Trumpets and other high brass: a history inspired by the Joe R. and Joella F. Utley Collection

Abstract

"Volume 2: Ways to Expand the Harmonic Series describes the emergence of instruments in which the single harmonic series is expanded in some way--with crooks, slides, tone holes, or keys. It traces the slide trumpet from its ambiguous beginnings, its blossoming and heyday in England to the development of slide cornets and trumpets in vaudeville and jazz in the twentieth century. It discusses the emergence of the cornetto from early fingerhole horns, its relation to the serpent, and its technological and regional variants up to the early nineteenth century. Important documents delineating the emergence of the invention and the stopped trumpet are presented for the first time in English translations, and acoustical implications for hand stopping are discussed. Various regional schools of the keyed trumpet and keyed bugle are described in great detail. Recently discovered documents that shine new light on the early history of the keyed bugle are fully transcribed. Not a catalog in the narrow sense, this second volume uses examples from the Utley Collection along with many from other collections to illustrate the major steps in the development of chromatic trumpets, cornetti, serpents and keyed bugles before the introduction of the valve. Like the proceeding volume, it provides a complete photographic and descriptive record of this section of the Utley Collection and includes technical drawings, x-ray imaging, and acoustical measurements. Available only in hardcover, the volume features more than 600 color photographs, which bring the subject to life, as does an accompanying DVD with musical examples played on instruments from the Utley Collection, by specialists such as Barry Bauguess, Ralph Dudgeon, Crispian Steele-Perkins, Kiri Tollaksen, and Douglas Yeo"--Provided by publisher.