Trumpet built or adapted to play in ‘flat’, i.e. minor, keys. The term, and presumably the instrument, was used in England only for a brief period, between about 1690 and 1720. No original flat trumpets survive, nor are there any reliable iconographical sources; the best evidence is James Talbot's description (transcribed in Baines and Smithers). Unlike the continental Slide trumpet, which itself glided up and down the mouthpipe, the flat trumpet he examined had a J-shaped double slide that pulled out backwards past the player's left ear; to allow this, the trumpet was held at a slant, bell pointing to the right, and the mouthpiece plugged into a cranked mouthpipe. The shorter arm moved inside the trumpet's bell-yard (the straight section of tube ending in the bell) reaching as far as the boss (ornamental ball) when the slide was shut up tight. The longer arm fitted over the middle yard, sliding outside it and in closed position covering it completely.
Talbot
does not mention any sort of mechanism for moving the slide. The overall length
of the flat trumpet ‘with the yards shutt’ was the same as the ‘common trumpet’
(the trumpet in E
).
Yet Talbot's chart of slide positions ascends chromatically from c to c''',
and the notes of the C major arpeggio (e apart) are all played with the
slide fully pushed in. The chart may have been obtained from John Shore, as
were the ordinary trumpet scale and the cornett fingerings; either Shore used a
crook to bring his instrument down to C or else transposed the results for
easier reading. As a guide to flat trumpet playing technique the chart must be
interpreted cautiously.
Shore, according to Roger North, invented a ‘screw or worme’ to control the movement of the slide on his concert instrument. He used this device instead of lipping ‘to aid the tuning [of] some notes’, and to play a number of ‘exotick’ (i.e. non-harmonic) notes otherwise beyond reach. How the screw worked, and whether Shore's special model counted as a flat trumpet too, are issues which remain unclear.
Only a very few late 17th-century scores call for flat trumpets explicitly. ‘Flat’ pieces like the March and Canzona of Henry Purcell's music for the funeral of Queen Mary are brief and mostly slow-moving, practicable on instruments of the Talbot type, however ungainly. But North's comments seem to suggest that shorter slides (slides with fewer positions) were also tried ‘to adapt [the trumpet] to consort’ rather than with the aim of achieving full chromaticism. Slide experiments of which Talbot knew only a little, and of which modern scholars know even less, might help to explain many apparent anomalies in English trumpet writing around the time of Purcell. The 19th-century English slide trumpet is clearly related to the flat trumpet, but whether it was independently re-invented or a conscious attempt to improve the earlier design is unknown.
A. Baines: ‘James Talbot's Manuscript, i: Wind Instruments (Christ Church Library Music MS 1187)’, GSJ, i (1948), 9–26
J. Wilson, ed.: Roger North on Music (London, 1959), 229
D. Smithers: The Music & History of the Baroque Trumpet before 1721 (London, 1973), 28–9, 225–7
M. Chan and J. Kassler, eds.: Roger North's Cursory Notes of Musicke (c. 1698–c. 1703): a Physical, Psychological and Critical Theory (Kensington, NSW, 1986), 119
A. Pinnock: ‘A Wider Role for the Flat Trumpet’, GSJ, xlii (1989), 105–11
D. Rycroft: ‘Flat Trumpet Facts and Figures’, GSJ, xlii (1989), 134–42
C. Steele-Perkins: ‘Practical Observations on Natural, Slide and Flat Trumpets’, GSJ, xlii (1989), 122–7
F. Tomes: ‘Flat Trumpet Experiments’, GSJ, xliii (1990), 164–5
J. Webb: ‘The Flat Trumpet in Perspective’, GSJ, xlvi (1993), 154–60
P. Downey: ‘Performing Mr. Purcell's “Exotick” Trumpet Notes’, Performing the Music of Henry Purcell, ed. M. Burden (Oxford, 1996), 49–60
ANDREW PINNOCK