The role of brass instruments in the Middle Ages, especially in the earlier Middle Ages, remains murky. No music survives and the scant remnants of instruments allow only the most fragmentary notions of what the actual structure and shapes of trumpets and horns of the time might have been. Literary and theoretical sources seldom mention brass instruments, and few pictures illustrate them. Only towards the end of the medieval era do the sources, especially pay records and iconography, provide more ample evidence.

What is clear, however, is that, throughout the time span, brass instruments maintained their associations with ritual and function. High ceremonies demanded the blare of trumpets, and armies, too, evidently continued the Roman tradition of communication and signalling by means of horns and trumpets of various types. These ritualistic legacies evidently laid the base for new directions which became evident in the fifteenth century, as various types of brass instruments became clearly associated with art music for the first time. It is the transition to participation in art music which marks a clear differentiation between the instrumental practice of the ancient world and that of the early modern era. This transition will provide the underlying theme to what follows.

Earlier Middle Ages

From the time of the break-up of the Roman Empire to the early fourteenth century the most telling transformations among brass instruments were those concerning trumpets. Horns of diverse kinds continued in use, although the details of their developments are very obscure and the use of early horns in any case seems to have had lesser impact on later medieval traditions.

In the nineteenth century, three processes took place simultaneously: the development of new types of brass instrument, further mechanisation in manufacture and increased mass production of instruments, and an enormous increase in the use of brasswind, particularly in bands. Keyed and valved brass and the remodelling of the slide trombone provided a varied palette of timbres: an instrumentarium of extensive chromatic compass in voices ranging from contrabass to soprano. The surge in brass playing in bands (described in Chapter 13) went hand in hand with the mass production of instruments at affordable prices. To an increasing extent, musical instruments became a trade commodity, made for export rather than local use.

The quality and variety of raw materials available to the brass instrument maker in Europe increased greatly in the period around the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The direct extraction of zinc from its ore, pioneered in the eighteenth century, led to brasses with a more controlled zinc content and a wider range of ratios of copper and zinc. The calamine process for producing brass, described in Chapter 3, was gradually supplanted by the direct alloying of copper and zinc. Refinements in the production of steel, most notably the Bessemer process, resulted in finer, tougher and more durable springs – essential components of efficient, smoothly operating valve mechanisms. More efficient and improved refining processes for other metals led to their use in specialised applications.

All brass instruments consist of a tube, at one end of which is a mouthpiece shaped so that the player can make an airtight seal when the lips are placed against it. The acoustical properties of brass instruments depend on the interactions of the player (in particular the oral cavities and lips), the air column inside the instrument, and the ambient air at the other end of the instrument. The column of air inside the tube is set into vibration when it is excited by the player buzzing his/her lips placed against the mouthpiece. A sustained sound on a brass instrument requires ‘standing waves’, i.e. soundwaves travelling from one end to the other and reflected from each end like water waves in a bath. Although the player opens his/her lips by blowing air through them, because he/she is buzzing his/her lips they are effectively closed for enough of the time to reflect most of the sound waves travelling towards them through the instrument. Whether the other end of the instrument terminates abruptly (as in a bugle) or terminates in a flaring bell (as in a trumpet), sound waves are reflected by the bell mouth or by the flare. The sound inside an instrument is much more intense than the sound produced by the instrument in the surrounding air. The bell of an instrument has to be carefully designed so that it reflects enough sound to allow standing waves to build up, yet allows enough sound to escape to be audible at an appropriate intensity to be useful in music. For this reason, brass instrument bells are of a limited range of patterns - one shaped like a gramophone horn, for example, would not work.

This book provides a broad overview of the story of brass instruments in western, and, to a lesser extent, non-western, music. Neither the book as a whole, nor any of the individual chapters contained in it, lays claim to being a comprehensive survey of its subject. Indeed, this is the first volume in the Cambridge Companion series to be devoted to a family of instruments rather than a single instrument type. Though it was a close-run decision, we felt that it was most helpful to look at the family of brass as a whole, because, though individual brass instruments have their own special histories, the merits of considering the family – particularly with respect to the way that brass instruments relate to each other – outweigh the benefits of dealing with just individual members of it.

There is probably no other family of instruments which has been more affected by the progress of history, with its attendant social changes, technical inventions and musical fashions. These changes have resulted in each instrument having not one, but several idioms. Such diversities are exemplified by the dilemma of modern performers who, on any day of any week, maybe required to imitate the style of the seventeenth century, the nineteenth century, 1920s Broadway, modern jazz, the Second Viennese school, or play the music of their own time within current parameters of taste and style.

The thing that we commonly call the modern orchestra is not really modern at all. It existed more or less in its present form in the early nineteenth century – even its seating arrangements were fixed by 1860. The repertoire it plays regularly was, for the most part, created between 1750 and the First World War: a sizeable number of regularly performed pieces were written in the first half of the twentieth century, but little of the orchestral music composed in the second half of the century has gained even a tenuous hold on the public's affections. The ‘modern orchestra’ is, if not exactly a fossil itself (as is sometimes alleged), then at least a collector of antiquities. This chapter describes evolving styles of writing for brass in the orchestral museum.

The brass section of a standard symphony orchestra will generally consist of four or five horns, three trumpets, three trombones and a tuba. This basic dozen will be enough for most of the music that is likely to be encountered, but is not an exact fit. Eighteenth-century brass sections were small – usually two horns and two trumpets. There was growth throughout the nineteenth century, culminating in Schoenberg's Gurrelieder (1912) which uses a brass section of twenty-five. Thereafter, composers continued to write for symphony orchestra but smaller forces have been common since about 1918.

Definitions and problems

When we hear the term ‘brass instruments’, most of us think first of standard western instruments such as the trumpet or trombone, polished precision instruments with valves or slides. These can be found all over the world today, not least in vernacular brass bands or popular music ensembles, where they exist alongside other markers of musical modernity – trap sets, keyboard synthesisers and electric guitars. This, however, is but the tip of an enormous iceberg. In looking beyond the western world, we must broaden our definition of ‘brass instruments’. In their 1914 ‘Classification of Musical Instruments’, Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs applied the term ‘trumpet’ to any instrument in which ‘the airstream passes through the player's vibrating lips, so gaining intermittent access to the air column which is to be made to vibrate’. They divided this basic category into two subgroups – natural trumpets (‘without extra devices to alter pitch’) and chromatic trumpets (‘with extra devices to modify the pitch’). Further subdivisions were made on the basis of shape (conch shell or tubular in the case of natural trumpets, conical or cylindrical tubing in the case of chromatic trumpets) and means of playing (side-blown or end-blown).

While the Hornbostel–Sachs system attempts to encompass lip-vibrated instruments of all shapes and sizes, it has serious shortcomings when dealing with the non-western world. The major problem is one of lopsidedness: since the only ‘chromatic trumpets’ are western, the rest of the world has to be subsumed under the category ‘natural trumpets’. If we exclude conch-shell trumpets, a relatively small and distinctive subgroup, it leaves a bewildering variety of instruments under the catch-all heading 'tubular trumpets'. For practical purposes, then, a recent modification of the system by Genevieve Dournon, with subdivisions based on structure, shape and material, is better proportioned and allows more sophisticated distinctions among non-western instruments (see Table I).

In music, improvisation is a process in which a major portion of the resultant performance is not prearranged or anticipated. It is generated by the creator(s) during a performance. The degree to which improvisation is important varies between different musical styles, but in jazz it is virtually always central. The nature and definition of improvisation are complex issues which have been discussed in detail elsewhere. For the particularly technical purposes of the present book, it is noteworthy that improvisation commonly involves a redrawing of the assumed ground of a musical form, through instrumental technique, just as much as by musical vocabulary or structure. As John Corbett entertainingly puts it:

Jazz is a music of the twentieth century which originated in the USA from Afro-American traditions. It achieves improvised intensification by rhythmic repetition and cyclic harmonic repetition. Much jazz involves 4/4 metre, with considerable accentuation of the constituent pulses, and a vital concern with syncopation, of a subtle and complex kind. The syncopation is not simply displacing strong beats to their half-point or by whole beats, but also making irregular displacements, often in complex subdivisions of triplets and quintuplets, and accompanied by large, abrupt and transient variations in dynamic and/or emphasis: these are components of the special rhythmic ‘swing’ inherent in most jazz.

On 20 November 1906, Francis Galpin, the Anglican cleric and pioneering organologist, delivered a paper to members of The Musical Association in London. His paper, ‘The Sackbut: Its Evolution and History’, was one of the great contributions to musicology. In it Galpin explained the story of the exotic-sounding ‘sackbut’. His narrative was clear, straightforward and based on the systematic evaluation of diverse primary-source evidence. Before that evening, it was believed by some, even perhaps by some members of his distinguished audience, that the sackbut was an instrument of deep antiquity, and that its citation in the Book of Daniel (‘That at what time you hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut…’) was no less than a literal testimony of musical practice at the time when the Old Testament was written. The unarguable truth that Galpin placed before them was that ‘sackbut’ was no more than a word by which one of the most familiar musical instruments – the trombone – was once known. Furthermore, he showed that it could be dated no earlier than the fifteenth century, and that a comparison of an early example (Galpin owned an instrument made in Nuremberg in the sixteenth century) with a modern trombone revealed, on the face of it, more similarities than differences.

In the twentieth century, research has improved our knowledge of the early trombone and the way in which its idiom and repertory changed over the years. We know more now than Galpin knew at that time. It is not just that we have more information about instruments, their players, their music and the cultural contexts into which music fitted and to which it conformed. We now also have evidence drawn from sophisticated musical experiments by performers on period instruments.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, the horn concertos of Mozart were recently composed, and the trumpet concertos by Haydn (1796) and Hummel (1803) suggested the birth of an era in which soloistic writing for brass instruments might provide an important means of musical expression. In fact, these propitious signals proved to be false, at least as far as the art music canon is concerned. The fact that few major composers from the nineteenth century wrote solo works for brass is surprising, given the new facility that technology brought to brass instruments.

The chief role of the trumpet, trombone and tuba in art music remained orchestral until the later twentieth century. Earlier solo and chamber music inspire curiosity and affection in the brass enthusiast, but such pieces were sporadic phenomena, arising largely through the efforts of exceptional individuals active in the orbit of some major cultural centres. A convergence of military, conservatoire and manufacturing connections were preconditions for the solo and chamber music to flourish, as indeed they did, though intermittently, in Paris, London, Vienna, Prague, Leipzig, Stockholm and St Petersburg.

The trumpet enjoyed a brief flourish of solo activity in Vienna, around the beginning of the nineteenth century, centred on the exceptional Anton Weidinger (1766–1852). Weidinger was a solo performer, inventor and entrepreneur. In 1800, he premiéred the work which Joseph Haydn had been inspired to write specifically for him and his Inventions-Trompete in 1796, the Trumpet Concerto in E♭ (Hoboken VIIe:1).

A medieval Companion to Virgil would not have presented him as the author of a tightly limited canon, nor would it have related his works, as modern scholars do, to the context of political life in the early principate or to their Greek sources. It would probably have reproduced exemplary stories about the poet's life drawn from the biography attributed to Donatus, perhaps augmented with tales, which enjoyed widespread circulation in thirteenth-century Italy, of Virgil the magician (whose feats included ridding Naples of flies with a magic bronze statue). It might well have included discussion of the Appendix Virgiliana, the Culex, Ciris and miscellaneous epigrams, which were widely believed to be Virgilian juvenilia, and it would certainly also have contained a large quantity of allegorical commentary on Virgil's works. The Fourth Eclogue was often read as a prophecy of the birth of Christ, while commentators such as Fulgentius (in the fifth century) established a reading of the first half of the Aeneid - which persisted until the sixteenth century - as an allegory of the moral progress of the soul from childish cupidity to maturity.

The Aeneid has a story to tell, of how Aeneas after the fall of Troy reaches Italy with a small group of followers (Books 1-6) and there fights a war with some of the native inhabitants which ends in his victory (Books 7- 12). The plot of the Aeneid is quickly told, and not that long in the enactment, but its temporal outreach is enormous, from the prehistoric past to Virgil's own day and beyond (a time-scale Ovid will extend and parody in the Metamorphoses). Like all good stories, it also has much to say about story-telling itself, and the way we plot our ends in history: and at every point who speaks and who sees admits itself of more than one story.

Narrators

The narrator of the poem is a first-century BC Latin poet, whom it is easiest to call 'Virgil': he generally retains epic anonymity, but on occasions reveals his hand (e.g. 7.1, Caieta is buried litoribus nostris, 'on our shores', or 9.446-9, Nisus and Euryalus will be famous as long as the Roman father has power si quid mea carmina possunt, 'if my poems can (do) anything'). But from the beginning we meet other storytellers within the poem: the Muse who tells him the causes of events (1.8), the anonymous narrator who told Juno of the plot of the poem before it even began (1.20 audierat, 'she had heard . . . ' : compare Dido's desperate desire Iliacos iterum demens audite labores, 'to hear again in madness the Trojan labours', 4.78), the script of the Fates (1.260) based - or is it the other way round? - on a treatment by Jupiter himself, the Master Narrator of all.

The culture of classical Greece was a performance culture. It valorised competitive public display across a vast range of social institutions and spheres of behaviour. The gymnasium with its competitions in manliness, the symposium with its performances of songs and speeches, and the theatre become - with the spreading of Greek culture throughout the Mediterranean world in the wake of Alexander the Great - the key signs of Greekness itself. The dominant culture of Athens in the fifth century is particularly influential in the development of these institutions, and can be said to have invented the theatre. Yet in this, as in most respects, Athens is not a typical Greek city. For the unique institutions of Athenian democracy constitute a special type of performance culture. The lawcourts and the Assembly are the major political institutions of democracy, the city's major sites of conflict and debate, its citizens' major route to positions of power. Both lawcourts and Assembly involve large citizen audiences, public performance by speakers, and voting to achieve a decision and a result. Democracy made public debate, collective decision-making and the shared duties of participatory citizenship central elements of its political practice. To be in an audience was not just a thread in the city's social fabric, it was a fundamental political act. The historian Thucydides has Cleon, a leading politician of the fifth century, refer dismissively to the Athenians as theātai tōn logōn, 'spectators of speeches' (Thuc. 3.38); Athenian political ideology proudly highlighted democracy's special commitment to putting things es meson, 'in the public domain to be contested'. A discussion of the audience of Greek tragedy must take as its frame not modern theatrical experience but both the pervasiveness of the values of performance in Greek culture and in particular the special context of democracy and its institutions, where to be in an audience is above all to play the role of democratic citizen.

A history of the influence of Greek tragedy on later Western literature and thought, if it could be written at all, would be not only enormously long but also extremely complicated. Given the cultural prestige of tragedy, however, it is striking how rarely the plays themselves were brought to the stage until relatively recent times. The extraordinary beginning made with the production of Sophocles' Oedipus the King at Vicenza in 1585 remained a more or less isolated event until the end of the eighteenth century, and indeed it is only in the last few decades that productions of Greek tragedy have become common occurrences (see Ch. 11). What did happen, and on a large scale, was the adaptation of tragic plots to create a new corpus of dramatic texts, more often than not the product of 'contamination' with Senecan tragedy, and drawing on historical and mythological lore from non-tragic sources as well as current religious, philosophical, and political ideas.

This chapter confronts some of the intellectual and aesthetic issues involved in the process of coming to terms with Greek tragedy over the last five centuries. I limit myself largely to plays and operas (and, in the final paragraphs, films and television) that are clearly based on extant Greek originals, not because these plays are necessarily of the highest literary or cultural importance in and of themselves (though no doubt a number are), but because they suggest in obvious ways the challenge that adapters from the Renaissance onwards faced in assimilating a particularly prestigious but in many ways intractable heritage.