59 Fun Facts About Trumpet

In which key is the most common trumpet pitched?

B♭ is a fairly recent standard: the first valved trumpets were usually pitched lower, in F, and the smaller B♭ model became near-universal only in the 20th century.

In the Book of Joshua, the walls of which city fell after priests blew trumpets for seven days?

Jericho: seven priests carried rams'-horn trumpets around the city for six days, then circled it seven times on the seventh, when a long blast and a great shout brought the walls down.

Straightened out, about how long would the tubing of a standard trumpet be?

About 5 feet: the tube runs roughly 148 cm, and trumpets have been folded into a compact loop since about 1500, after longer straight ones grew too unwieldy to handle.

What produces the sound of a trumpet?

Lips buzzing in a mouthpiece is what makes an instrument 'brass', not the metal: the saxophone is built of brass but, sounded with a reed, counts as a woodwind.

What is the musical term for the placement and shaping of a wind player's mouth on the instrument?

Embouchure comes from the French bouche, 'mouth'; by tightening or relaxing it, a trumpeter can sound several different notes without moving a finger.

What does pressing a valve do to the path the air takes through a trumpet?

Lengthens it: each valve detours the air through an extra loop of tubing, and the longer path lowers the note by a semitone, a tone or a tone and a half, depending on the valve.

Verdi had straight fanfare trumpets specially built for the Triumphal March of which opera?

Aida: the opera's on-stage march gave the instrument its name, and straight fanfare trumpets of the kind are still called Aida trumpets.

Which type of valve is more common on trumpets in German-style orchestras?

Rotary valves spin a rotor 90 degrees when a lever is pressed; trumpets built with them took hold in Germany and Austria, while the piston trumpet won out in France and elsewhere.

What do orchestral trumpeters learn to do at sight when parts are written for D or E♭ instruments?

Transpose: rather than keep a trumpet for every key a composer names, players read the part as written and shift each note in their heads, playing it on their everyday instrument.

Which musicians usually play the bass trumpet?

Trombonists get the job because the bass trumpet's mouthpiece is close in size to their own; Wagner gave the instrument solo passages throughout his Ring cycle.

How does a cornet's bore differ from a trumpet's?

It is mostly conical, widening gently from mouthpiece to bell, and that taper gives the cornet a mellower tone than the trumpet, whose tube stays cylindrical until the bell flare.

The famous 'Trumpet Voluntary' was for many years wrongly credited to which English composer?

Henry Purcell never wrote it: the tune is the Prince of Denmark's March by his younger and less famous contemporary Jeremiah Clarke.

The German word Flügel in flugelhorn means what?

Wing: one account says an 18th-century hunt leader, the Flügelmeister, used the horn to direct his wing of a ducal hunt; another holds that the instrument simply looked like one.

Which free-jazz pioneer and Ornette Coleman sideman was renowned for playing the compact pocket trumpet?

Don Cherry called his tiny horn a pocket trumpet, though collectors class his 1930s Besson as a pocket cornet; he played it on Ornette Coleman's pioneering free-jazz records.

What was a natural trumpet unable to do?

A natural trumpet could not play notes outside one overtone series because its tube had one fixed length; to change key, players fitted an extra coil of tubing called a crook.

Baroque trumpeters played melodies in which high register, where the instrument's natural notes lie close together?

Clarino playing worked because the natural notes that high up sit close enough to form a scale; today's players usually take those Bach and Handel parts on a piccolo trumpet.

Which Beatles song has a piccolo trumpet solo?

Penny Lane: McCartney saw David Mason play Bach's second Brandenburg Concerto on BBC television and had him in the studio six days later to add the solo.

What was the straight battlefield trumpet of the ancient Greeks called?

Salpinx: the narrow tube was usually bronze with a bone mouthpiece, and anatomists later borrowed the word for trumpet-shaped passages such as the Fallopian tube.

Which archaeologist's excavation uncovered a silver and a bronze trumpet in Tutankhamun's tomb?

Howard Carter's team found both among the boy king's treasures; in 2011 the bronze one was stolen from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and resurfaced weeks later.

Legend holds that sounding Tutankhamun's ancient trumpets, as the BBC did in a famous broadcast, summons what?

War: a British bandsman played them on BBC radio in 1939, months before the Second World War, and a Cairo curator has claimed one was also blown before the first Gulf War.

Which vocal trio had a 1941 hit about a trumpet player drafted to become a 'boogie-woogie bugle boy'?

The Andrews Sisters introduced the song in the Abbott and Costello army comedy Buck Privates, and their single climbed to number six on the charts.

Before valves existed, what kind of trumpet did court trumpeter Anton Weidinger devise to play every semitone?

Keyed trumpets had side holes covered by padded keys, much like a woodwind; Haydn wrote his Trumpet Concerto for Weidinger's, but valves soon made the design obsolete.

Which composer, who lived in Mozart's house as a boy pupil, later wrote a trumpet concerto?

Hummel went on to take over Haydn's old post with the Esterházy family, and he wrote the concerto for Anton Weidinger, the Viennese court trumpeter for whom Haydn had written his own.

Which bugle call signals lights out and is played at US military funerals?

Taps first stood in for the three rifle volleys at a soldier's burial in 1862, when an artillery captain feared that gunfire so close to the enemy would restart the fighting.

Which Johnny Cash hit got its trumpets after he said he dreamed of hearing the song with Mexican horns?

Ring of Fire first came out as a folk song by another singer; after hearing that version, Cash dreamed up the horns and cut his own with trumpets in 1963.

Which style of Mexican ensemble plays its melodies on trumpets and violins over a bass guitarrón?

Mariachi groups began as string bands: trumpets joined only in the early 20th century and are now all but essential to the sound.

Which two nicknames did Louis Armstrong go by?

Satchmo and Pops: 'Satchmo' is a clipped 'Satchelmouth', one of several boyhood nicknames about the size of his mouth; in one telling, a British editor coined it by mistake with a greeting.

On which date did Louis Armstrong often claim to have been born?

July 4, 1900 was the birthday he gave all his life; in the 1980s an Armstrong expert found a New Orleans baptismal certificate dating his birth to August 4, 1901.

Louis Armstrong's 'Melancholy Blues' left Earth in 1977 on the golden record of which NASA probes?

Voyager 1 and 2 each carry a copy: a committee chaired by Carl Sagan picked Armstrong's Hot Seven to speak for Earth alongside Bach and Chuck Berry.

For which song did Louis Armstrong win the 1965 Grammy for Best Male Vocal Performance?

Hello, Dolly! went to number one in 1964, knocking the Beatles off the top of the US chart at the height of Beatlemania, when Armstrong was in his sixties.

Which mute gave Miles Davis the hushed, otherworldly tone that became his trademark?

A Harmon mute takes its name not from its inventor but from Patrick 'Paddy' Harmon, the backer who was assigned half of George Schluesselburg's 1925 patent.

Which 1959 Miles Davis album is improvised on scales rather than fast-changing chords?

Kind of Blue is the classic of modal jazz: with sparse chords and scales to work from, the soloists could dwell on melody.

On which million-selling 1970 album did Miles Davis embrace the rhythms and electric instruments of rock?

Bitches Brew won Davis new fans and alienated old ones; five years later, in poor health, he retired from music and stayed away until 1980.

Miles Davis skipped his Juilliard classes to seek out and play with which bebop saxophonist?

Charlie Parker was his idol: Davis spent his nights hunting for him in the New York clubs, and the two were recording together by 1945.

By his own account, how did Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet get its upturned bell?

It was bent at a party for his wife Lorraine in 1953, he said, when a dancer fell on it; he liked the sound so much that he had his trumpets built that way from then on.

Which Dizzy Gillespie tune of 1942, first known as 'Interlude', is noted for its syncopated bass line?

A Night in Tunisia broke with the steady four-beat bass then standard in jazz, and its first studio recording was a vocal version, sung by Sarah Vaughan with Gillespie in the band.

Whose orchestra did Dizzy Gillespie join at the end of the 1930s?

Cab Calloway later fired him over a spitball someone in the band had thrown: the leader blamed Gillespie, who denied it, and the two came to blows.

Which Wynton Marsalis oratorio about slavery was the first jazz work to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music?

Blood on the Fields, the story of two enslaved Africans named Jesse and Leona, won in 1997; in 1965 the Pulitzer board had overruled its own jury rather than honor Duke Ellington.

Which ballad, a 1952 hit for the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, became trumpeter Chet Baker's signature tune?

My Funny Valentine made Baker's name in a quartet with no piano, which left his trumpet and Mulligan's saxophone to weave their lines around each other.

In which city did Chet Baker die after falling from a hotel window in 1988?

Amsterdam: after years lost to addiction and jail, Baker was in the middle of a late-career resurgence, recording more than ever, when he fell from his hotel room window there.

Which hard-bop trumpeter died in a car crash at 25 in 1956?

Clifford Brown died on the Pennsylvania Turnpike along with pianist Richie Powell, ending the quintet he led with drummer Max Roach, one of the outstanding jazz groups of its day.

Which singer was waiting tables at a New Jersey club in 1939 when trumpeter Harry James hired him for his band?

Frank Sinatra's best-known record with James, All or Nothing at All, flopped in 1939 and became a huge hit when it was reissued four years later, after both men were stars.

Which cornetist from Davenport, Iowa, a star soloist of 1920s jazz, died at just 28?

Bix Beiderbecke became the featured soloist of Paul Whiteman's hugely popular orchestra, but severe alcoholism wrecked his career and led to his death in 1931.

Herb Alpert is the only solo artist to top the Hot 100 as both a vocalist and what?

An instrumentalist: his trumpet tune Rise hit number one in 1979, eleven years after his rare vocal on This Guy's in Love with You gave his own record company its first chart-topper.

Which record label did trumpeter Herb Alpert co-found in 1962, later the home of Cat Stevens and Joe Cocker?

A&M takes its name from the initials of Alpert and his partner Jerry Moss; its first number-one single, in 1968, was a rare vocal by the boss himself.

Which trumpeter led the NBC Orchestra on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson?

Doc Severinsen stayed until Carson signed off in 1992; within a week of the last show he had his own big band out on the road.

Which Cuban trumpeter defected while touring with Dizzy Gillespie's United Nations Orchestra?

Arturo Sandoval defected in 1990 with his mentor Gillespie's help and later became a US citizen; HBO turned the escape into the film For Love or Country, with Andy García in the lead.

Which Mexican-born trumpet virtuoso played as a boy for Pancho Villa?

Rafael Méndez became Villa's favorite player and was kept in the general's camp; at 20 he emigrated to the US, where he first worked in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana.

Adolph 'Bud' Herseth was principal trumpet of which orchestra for 53 years, through the eras of Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti?

Chicago Symphony music director Artur Rodzinski hired him in 1948 while he was still a graduate student in Boston, then left before the two ever played a concert together.

Which brass maker, founded in 1918 by an Austrian-born trumpeter, later moved to Elkhart?

Vincent Bach turned maker after a repairman ruined his mouthpiece on tour: a trained engineer, he began making his own, then whole trumpets under the Stradivarius name.

Which English trumpeter, a pupil of Håkan Hardenberger, devised the trumpet play Gabriel for Shakespeare's Globe in 2013?

Alison Balsom, winner of three Classic BRIT Awards, played Baroque trumpet music on stage in Gabriel alongside actors and a period-instrument orchestra.

Which Canadian trumpeter, famed for his screaming high notes, made a hit of the Rocky theme 'Gonna Fly Now'?

Maynard Ferguson took the tune into the pop charts in 1977, a year after playing a trumpet solo at the Montreal Olympics, in the city where he grew up.

What do brass players call the notes they can force out below the trumpet's normal lowest note, a written F-sharp?

Pedal tones sit on the fundamental, the bottom of the harmonic series, which the trumpet's normal notes skip; that is why they fall below the standard range.

Whose Complete Conservatory Method of 1864 is a standard tutor for trumpet and cornet?

Jean-Baptiste Arban published it in Paris as a method for the cornet and saxhorn, not the trumpet, whose players later made it their own.

How does a trumpet mouthpiece with a deeper cup generally change the sound?

It gets darker: a deep cup gives a mellow sound and a shallow one a bright, piercing sound, so players choose a cup to suit the music in front of them.

Bronze is copper and tin; brass, the metal of most trumpets, is copper and what?

Zinc: makers vary the recipe for tone, with yellow brass sounding bright and forceful and copper-rich gold brass sounding rich and expansive.

A herald trumpet's bell section is built straight so that it can carry what?

A hanging banner is part of the British fanfare tradition that the US Army copied when it formed its Herald Trumpets in 1959; their first performance welcomed Queen Elizabeth II.

Which Mussorgsky work opens, in Ravel's famous orchestration, with a solo trumpet?

Pictures at an Exhibition was written for piano alone; Ravel's 1922 orchestration, the best known of several, handed its strolling opening theme to a lone trumpet.

Which American composer wrote Fanfare for the Common Man, a 1942 showpiece for brass and percussion?

Aaron Copland took his title from a 1942 speech in which Vice President Henry Wallace hailed the coming 'century of the common man'.