Brass Bulletin N. 29

Jean-Pierre Mathez

At the dawn of the 1980s, Brass Bulletin challenges institutional habits, avant-garde rigidity and brass pedagies through a direct appeal to younger musicians.

Gadgets I

Thomas Stevens

From Schilke soundposts to piccolo trumpet extensions, American performers turned technical frustrations into specialized tools for modern playing.

Rolf Quinque

From Bach’s clarino tradition to modern piccolo trumpet playing, extreme high-register technique is tied here to breath support, pressure control and disciplined endurance.

Roger Bobo

From Reykjavik to the Hollywood Bowl, rising concert hall scale and amplified culture reshape orchestral sound, leaving acoustic limits exposed.

Werner Christoph Schmidt

From Höchstädt to Markneukirchen and beyond, five generations of Schmidts shaped brass mouthpiece design through craft, anatomy and evolving orchestral demands.

Jeffrey Agrell

From meditation to distance running, horn playing becomes a way of quieting mental noise, linking breath, concentration, and daily life.

Rudolf Limmer

From 18th-century Graslitz to postwar Bavaria, brass makers rebuilt a vanished musical industry around Miraphone, preserving craft through exile and industrial change.

Women and Brass

Jean Douay

From Paris conservatories to police bands, a young trombonist confronts isolation, scrutiny and ambition as women slowly enter the brass world.

Portrait in brief

Jean-Pierre Mathez

Vaclav Hoza

From Hussite suspicion of musicians to tower signals over Bohemian towns, horns and trumpets shaped civic life, danger warnings and ritual memory.

Michel Ricquier

Breath, fingers and muscular tension form a hidden technical chain in wind playing, as Michel Ricquier links virtuosity to bodily awareness.

Merri Franquin, Eugène Foveau and Raymond Sabarich

Michel Laplace

Franquin, Foveau and Sabarich appear through their Paris careers, teaching legacies, recordings and role in shaping modern French trumpet playing.

Father of trombone playing in Scandinavia

Per Gade

From Sibelius to Paris, Anton Hansen’s later career links Scandinavian trombone playing with French repertoire, teaching, and orchestral reform.

An exhibition at the Trumpeter's Castel in Bad Säckingen

Kurt Janetzky

Natural trumpets from Verona, Nürnberg and Vienna framed a 1979 gathering in Säckingen linking Baroque practice, collecting culture and modern playing.