Why “Baroque” trumpets with finger holes are not historical instruments

Prelude

Before we talk about the historical instrument that was the trumpet, I find it helpful to acknowledge the recent history of the musical world we live in.

The early music movement started as a group of intrepid musicians wanting to better understand the music of the baroque masters such as Bach and Handel. They started by finding strange old keyboard and string instruments, poorly understood with their contemporary knowledge, and devoted large effort to diligent research and practice in order to rediscover the lost skills and techniques that made these instruments work. This outsized effort made it therefore a predominantly niche exercise that was commercially limited. However, these musicians became more successful and were able to commercialize their skills making recordings and playing concerts. They formed bigger and bigger ensembles to play larger works and naturally needed other wind players including trumpeters to perform those Messiahs, Christmas Oratorios, and B minor Masses ever popular with audiences.

The end of the 19-century fundamentally changed trumpet design

While trumpets existed for millennia, they generally didn’t have the ability to play pitches outside the natural harmonic series. Starting before the renaissance and throughout the early romantic era, they were nominally 8’ long, the longer length allowing them to play higher up in the harmonic series where notes were close enough to play a melody. Since this set of pitches was musically quite limiting, the 19th century saw an explosion of innovation, and around the 1850’s valves became the standard way of turning trumpets into chromatic instruments capable of playing any note in any key.

I would argue the most fundamental change to the trumpet happened not with the initial invention of the valve, but just before the turn of the 20th century as an outgrowth of valve refinement. Early valves were added onto the known trumpet design and it took some time to redesign the instrument to optimize its new abilities. A good parallel is in the automotive industry with the earliest cars being horseless carriages.

The new generation of trumpets towards the end of the 19th century were at a nominal 4’ pitch, half the length of their predecessors. This nominal 4’ length made the natural harmonics in the playable range farther apart, making it therefore easier to play without missing notes; it also created the need for players to rely heavily on valves to fill in the notes missing from the harmonic series. The side effect of this shortening was these instruments sounded much brighter than their longer counterparts, so changes were made to both smooth out the air flow in order to round out the sound and also improve on the intonation issues presented by a shorter instrument (those familiar with modern day piccolo trumpets, nominally 2’, know they exhibit this same added brightness compared to our modern Bb and C trumpets). Whereas with an 8’ instrument, the player’s goal was to add brightness and resonance to the sound, the 4’ instruments had plenty of this and the player needed to add roundness and depth to the sound. The designs of trumpets were changed by adding conicity to more efficiently funnel large amounts of air through the instrument, aiding the creation of a darker tone. The conicity also made the difficulties of early, leaky valves more easily corrected by the player and one could therefore rely on more valve combinations to produce tones acceptably in-tune. This fundamental change of length and conicity affected all aspects of trumpet playing in the 20th century.

The mid-20th century reinvention of the Baroque trumpet

When trumpeters were trying to learn the historical trumpet to participate in the early music performances of the 60’s and 70’s they looked to the surviving antiques and found  historical instruments that behaved totally different than how they knew how to play.

In the end, those musicians who became successful in their careers succeed by redesigning the instruments to fit their fundamental 20th century understanding of how to play a trumpet. They added holes to correct the “out of tune” harmonics  (the 11th and 13th harmonics, which are between f/f# and g#/a respectively), and then enlarged the bore to enable the holes to work better. They used the smaller modern mouthpieces they were used to, instead of the sharp rimmed, large mouthpieces of past times. And they added tapers to the lead pipes and widened the bell flares to correct the perceived flaw of a flat low range.

I find this interesting that, other than adding holes, these are the same fundamental changes that piston valved trumpets went through at the beginning of the 20th century.

This trade-off meant that these players who were performing on a redesigned instrument, while not rooted in any historical tradition, were at least using instruments the correct length and therefore the sound was still preferable to using a modern instrument with vales. It is understandable how these pioneers of the Baroque trumpet reached this conclusion, and I cannot emphasize enough that they should be celebrated for their trailblazing in their immense diligence in researching and bringing the baroque trumpet in front of audiences.

However, fifty years have passed, and a few generations of trumpet players have grown up having had careers playing Baroque trumpet. It is time to move past these compromises and dedicate the time learning to play the more historically accurate version of the trumpet in order to better explore the nuances of early music that simply cannot be done with compromised instruments.

An aside: It is interesting to note that this general evolution of early music instruments is not unique to the trumpet. The harpsichord world started a similar evolution in the 1970’s lead by Hubbard and Dowd examining antique instruments and moving away from the German style serieninstrumenten by makers such as Neupert, Sperrhake, and Whittmayer.  The current instruments we build have details even more historically accurate than ever before because of our evolving understanding of the nuances of these instruments.

Re-evaluating what is “out of tune”

The most obvious difference for people familiar with the modern holed “baroque” trumpet is the “out-of-tune” partials within the harmonic series when listening to a true natural trumpet.  While this tuning system may not be what our ears are used to hearing today, there is a valid argument to be made that we don’t want our music to be perfectly in tune for any number of reasons.

It is worth asking the question “What is any tuning system trying to accomplish?” A couple of examples follow:

• The modern piano makes everything equally slightly out-of-tune by using equal temperament. No interval is more, or less, in tune than its neighbors.

• Modern orchestral brass players must always temper thirds and 5ths to make pure chords. When playing a section part in the orchestra, it is not uncommon to have the same note repeated in a chord progression that must be placed in wildly different spots to fit within the chord progression. When playing alone this would sound terribly out of tune, but in context it is imperative to fit within the broader brass section.

• The late 19th century string player’s practice of expressive intonation is another method of tuning by raising leading tones to help add melodic tension.

• In the 16th and 17th centuries, arguably the standard keyboard temperament, quarter-comma meantone tunes major thirds pure which cause the fifths to beat wildly out of tune. In the musical context, pure thirds give a remarkable sense of repose. Chromatic passages with their wildly uneven alternating small and large half steps add character to something as simple as a descending passage. Dissonances are painfully out of tune adding drama to the music.

I might go so far as to posit that, by definition, the harmonic series is technically the only way to be “in-tune” according to the laws of physics, but as musicians master their craft they learn to deviate from this ideal. In other words, we play (controlled amounts of) out-of-tune in order to make the music work in its context.

By operating exclusively through the harmonic series, the natural trumpet is restricted to this perfect intonation ideal more than any other instrument. It is up to the player’s skills to attempt to bend the laws of physics to fit a less ideal, more worldly, version of intonation.

With baroque music so rife with heavenly symbolism, we need to reevaluate our conclusion of this bug, and make it the feature that it needs to be.

Frequently Asked Questions

Correcting intonation of the “out-of-tune” harmonics can largely be done with 1 finger hole, so why do players perform on 3- and 4-hole baroque trumpets? In 2 words: job security. The additional finger holes make the partials farther apart by effectively shortening the length of the instrument, thus making it behave just like the 4’ modern instruments mentioned above.

Why are the mouthpieces so much larger than their modern equivalents? Practically, a large mouthpiece spreads out the surface area and moves the rim away past the teeth, both highly valued when playing military signals while riding a horse. Musically, they enable a robust low range, making a racket that smaller mouthpieces can only dream of. Playing higher in the clarino range leads to a beautiful shift in timbre from the earthly low sounds to the angelic high range that blends so wonderfully with a singer, oboe or string instruments.

What about that one surviving trumpet with holes? Or that one small mouthpiece in that museum somewhere in Europe? In order to keep this page (relatively) short, this is in no way a comprehensive history and includes many cuts and generalizations. Furthermore, one can always find outliers within the historical record. This essay is not about those outliers (they have their own context and nuances that deserve to be explored), but about the typical trumpets that were widely played on a daily basis by the majority of trumpet players across Europe.