24
Mar, 2017

Franquin, transposing trumpets, Bahb Civiletti & the TCE

Recently I’ve been reading a little about the old French trumpet player and pedagogue Merri Franquin. In 1912 he invented a four-valved trumpet in C. The fourth valve worked differently from the standard three in that it raised the pitch of the trumpet by a tone – like a backwards first valve. The purpose of this valve was twofold. First of all it enabled the player to play a trill on any note using this valve; and secondly it addressed the tuning issues on the low D and D-flat. The advent of the movable valve slides (credited to Theo Charlier in 1900) solved this issue in a mechanically simpler way and combined with many players seeing the new trumpet as a “cheater’s instrument” (where have we heard that before?!!) it never gained widespread popularity.

Something else that was common at that time was trumpets with a A/B-flat transposition key. You can still find these instruments on eBay and lying in cupboards but unfortunately they’re rarely in good playing condition.
Today I dug out one such trumpet in a school that I teach at. It’s a small bore instrument with fixed valve slides and a crumbled bell. It’s quite a leaky trumpet at the tone it produces is pretty fluffy as a result. An interesting thing is that because of the bore size it fits nicely into my model “long trumpet with a small mouthpiece” preference that I mentioned in my previous post about mouthpieces.

To show how this works I made a short video of me playing an excerpt of Telemann’s Trumpet Concerto in D that you will find below. The video doesn’t have any talking on it so I will give a  short explanation here:
In a lesson with Bahb Civiletti last year he suggested to me that in order to gain the accuracy, centered pitch and stamina for baroque music I should practice all piccolo pieces on the standard B-flat trumpet. To many this will sound ridiculous, but playing with the Tongue Controlled Embouchure allows me to do this without the physical effort that most use to play in the high register.
In this demonstration you will see me play an excerpt from Telemann’s concerto, ascending to an F above Double C on a century-old, worn-out, leaking trumpet in A.

For more information about the Tongue Controlled Embouchure visit http://tonguecontrolled.info/

For more about Bahb Civiletti visit http://tce-studio.com/

Enjoy! ~iii<0

9
Dec, 2015

Trumpet in G Project

Image above: A dismantled Soprano Bugle.

A couple of months ago I decided to dismantle and re-assemble an old Soprano Bugle that had bought on eBay in 2007. At first things were going well. I removed some dents, rebuilt the tuning slide, patched over a hole using a small copper ring and added an Amado water key. When it came to fixing the bell I realised after reshaping it that it was beyond repair. For reasons unknown to me it rings and buzzes in ways that it shouldn’t. As it happened I had a spare old trumpet in the garage and so I took the bell from that and put it onto the body of the bugle. To my surprise this bell made the old instrument sound much better so my project evolved into something else.

After making this trumpet I wrote a long list of reasons why using a lower-pitched trumpet in G is a good idea and I think I may refine and publish that at another date. When I started to write that blog post it turned out that I needed a series of other blog posts to already exist to explain the concepts that I mentioned in the list. That’ll just have to be a work in progress for now.

Since making this instrument I have tried playing a wide variety of music on it. I practised Bach’s B minor mass for a few days. Music written for trumpet in D or C end up in comfortable keys (G or F major respectively) when transposing on a trumpet in G. Upon realising that I needed to build my stamina a bit I began instead to playing from a French horn tutor book. I was transposing in a way such that a written middle C would be played as the 3rd available open note, thus meaning that the fingering would be the same as in the tutor book. Essentially this is how you would read music for a natural trumpet in G (a high key for a natural trumpet and not an instrument that existed historically), except you also have the facility of the valves to add chromaticism. Doing this really helped to develop my ear for this instrument as well as develop some familiarity with the harmonics being closer together at the lower pitch.

Below: some photos of the finished instrument.

UMSV7396In the last few days I have made some recordings of myself playing some orchestral repertoire using this trumpet. I don’t believe it would be appropriate to play music written post-1900, but anything before then is fair game. I chose the Leonore calls by Beethoven, because they are ideal for instantly hearing the different tonal qualities of this trumpet, and I also chose excerpts from Chabrier’s España, which has parts for both  B-flat Cornet and Trumpet in F. I played the trumpet parts on the trumpet in G and the Cornet parts on the trumpet in B-flat (my Rudy Mück). I hope you enjoy listening to them. As always I welcome comments. ~iii<0

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/173320602″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

I used GarageBand for these recordings and a Shure SM57 microphone.

Trumpet Fantasy

Last year a friend and colleague of mine wrote this piece of music and we made a recording. Seeing as I haven’t posted it on here yet I think it’s about time that I do.
The piece is called Trumpet Fantasy by Matthew Dury.
Update: the sheet music for this piece is now available for purchase. Click here for more detatils.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/155255860″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
To hear more of Matt’s compositions head over to his new website! http://www.newsongmusic.co.uk/