Book: Trumpets and Other High Brass: Volume 2, Ways to Expand the Harmonic Series

Book: Trumpets and Other High Brass: Volume 2, Ways to Expand the Harmonic Series

National Music Museum

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Trumpets and Other High Brass:  A History Inspired by The Joe R. and Joella F. Utley Collection Volume 2:  Ways to Expand the Harmonic Series 
by Sabine Katharina Klaus (2013)

Trumpets and Other High Brass is a series of five volumes, illustrated with instruments from the Utley Collection at the National Music Museum and other major collections.

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.

The Joe R. and Joella F. Utley Collection was assembled over the course of nearly half a century by Dr. Joe R. Utley (1935-2001) and includes more than 600 instruments from around the world. The holdings tell the story of the trumpet and related brass across three hundred years. The collection was generously donated to the National Music Museum in 1999.

The author, Sabine Katharina Klaus, is the first Joe R. and Joella F. Utley Curator of Brass Instruments at the National Music Museum (1999). Prior to this appointment, Klaus worked at several major musical instrument collections in Europe and the U.S. Klaus' research is internationally recognized through numerous publications on topics relating to historical keyboards and brass instruments.


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