The Baroque trumpet, the high trumpet and the so-called Bach trumpet

2. The origin of the term « Bach trumpet »

Even though English Baroque trumpeters had never scaled the heights conquered by their German colleagues, it is curious that the art of playing in the clarin register of the natural trumpet survived the longest in England. Throughout the 19th century they played on the so-called slide trumpet. This was nothing more than a natural trumpet fitted with a slide, enabling the out-of-tune harmonics to be brought into the correct pitch. The most famous of these slide trumpeters, Thomas Harper Sr. (1786–1853), was legendary for his rendition of Handel’s trumpet arias. His son, Thomas Harper Jr. (1816–1898), who is to be seen on Illustration 4, continued his father’s tradition until his retirement in 1885. The cultivation of the slide trumpet is all the more remarkable when we realize that the valve, which revolutionized playing technique and ushered in the modern era of playing, had already been invented around 1815¹⁶.