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Early Music
the modern establishment of Baroque orches- in England, building harpsichords and lutes, form-
tras using historical instruments, the trumpet has ing gamba and recorder consorts, as well as publish-
posed particularly intractable problems. Through- ing editions from sources in British libraries. What
out the 18th and 19th centuries all instruments is less well known is that he also trained as a violinist,
underwent alterations, but none was altered to the pianist and musicologist at the Brussels Conserva-
extent that the trumpet was. The last two centuries tory, where he came into contact with the influen-
of development have completely changed their shape tial musical thinker, brass instrument-maker and
and the way in which they are played. The invention factory-owner Victor-Charles Mahillon (1842-1924).
of valves created fully chromatic instruments that Mahillon had been collecting, studying the acoustics
could be as little as a quarter of the length of their of instruments and even copying old instruments
Baroque equivalents. Mouthpieces became signifi- for many years.1 He was the first conservator of the
cantly smaller. Not only did the trumpet's shape and Brussels instrument museum, and created the clas-
function change radically but the techniques specific sification system adopted by Curt Sachs and Erich
to Baroque trumpet playing became outmoded and von Hornbostel;2 he reproduced and experimented
forgotten. Given these changes, any revival of the with many obsolete instruments, and had a particu-
Baroque instrument was going to be extremely dif- lar interest in natural trumpets.
ficult. My purpose here is to document the major The renewal of interest in early music in Germany
features of this revival. was perhaps more academic, with intellectuals such
A renewed interest in the history of all the arts, as Philipp Spitta (1841-94) laying down new standards
including music, may be observed in the newly of scholarship, examining primary musicological
industrialized nations of northern Europe from the sources, producing a biography of Bach,3 helping to
middle of the 19th century onwards. In Britain, for found the first Bachverein in Goettingen University
example, the Arts and Crafts Movement of the 1880s and establishing the first journal of musicology.4
emerged as a reaction to the social upheaval and Germany also had some practical experimenters
environmental degradation caused by industriali- such as Hermann Ludwig Eichborn (1847-1918),
zation and the disproportionate opulence it created who wrote very knowledgeably indeed about the his-
for a minority. Men such as John Ruskin (1819-1900) tory of the trumpet,5 and as a player experimented
and William Morris (1834-96) championed the with old instruments, reflecting a growing interest in
return to Gothic architecture, to medieval design historical music practice. Whether his extensive the-
and simplicity, to craftsmanship and community. oretical knowledge resulted in any kind of perform-
It is well known that the French-born Arnoldances on natural trumpets, I am unable to establish
Dolmetsch (1858-1940) was befriended and encour-
with certainty.
aged both by Morris and the writer and music criticIt is difficult now for us to imagine the suspi-
cion and contempt in the early decades of the
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) shortly after his
arrival in London in 1883. Dolmetsch had received
20th century from those within the musical estab-
lishment towards practitioners who were trying
an initial training as a craftsman in his father's piano
and harmonium factory in Le Mans. He subse-
to escape the confines of the canon of Romantic
literature and interpretation. Viola da gamba
quently became a leader in the revival of early music
Early Music, Vol. xxxvm, No. 2 © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. 1Q
doi:10.1093/em/caq026, available online at www.em.oxfordjournals.org
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
3 Long model with one vent-hole (Meinl und Lauber catalogue, 1975)
trumpets using mainly seamless machine-drawn least attentive listener hears when a brass player
tubing and modern mouthpieces. Rather unsur- makes a mistake. With the advent of the compact
prisingly, even though they are acoustically reli- disc, the listener was replaced by the consumer,
able, when used with modern mouthpieces they largely oblivious to the fact the most of the records
can sound quite close to modern trumpets. The he or she hears are made up of hundreds, sometimes
sound of the instrument is generally regarded as even thousands of sequences stiched together with
being superior to the German model mentioned all the mistakes edited out. For the unsuspecting
above. It retains the authentic shape of the 18th- public, this forgery of reality became the benchmark
century trumpet, and the use of an alterna- by which live music came to be judged and as a con-
tive second yard without any vent-holes gives it sequence of which musicians created techniques
an advantage over the German model in that it to reduce the risk. The vent-hole trumpet that was
can be easily converted back into a true natural developed in this cultural context represents the
trumpet. cultural norm of its time. Beta-blockers, banned in
In the large-scale performances that took place sport but apparently not on the concert platform,
between the 1960s and the 1990s, a plethora of small represent another aspect of the same aversion to
infelicities on a bassoon or a violin might have risk. Market forces tended to prevail inevitably on
occurred without drawing attention, but even the the side of caution, reducing risk and producing
the quickest marketable result; this was the era of its assailants started to become blurred. Orchestral
Deutsche Gramophone, Telefunken and Harmonia managers started to appear. The novelty and fresh-
Mundi. The 'new' Baroque trumpet reflected the ness of a 'craftsmanship of risk' under Leonhardt
socio-economic values of the epoch. and Harnoncourt in the 1970s evolved into a more
Very few trumpeters were lucky enough to have the professional, if at times somewhat slick movement
combination of economic independence, stubborn in the 1980s and 1990s, risk being supplanted by
moral persistence and historical overview to resist the professionalism, jigs and widgets, gadgetry and
tide of 'progress'. As musicological study and icono- 'know-how'. Hardly anyone would now bat an eye-
graphical knowledge concerning the trumpet grew in lid at vent-holes since this was part of the accepted
the 1980s, the gulf between the modern-day approach way of doing things, now part of the canon, part of
and the historical practice seemed to widen. Almost the professionalism necessary to get the job done -
alone, like a prophet in the wilderness, stood Don the job being ideally to reproduce the CD in a con-
Smithers, the American trumpeter and scholar, berat- cert setting. Even if the trumpet was by no means the
ing his colleagues for their deviant practices. only instrument in the orchestra to be making his-
Early music, emerging as a reactionary movement torical compromises, it was making the largest one.
in the 1960s in opposition to the established canon of With the satiation of the CD market in the 1990s
Classical music, experienced enormous growth and and the downsizing of ensembles, partly as a result
popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. However, its very of musicological research and partly economic con-
appeal and success made it a target for the forces of straint, a new phase began, one in which the estab-
marketing so that it became increasingly incorpo- lished core values of the then Baroque trumpet were
rated into the recording industry and the festival finally challenged. One of the problems confronting
circuit. Thus the distinction between the canon and those using vent-hole trumpets, modern mouthpieces
7 Trumpet by William Bull, c.1700, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (photo: G. Nicholson, 2006)
After a postgraduate degree in musicology at King's College London, Graham Nicholson studied Baroque
trumpet with Edward Tarr at the Schola Cantorum in Basel He has researched intensively the lost art of
clarino playing, and the making of natural trumpets with the quality of craftsmanship available to the
18th-century musician, graham.nicholson@inter.nl.net
(Leipzig, 1881). s