Gnomon's Guide

The trumpet is a musical instrument of ear-piercing loudness. It has been used since time immemorial for fanfares of the "shut up, someone's going to say something important" variety. In more recent years, some seriously good music has been played on the trumpet, ranging from Bach and Handel to Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. The trumpet is one of the oldest musical instruments in the world. A trumpet was found in the tomb of Tutankhamen, which dates from about 1320 BC. It was still playable (barely).

Rasp!

The basic principle of trumpet playing, and all brass instruments, is lip buzz. This is known as "blowing a raspberry" in the UK and "the Bronx cheer" in the USA. It means putting your lips together and blowing a farting sound. You do this in one end of the trumpet and music comes out the other end. What's happening is that your lips act as a noise generator. The tube of the trumpet filters out the unwanted noise and reinforces the musical bits by resonating, so that a musical note comes out.

Playing the Harmonics

The lowest note that a trumpet produces is called its "fundamental". You get it by playing with very loose lips. It depends on the length of the trumpet. A short pipe will produce a higher note than a long pipe.

The most important way of changing the note you get from the trumpet is by tightening your lips. As you tighten your lips and blow harder, the note switches to higher notes known as "harmonics". There is a series of notes which the trumpet naturally plays. The tighter your lips and the harder you blow, the higher up the "harmonic series" you go.

For a trumpet pitched in C, the series of harmonics is as follows: C C G C E G Bb C D E F# G ... The series continues, but the harmonics get harder and harder to reach as you go up. If you play out these notes on a piano, you will find that they get closer together as you go up.

The Natural Trumpet

The trumpet in Tut's tomb and all other trumpets up to about 1815 were of a type known as the natural trumpet. They were basically a cylindrical pipe which narrowed down a bit at one end with a cup-shaped mouthpiece for your lips and which widened out a bit at the other end, known as a bell. You could stretch the pipe out straight to make a heraldic trumpet, the sort you hang flags out of, or you could bend it round into a curve to make it more compact, but this didn't affect the sound. Because the notes available were limited, you were restricted in what you could play. If you wanted to play proper tunes, you had to do this very high up where the harmonics are close enough together to make a scale. This is the way the trumpet was played in the time of Handel and Bach and both composers wrote some wonderful music for the natural trumpet. Handel wrote "The Trumpet Shall Sound" in his oratorio "Messiah"; this is a duet between Bass singer and trumpeter. His "Water Music" also has some wonderful trumpet playing. Bach used trumpets in the "Mass in B Minor" to great effect, and in one of his "Brandenburg Concertos". Nevertheless, the natural trumpet was a very difficult instrument to play good music on.

The Valve Trumpet

Around 1815, a new type of trumpet was invented: the valve trumpet. This has three or four pistons. When you push down the pistons, the air in the trumpet is diverted into different sections of pipe, making the pipe longer, so the note produced is lowered in pitch. Normal trumpets have three valves. These lower the pitch by 1, 2 and 3 semitones. They can be used in combination so you can lower the pitch by anything up to 6 semitones, with all the notes in between. Using the valves along with playing the different harmonics, you can play any note in a range of about 2½ octaves.

The Trumpet Today

The introduction of the valve trumpet meant that trumpets could now be played much more easily. Nowadays, valve trumpets in B flat are the standard and almost no-one knows how to play the natural trumpet. Trumpets became very popular in Jazz music and the styles that grew out of it such as Swing and Bebop, with world famous trumpeters such as Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong. It is also alive and well in the Classical world with such notables as Wynton Marsalis and Håkon Hardenberger.