Slide trumpet

(Fr. trompette à coulisse; Ger. Zugtrompete; It. tromba da tirarsi).

A trumpet fitted with a slide mechanism whereby the length of the instrument can be altered while it is being played, thus making it possible to fill in gaps in the natural harmonic scale (it is classified as an aerophone: chromatic trumpet). It was used on the Continent during the Renaissance and Baroque periods and, in another design, in England in the 17th and the 19th centuries.

According to evidence first presented by Sachs and later refined by Polk, Höfler, Welker and others, the Renaissance slide trumpet was made with the mouthpiece attached to a long cylindrical mouthpipe that telescoped inside the instrument’s first length of tubing (seefig.1). The player held the mouthpiece against his lips with one hand, moving the instrument back and forth on the mouthpipe with his other hand; depending on the length of the instrument, three or four positions were obtainable. When the instrument was in a closed position, it could scarcely be distinguished from the contemporary natural trumpet.

The straight natural trumpet was already in use in Flanders around 1330–50 in the alta (see Alta (i)), the basic formation of which soon consisted of a shawm, a tenor shawm and a trumpet. Shortly before 1400 instrument makers learned to bend brass tubing; the earliest documentation of an S-shaped trumpet is a carving from the Worcester choir stalls, dated 1379 (the dating c1397 in Galpin, Old English Instruments of Music, 4/1965, 149 seems to be a misprint). The single-slide trumpet seems to have been introduced shortly afterwards – according to Polk (1997) between 1400 and 1420, probably first in Burgundy, then in the Cologne-Flanders area – and was soon ubiquitous. It was used until the invention of the double slide around 1490 (this date according to Baines (1951) and Höfler; not earlier, despite Downey’s reservations 1993), after which time the trombone gradually took over the single-slide trumpet’s former function.

During this roughly 100-year period many shapes of slide trumpet co-existed: straight (both short and long, one of which can be seen in Hans Memling’s Nájera organ doors from c1490, fig.1); U-shaped (from an illustrated Bible from Padua, late 14th century, GB-Lbl Ms.15277, f. 34); S-shaped (perhaps best exemplified by Michael Pacher’s carving of two angel trumpeters from an altar showing the Coronation of the Virgin, from 1471–81, St Wolfgang im Salzkammergut, St Wolfgang); very long with a short folded section (as in the Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry, c1411/1413–16, F-CH MS 65; see Trumpet, fig.10b); folded with the non-parallel tubing lying in a kind of loop (popular in the north, as in the Memling painting mentioned above); and folded with parallel tubing like the later Baroque trumpet (from mid-century and possibly called ‘clareta’ or ‘clarette’). There were also ‘proto-trombones’ with a single slide and in which the second bend of tubing lies behind the player’s head (for example in a painting of the Coronation of the Virgin by the Master of the Life of the Virgin, c1480 in Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen). With all due caution Höfler has determined on the basis of surviving illustrations that the lengths of such instruments could have been about 120 cm at the beginning of the 15th century, about 180 cm towards mid-century and later, and about 240–360 cm at the end of the century.

Terminology and nomenclature in a period of transition are always problematic. Early mentions of ‘pusun’, for example in Basle in 1410, could refer to either the long straight trumpet or perhaps the slide trumpet; ‘trompette saicqueboute’, in Burgundy in 1468, probably meant a slide trumpet, not yet the trombone; and various scholars including Höfler, Welker and McGee have shown that the brass instrument depicted on the Florentine ‘Adimari wedding chest’ of c1443–65 can no longer be termed a trombone, as had previously been thought (for illustration see Alta (i)). By 1422 the trumpet in the alta – perhaps already a slide trumpet – was apparently known at the Burgundian court as the trompette des ménestrels to distinguish it from the natural trumpet or trompette de guerre. In Spain, where the alta consisted of four ‘ministrers de xalamies’ (shawms) and one ‘trompeta de ministriers’ as early as 1418, the slightly later term ‘trompeta bastarda’ probably referred to the slide trumpet.

The close connection between slide trumpet and trombone should not be surprising, since both instruments were then played in the alto-tenor range. Johannes de Grocheio (De musica, c1300) showed that the trumpet played predominantly in the second octave of the harmonic series, the octave in which prime, 5th and octave are present.

In addition, trumpet style for secular instrumental music was described in an early 15th-century German treatise (PL-WRu, IV.Qu.16, f.148): ‘Trumpetum and stampania may have two or three parts and wander frequently to the 5th or the diapason, i.e. the octave, in the manner of a trumpet [tube] or a lyre’.

Johannes Tinctoris (De inventione et usu musicae, c1487) stated that the alta performed for church festivals, the weddings and banquets of the nobility, and for numerous other festivities both public and private, sacred and secular, ‘very gracefully and with rich invention’. The usual repertory of the alta consisted of basses danses, in which the slide trumpet generally played the contratenor part with its characteristic leaps. The music was generally memorized or even partially improvised, but it could also be written out. The repertory of the ship’s trumpeter Zorzi from c1444–9 contains various tenor and contratenor parts (GB-Lbl Ms. Cotton Titus A XXVI); in 1447–8 he was joined by two pipers, Girardo and Borttolomaio.

Certain 15th-century church compositions by Grossin, Loqueville, Lantins, Franchois de Gemblaco, Fontaine and others include the indication ‘trompetto’ or ‘tuba’ (chiefly in the contratenor parts) (see Heyde and Safowitz). Although it has been suggested that these parts may have been performed on other instruments in imitation of the slide trumpet, scholars now consider them to have been vocal imitations of the instrument. It was not until late in the century that wind instruments combined with voices.

Some later illustrations of slide trumpets, notably one in Jost Amman’s Stände und Handwerker (Frankfurt, 1568), include a cross-piece with which the player seems to manipulate a double slide (fig.3). Thus the question is raised as to whether slide trumpets were always exclusively of the single-slide type.

The Türmer Horn (‘tower watchman’s horn’) depicted in the early 16th century by Virdung (Musica getutscht, 1511) and Martin Agricola (Musica instrumentalis deudsch, 1529) may have been a slide trumpet. Trumpeters had been installed as tower watchmen as early as 1376 in Görlitz; the more usual terms were Zugtrompete and tromba da tirarsi. A Kassel inventory of 1573 recorded ‘three German trumpets with their slides and mouthpieces’ and another from 1601 mentioned two ‘slide [Zugk] trumpets’. Thus it seems unlikely that the slide trumpet was invented in 1648 by the Weimar court conductor Adam Drese, as Downey has provocatively suggested. Still another inventory from the Wenzelskirche in Naumburg in 1658 spoke of ‘two brand-new slide trumpets’. The only surviving example of such an instrument came to a Berlin collection (Musikinstrumenten-Museum, Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung) in 1890 from that church; made in 1651 by Huns Veit of Naumburg, it is pitched in modern E and has a single slide nearly 56 cm long (seefig.2a). G.C. Wecker, Kuhnau, J.S. Bach and J.L. Krebs wrote music for the slide trumpet; Gottfried Reiche owned one when he died in 1734. J.E. Altenburg (letter of 1767; Versuch, 1795) referred to the slide trumpet as used by tower watchmen and by Kunstpfeifer to play chorales. Another version of the slide trumpet, called the Flat trumpet, was used in England in the late 17th century.

Towards the end of the 18th century in England a type of slide trumpet was developed in which the bend of tubing nearest the player’s chin was a slide that could be drawn towards the player by a finger cross-piece on a bar fixed lengthwise inside the loop of tubing (seefig.4). John Hyde, in his New and Compleat Preceptor for the Trumpet & Bugle Horn (London, c1798), described one of the earliest instruments of this type as a ‘Chromatic Trumpet … invented by J. Hyde, and made by Woodham’ that allowed every note of the harmonic series to be lowered one semitone. The early models had a double watch-spring mechanism to return the slide to its normal position; later ones from about 1860 used a band of rubber. Surviving examples of ‘Harper’s Improved’ model, licensed to John Köhler of London in 1833, are of both types (Bate Collection, Oxford). The standard English slide trumpet was in F, with crooks to lower the pitch to E, E, D or C (or by combining crooks, to D, B, B or A) and had sufficient length in the slide to lower the pitch of open notes by a semitone or, in some instances, by a whole tone. Despite the advent of valved trumpets and cornets, English players – notably the Harpers, father and son – continued to play the slide trumpet throughout the century, taking up the cornet only occasionally for passages of great technical intricacy. In 1890, W. Wyatt introduced a doubly folded slide trumpet with more positions (an instrument of this type is now in the Padbrook collection.). Two other English variants were the large-bore short-model slide trumpet with a double fold, first built in 1815 (known as the Regent’s bugle) and the ‘patent ortho-chromatic slide trumpet’ with forward-extending slide, manufactured by Boosey about 1892.

In France the noted trumpeter J.D. Buhl rejected a German slide trumpet by Haltenhof of Hanau, brought to France in 1823, because of its cumbersome slide mechanism. However, in the mid-19th century Adolphe Sax in Paris made a slide trumpet of the English type, with a single watch-spring mechanism (now in the Bernoulli collection, Historisches Museum, Basle, Switzerland). F.G.A. Dauverné developed an instrument with the slide located in the bend nearest the bell, so that its movement was away from the player; six positions were possible. Courtois and Sax manufactured instruments of this type but French players preferred the cornet à pistons and the slide trumpet was generally little used in France.

An unusual type of slide trumpet, with two double bends of tubing (now in the collection of the Stadtmuseum, Munich), was made in about 1820 by Michael Saurle of Munich (fig.2b). Of the two bends in the tubing at the bell end of the trumpet, the inside one can be used as a tuning-slide and the outside one as a double-slide mechanism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

H. Besseler: ‘Die Entstehung der Posaune’, AcM, xxii (1950), 7–35

C. Sachs: ‘Chromatic Trumpets in the Renaissance’, MQ, xxxvi (1950), 62–6

A. Baines: ‘Two Cassel Inventories’, GSJ, iv (1951), 30–38

E. Bowles: ‘Haut and Bas: the Grouping of Musical Instruments in the Middle Ages’, MD, viii (1954), 115–40

D. Heartz: ‘The Basse dance: its Evolution circa 1450–1550’,AnnM, vi (1958–63), 287–340

C.A. Hoover: ‘The Slide Trumpet of the Nineteenth Century’, Brass Quarterly, vi (1962–3), 159

H. Heyde: Trompete und Trompeteblasen im europäischen Mittelalter(diss., U. of Leipzig, 1965)

V. Safowitz: Trumpet Music and Trumpet Style in the Early Renaissance(diss., U. of Illinois, 1965)

D. Altenburg: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Trompete im Zeitalter der Clarinblaskunst (1500–1800) (Regensburg, 1973)

D.L. Smithers: The Music and History of the Baroque Trumpet before 1721(London, 1973, 2/1988)

A. Baines: Brass Instruments (London, 1976/R)

E. Tarr: Die Trompete (Berne, 1977, 3/1994; Eng. trans., 1988)

J. Höfler: ‘Der “Trompette de menestrels” und sein Instrument’,TVNM, xxix (1979), 92–132

S. Žak: Musik als ‘Ehr und Zier’ im mittelalterlichen Reich: Studien zur Musik im höfischen Leben: Recht und Zeremoniell (Neuss,1979)

D. Leech-Wilkinson: ‘Il libro di appunti di un suonatore di tromba del quindicesimo secolo’, RIM, xvi (1981), 16–39

L. Welker: ‘“Alta Capella”: Zur Ensemblepraxis der Blasinstrumente im 15. Jahrhundert’, Basler Jb für historische Musikpraxis, vii (1983), 119–65

P. Downey: ‘The Renaissance Slide Trumpet: Fact or Fiction?’,Early Music, xii (1984), 26–33

P. Barton: ‘The Woodham-Rodenbostel Slide Trumpet and Others Employing the “Clock-Spring” Mechanism’, GSJ, xlii (1989), 112–20

R. Duffin: ‘The “trompette des ménestrels” in the 15th Century “Alta Capella”’, EMc, xvii (1989), 397–402

H. Myers: ‘Slide trumpet madness: fact or fiction?, ibid., 383–9

K. Polk: ‘The Trombone, the Slide Trumpet and the Ensemble Tradition of the Early Renaissance’, ibid., 389–97

P. Downey: ‘Adam Drese’s 1648 Funeral Music and the Invention of the Slide Trumpet’, Irish Musical Studies, i: Musicology in Ireland, ed. G. Gillen and H. White (Dublin, 1990), 200–17

R. Meucci: ‘On the Early History of the Trumpet in Italy’,Basler Jb für historische Musikpraxis, xv (1991), 9–34, esp. 19–25

K. Polk: German Instrumental Music of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge,1992)

P. Downey: ‘“In tubis ductilibus et voce tubae”: Trumpets, Slides and Performance Practices in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe’, Irish Musical Studies, ii: Music and the Church, ed. G. Gillen and H. White (Blackrock, 1993), 302–32

E.H. Tarr: ‘The Romantic Trumpet’, HBSJ, v (1993), 213–61

J. Webb: ‘The English Slide Trumpet’, ibid., 262–79

T.J. McGee: ‘Misleading Iconography: the Case of the “Adimari Wedding Cassone”’, Imago Musicae, ix–xii (1992–5), 139–57

A. Brownlow: The Last Trumpet: a Survey of the History and Literature of the English Slide Trumpet (Stuyvesant, NY, 1996)

K. Polk: ‘Art Music in the Middle Ages’, Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments, ed. T. Herbert and J. Wallace (Cambridge,1997), 38–50

R. Duffin: ‘Backward Bells and Barrel Bells’, HBSJ, ix (1997), 113–29

EDWARD H. TARR