functions, while metal trumpets appeared in China during the same broad era.

  The ancient Greek Salpinx was a straight trumpet 62 inches long, constructed of bone or bronze. Homer's Iliad, written in the 9th or 8th century BC, contains the earliest written reference to its sound. From that point onward, descriptions of the Salpinx appear throughout the Classical Period. Competitors in Salpinx playing competed at the original Olympic Games, which places the trumpet at the center of one of antiquity's great public spectacles.

  The Shofar, made from a ram's horn, and the chazozra, made of metal, both appear in the Bible. Tradition holds that they were played in Solomon's Temple around three thousand years ago. Far to the west, the Moche people of ancient Peru were depicting trumpets in their ceramic art as early as AD 300, suggesting that this basic impulse to take a long resonating tube and blow through it arose independently across multiple civilizations. All of these instruments shared a common function: not to make music, but to be heard at a distance, to command attention, to mark a boundary between the sacred and the ordinary.

• 3. From Signals to Music

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  Improvements in metalworking and instrument design during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance changed what the trumpet could do. Natural trumpets of that era were coiled tubes without valves, capable of producing only the notes of a single overtone series. Changing keys required swapping out a section of the instrument called a crook.

  A group of specialist trumpeters discovered the upper register of the instrument, called the clarino register. Cesare Bendinelli was among the notable figures who developed technique in this register, and their work opened a rich vein of virtuoso music written specifically for trumpeters during the Baroque era. Historians have called this period the Golden Age of the natural trumpet. Interest in the natural trumpet was revived in the mid-20th century, and many players today in Germany and the United Kingdom who perform Baroque music use versions fitted with three or four vent holes to help correct out-of-tune notes in the harmonic series.

  The arrival of the Classical and Romantic periods brought a harder stretch for the instrument. With its fixed pitches, the natural trumpet struggled to keep up with the harmonic ambitions of the era's composers. Hector Berlioz, writing in 1844, quoted the prevailing attitude bluntly: every composer, he said, including Mozart, had persisted in confining the trumpet to the unworthy function of filling up, or in causing it to sound two or three commonplace rhythmical formulae. The person who would change this situation was the Viennese instrument maker Anton Weidinger, who in the 1790s developed the first successful keyed trumpet capable of playing chromatically. Joseph Haydn's Trumpet Concerto was written for Weidinger in 1796 and startled audiences with its novelty, particularly its stepwise melodies played in the instrument's low register.

• 4. How a Trumpet Works

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  Pressing a trumpet to the lips turns it into a closed tube. A player produces sound by vibrating the lips in the mouthpiece, creating a buzzing sound that starts a standing wave in the air column inside the instrument. Because of this closed-tube physics, the instrument naturally produces only every other overtone of the harmonic series. The shape of the bell is what makes the missing overtones audible.

  The most common trumpet, pitched in B, has a tubing length of about 1.48 meters. Most modern instruments have three valves, and sometimes four. Pressing the first valve lowers pitch by a whole step, or two semitones. The second valve lowers pitch by a half step, one semitone. The third lowers pitch by one and a half steps, three semitones. Used in combination, these three valves provide eight possible combinations but only seven distinct tubing lengths, because the third valve alone produces the same tube length as pressing the first and second together. A fourth valve, when present, typically lowers pitch by a perfect fourth, which is five semitones.

  The mouthpiece itself shapes the sound before it ever enters the main tube. Behind the rim sits the cup, which channels air into the back bore. A wider, deeper cup produces a darker tone. The tuning slide allows the player to raise or lower overall pitch by pushing it in or pulling it out. Renold Schilke designed a specialized tuning-bell trumpet that addressed intonation problems by removing the brace between the bell and the valve body and inserting a slide in the bell section itself, allowing the regular tuning slide to stay fully pushed in and improving the instrument's overall response.

• 5. A Family of Instruments

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  Maurice Andre, Hakan Hardenberger, David Mason, and Wynton Marsalis are among the players celebrated for virtuosity on the piccolo trumpet, a form with tubing exactly half the length of the standard B instrument, placing its sound an octave higher. Piccolo trumpets are built to play in both B and A, with separate leadpipes for each key, and almost all piccolo versions carry four valves rather than three.

  At the other end of the family sits the bass trumpet, pitched an octave below the standard B or C instrument. Its mouthpiece resembles that of a trombone, and the instrument is usually played by trombonists. Most bass trumpets are pitched in either C or B. Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, and Anton Bruckner all wrote for trumpets pitched in the key of low F during the nineteenth century, though those parts are typically played on B or C trumpets today.

  David Monette designed the flumpet in 1989 for jazz musician Art Farmer. It crosses a trumpet with a flugelhorn, pitched in B and using three piston valves. The flugelhorn has tubing even more conical than that of the cornet, producing an even mellower tone than either the cornet or the trumpet, though all three share the same B pitch and three-valve layout. The pocket trumpet, associated famously with jazz musician Don Cherry, compresses the tubing into a more tightly wound shape without reducing the total tube length, preserving the instrument's pitch while fitting it into a smaller physical package. The herald trumpet, with a straight bell section long enough to display a hanging banner, is built specifically for ceremonial events like parades and fanfares.

• 6. Jazz and Extended Technique

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  Louis Armstrong's recordings with the Hot Five and Hot Seven groups established his reputation for virtuosity and improvisation in early jazz. His switch from cornet to trumpet is widely credited with shifting the balance of the two instruments, leading to the trumpet's dominance over the cornet in jazz thereafter. Dizzy Gillespie built on the style of Roy Eldridge and added new layers of harmonic complexity to his playing, operating in an extremely high register. Gillespie had a wide influence, both through his own playing and through his role as a mentor to younger musicians. Miles Davis, considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, shaped generations of jazz musicians through his phrasing and his use of space within a solo. Maynard Ferguson came to prominence in Stan Kenton's orchestra before forming his own band in 1957, known for playing accurately at a remarkably high register.

  Contemporary composers have pushed the trumpet into territory that its Renaissance players could not have anticipated. Flutter tonguing requires the player to roll the tip of the tongue as if pronouncing the Spanish letter R, producing a growling tone. Composers Berio and Stockhausen both used this technique extensively. Circular breathing allows the player to store air in the cheeks and inhale through the nose simultaneously, producing an uninterrupted tone without pausing to breathe. Multi-phonics involve sustaining one note while humming a different pitch at the same time. Valve tremolo exploits the fact that many notes can be produced by more than one combination of valves, alternating between combinations to create a tremolo effect; Berio made extended use of this in his Sequenza X. Ibrahim Maalouf plays a trumpet fitted with a fourth valve invented by his father, which provides a quarter-tone step between each note and makes it possible to play Arab maqams. Claude Gordon incorporated pedal tones into his systematic practice routines, building on lessons from Herbert L. Clarke; the technique itself was pioneered by Bohumir Kryl.