Brass Bulletin N. 45

Jean-Pierre Mathez

Between disciplined practice and creative folly, musicianship emerges where scales and systems give way to imagination, instinct and the unsettling freedom to think.

Pierre Trichet

A seventeenth-century description of the sackbut captures its moving slide, chromatic freedom and bass role at a moment when the instrument was still being defined.

Young Man With A Horn

Michel Laplace

Harry James stood between jazz virtuosity and popular showmanship, turning the trumpet into a mass-audience voice without losing the respect of classical players.

Benjamin Perl

Berlioz turned a changing brass section into a dramatic force, using horns, trombones, cornets and saxhorns to shape colour, distance, ceremony and fear.

A suggested notation system

Klaus-K. Hübler

When trombone slide, overtones, breath and valves become independent musical voices, conventional notation reaches its limits and a new system becomes necessary.

Thomas Bacon

Jeffrey Agrell

Classical discipline meets jazz-rock freedom as Thomas Bacon confronts improvisation, stylistic crossover and the physical demands placed on the horn.

The instrument for jazz

Michel Laplace

Jazz trumpet playing balances equipment, embouchure and articulation, as changing sound ideals reshape mouthpieces, technique and the physical approach to playing.

Changes and modifications of tempo

Peter Damm

Tempo, dynamics and cadenzas expose how much an 18th-century horn concerto once depended on choices that modern notation and instruments can easily obscure.

Portrait

Jean-Pierre Mathez

A career nearly abandoned after a disastrous switch from cornet to trumpet became a lesson in self-knowledge, persistence and an unexpected return to music.

Quintet, by Peter Maxwell Davies

Thomas Aitken

A BBC studio session turns Maxwell Davies’s brass quintet into a test of virtuosity, balance and whether brass could claim a new place in chamber music.