Trumpet Instruments
Trumpet Instruments Fast Facts
Although various types of trumpet (made from conch-shells, horn, wood, and even metal) have been used for thousands of years, the instrument as we know it today was developed from the military and ceremonial trumpets of the Renaissance. They were used for sending military signals, and for fanfares to announce the presence of kings and princes – indeed, for a long time the trumpet was regarded as a ‘royal’ instrument and not to be used for anything as commonplace as the performance of music. In military circles it came to be closely associated with the corps of drums, and when finally it joined the orchestra it tended at first to take an accompanying drum with it.
A Brief History of the Trumpet Instrument
The word trumpet is a diminutive of trumpe,
a larger instrument which, according to certain specialists, will have
the privilege of announcing the Last Judgment. In Chaucer’s 14th century
the trumpet was called beme to distinguish it from the large
trumpe and the smaller clarioun. The root fo the word comes from
the Greek strombos, sea shell.
The history of the trumpet has at least one unusual feature. While most
instruments of the orchestra gained in stature and interest when they
came out of the cold into the concert hall, the trumpet did not. Previously
it had held an elevated and respected role in the highest society, with
an interesting repertoire; when admitted to the orchestra the trumpet
declined into the obscurity of pronouncing banal clichés, doubling and
low grade filling-in. Berlioz expressed the whole sorry slither in his
Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration: ‘Notwithstanding
the real loftiness and distinguished nature of its quality of tone, there
are few instruments that have been more degraded than the trumpet. Down
to Beethoven and Weber, every composer – not excepting Mozart – persisted
in confining it to the unworthy function of filling up, or in causing
it to sound two or three commonplace rhythmical formulae…This detestable
practice is at last abandoned.’ Indeed, a glimpse at the scores of Beethoven’s
‘Eroica’ Symphony of Egmont overture will at once show how boring
the life of an orchestral trumpeter could be in classical music.
The high status and associations with magical power that the trumpet enjoyed
in antiquity was not confined to Europe but was widespread. The earliest
pictorial representation of the true trumpet with a narrow cylindrical
bore dates from about 2200 BC. Early instruments are usually discovered
or depicted in pairs. This has sometimes been interpreted as of purely
magical significance, but since it has been found that each instrument
of the pair was of different length, it may be simply that the ancients
had a good grasp of the harmonic series and that the pairing was a method
of obtaining a larger number of notes. (On the other hand, the phenomenon
of harmony itself may have had religious significance.) ‘Tut’s toots’,
as the BBC Sound Archive staff called recordings of those trumpets discovered
in Tutankhamen’s tomb, are an example: one blows a whole tone lower than
the other.
The evidence of paired trumpets employed in sacred, sacrificial and other
special rites and ceremonies abounds from the time of the 14th century
BC when the invention of the trumpet was ascribed to the god Osiris, a
deity symbolizing good and sunlight. Thereafter trumpets were increasingly
associated with the panoply of special events, including warfare; the
Celts are reported to have blasted the courage out of the enemy by the
sound of their carnyx, a form of trumpet terminating in a carved figure
of a boar’s head. Later, the Islamic world shouted with multitudes of
trumpets. In fact no cultivated community or race was ever without trumpeters
– there are still State Trumpeters in Britain today.
The elegant aspect of the early straight trumpet was something to hang
banners on, which is what happened in the princely and ducal courts of
Europe in the early 13th century. Soon the instrument was made S-shaped
for easier handling; the center of gravity was thus shifted and the stance
of the player became one degree less elegant. As the centuries passed
the center of gravity was moved to a few inches in front of the player’s
face, until he could sit down and play. So let’s play!
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