On Apr 30, 2012, at 9:25 AM, David van Ooijen wrote: > Did you ever have the doubtful pleasure of attending a concert of the > B-minor mass with _real_ Baroque trumpets (without holes instead of > the 1960s 'Bach' trumpets which are the generally accepted standard in > today's early music Esperanto)? If you have, you'll never say Bach > wrote competently (or whatever the quote was) for trumpet, as there > are notes simply out of the range of the instrument.
By this, I assume you mean notes not in the overtone series, rather than notes too high to play (Bach never wrote higher than written d'''; other composers wrote higher). But holes or no holes, some trumpeters of the time could play those notes, and not just in Leipzig: In Purcell's "Hail, Bright Cecilia" there's a climactic E flat for the first trumpet at the end of "The Fife and all the Harmony of War." The difficulties of the trumpet part in Bach's Cantata 90 may seem bizarre by comparison, but Bach wasn't an idiot and he wasn't deaf, and he must have known that the trumpeter, probably Gottfired Reiche, could make it sound brilliant rather than scandalous or funny, or he wouldn't have written it (or would have ripped it up after the first rehearsal). Needless to say, I regard these trumpet parts as proof that Purcell didn't intend that Bach's orchestral suites be played on the lute. > Anyway, even the > notes within the range are 'interesting', however potentially superb. > As a no-holes trumpet player I know tends to summarise his job: 'a > lifetime of practise for five minutes of embarresment'. That's true with or without holes, I'm afraid. Tough job. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
