Instrument
Trumpet
The highest, brightest voice in the brass section, historically tied to fanfare and signal.
The trumpet is the highest-pitched and often the most piercing instrument in the brass family, and its history as a signaling instrument runs deep - long before it had a place in the orchestra, trumpets (and their ancestors) were used for military calls and ceremonial announcements, and that association with fanfare, triumph, and public occasion has stuck with the instrument ever since.
How it works
Like all brass instruments, the trumpet is played by buzzing the lips into a cup-shaped mouthpiece. Modern trumpets use three valves, which reroute the air through extra lengths of tubing to change pitch, supplementing the natural overtone series a player can access purely through lip tension alone. The most common orchestral trumpets are pitched in B-flat and C, and players also keep smaller, higher trumpets for Baroque music.
Trumpeters can transform the sound with mutes placed in the bell: the straight mute gives a thin, distant tone; the cup mute a softer, rounder one; and the harmon mute the buzzy, intimate sound associated with jazz.
The natural trumpet and the clarino
Before valves were standardized in the 1800s, trumpet parts were largely restricted to that natural overtone series, which is part of why Baroque and early Classical trumpet writing sounds different from Romantic-era writing composed after valves became standard. In Baroque courts, trumpeters were an elite guild, and trumpets with timpani signaled royal power and celebration.
Baroque composers got around that limitation with clarino playing: skilled trumpeters working in an extremely high register, where the overtone series is dense enough to produce something close to a full melodic scale without any valves at all. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, which pairs a clarino trumpet with recorder, oboe, and violin as equal solo voices, is one of the most demanding surviving examples of the technique.
The trumpet comes of age
Haydn wrote his Trumpet Concerto (1796) for an early keyed trumpet, which used holes and keys to fill in the missing notes, and Johann Nepomuk Hummel wrote another for the same player. Once valves arrived, Romantic and 20th-century composers gave the trumpet heroic solos, from Mahler's symphonies to the jazz-inflected writing of Gershwin and Copland. In the 20th century, jazz made the trumpet a star - and some players, like Wynton Marsalis, have excelled in both jazz and classical music.
The closely related cornet, valved from its 19th-century origins and built with a more conical bore, produces a mellower tone than the trumpet and is a mainstay of brass bands rather than the symphony orchestra.
Essential trumpet music
- Jeremiah Clarke - Prince of Denmark's March (the "Trumpet Voluntary"), long misattributed to Purcell and a wedding favorite.
- Bach - Brandenburg Concerto No. 2.
- Haydn - Trumpet Concerto in E-flat (1796).
- Hummel - Trumpet Concerto (1803).
- Mussorgsky, orchestrated by Ravel - Pictures at an Exhibition, which opens with a solo trumpet.
- Mahler - Symphony No. 5, which also begins with a solo trumpet call.
Where to start listening: the trumpet fanfare at the heart of Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man is one of the instrument's most direct, ceremonial showcases. The clarino writing in Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 shows the Baroque high-trumpet tradition at its most virtuosic, and the finale of Haydn's concerto is pure sunshine.