Brass Bulletin N.º 47

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Jean-Pierre Mathez

A ghostly Arban returns in 1984 to find virtuosity thriving, instruments transformed and a brass world whose progress leaves its greatest pedagogue strangely displaced.

Albert Hiller

For forty years, northern German postilions exchanged the familiar post-horn for trumpets, turning postal signals into an unexpected echo of military practice.

Is Big Always Beautiful?

Thomas Aitken

As brass instruments grew larger and louder, John Fletcher saw something being lost: the individual voice, clarity and character that make a player heard.

Interview with René Périnelli

Jean-Pierre Mathez

Where trumpet teaching once relied on intuition, René Périnelli and Jean-Jacques Greffin brought physiology, medical imaging and science into daily practice.

Jeffrey Agrell

The natural horn is not a retreat into the past: Thomas Müller argues that its demands on sound, technique and awareness can broaden a modern player’s craft.

Michel Laplace

Dance-band trombonists reshaped orchestral expectations in the 1920s and 30s, leaving their mark on Ravel’s Boléro and a generation of players.

Special jazz techniques

Michel Laplace

Vibrato, half-valves, growls and shakes lead to a larger argument: jazz transformed trumpet technique, yet its contribution remained strikingly undervalued.

Aus Pierre Trichets Traité des Instruments de Musique (um 1640)

Pierre Trichet

Hunting horns, buccinae and cornets blur into one another as Trichet links ancient signals, shepherds, hunters and myth to the instruments of his own age.

Tom Varner

Jeffrey Agrell

Choosing jazz over the orchestral path, Tom Varner confronts the horn’s stiffness, projection and unlikely place as a front-line improvising voice.

His career

Jean-Pierre Mathez

A virtuoso of Ansermet’s orchestra, piccolo-trumpet pioneer and mentor to Maurice André, Longinotti’s brilliance was matched by a devastating final chapter.