News

Simon Wills spoke about the early trombone on BBC Radio 3’s Early Music Show last June. For those that missed it, due to a rebroadcast today, it will be available to hear on-line for the next seven days.

Lucie Skeaping looks at the history of the sackbut and its use as an ensemble instrument in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Music includes pieces by Monteverdi, Gabrieli, Lassus, Scheidt and Locke. Andrew Gourlay visits the home of trombonist and sackbut player Simon Wills for a potted history and demonstration of the instrument.

Many British trombonists have a soft spot for old Conn instruments, so there is sure to be some interest in a new gallery of photos from the Conn factory dating from around 1911. Provided by American brass instrument repairers Oberloh, the sepia images show hundreds of men working in a variety of departments from the factory, with scenes including bells being spun, tubes being bent and slides being drawn.

This factory, built in 1910 in Elkhart, Indiana, was where Conn made trombones until 1971, when production (of professional models) moved to Texas.

One of the best known brass scholars is giving a lecture as part of a prestigious series at the Royal College of Music later this month. Trevor Herbert is best known for jointly editing the Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments (with John Wallace) and last year earned much more praise for his ground-breaking book The Trombone. In this lecture, Herbert will talk about research and scholarship for performers.

27 February 2007, 6.30pm
Royal College of Music Recital Hall, London
Crees Lecture 2007
Professor Trevor Herbert, The Open University

Researching and Writing About Music: Scholarship for Performers

A graduate of the Royal College of Music, Trevor Herbert has played trombone with many of the UK’s leading orchestras. He’s also a hugely respected author and academic who joined the staff of the Open University thirty years ago. His books include The Trombone and Music in Words, an indispensable bible for musicians faced with the challenge of communicating in words what music is all about.

The Crees Lecture is an annual tradition at the RCM dating back many decades in which a renowned musician is invited to speak about a major aspect of today’s profession.

There will be a drinks reception following the lecture. Tickets are free, but should be reserved in advance. Call the Box Office weekdays 10am-4pm on 020 7591 4314 from 15 January.

A large display of historic Boosey & Hawkes instruments and production records will be opening at the Horniman Museum later this month, celebrating over 150 years of British brass instrument manufacture and Boosey & Co.’s invention of the compensating valve system in 1874.

The museum in South London, which already has a large display of historical brass instruments, acquired the Boosey & Hawkes Collection and Archive in 2001. The B&H museum of instruments and production records from the Boosey & Hawkes factory in Edgware needed a new home when B&H left Sonorous Works and moved to much smaller premises in Watford. These instruments and material from the archives are the centrepiece of the new Boosey & Hawkes display in the music gallery, which will open officially on 17 November 2006.

The identity of the first landmark woman to play trombone in Britian is quite surprising. Helen Vollam at the BBC Symphony has made her mark in the last decade but of course most people are aware of Maisie Ringham’s impact in the Hallé since the 50’s, but would you believe it they were both somewhat preceded by the private trombone passions of Queen Elizabeth I.

According to Trevor Herbert’s new book The Trombone, there is some suprising evidence that suggests that the Virgin Queen obtained a bass trombone for her private usage. Under a list of the Queen’s personal ‘necessaries’ such as clothing, bedding we find:

One greate sackbut provided for the Queens use. £15.0.0.2

H. Nicolas, Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York: Wardrobe Accounts of Edward IV (London: Pickering, 1830), pp 267-8

The Trombone by Dr Trevor Herbert, Staff Tutor and Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University in Wales, is published in March 2006 by Yale University Press. Already received with critical acclaim, this book deserves a place on every trombonist’s bookshelf. The synopsis states:

This is the first fully comprehensive study of the trombone in English. It covers the instrument, its repertoire, the way it has been played, and the social, cultural and aesthetic contexts within which it has developed. It explores the origins of the instrument, its invention in the fifteenth century, and its story up to modern times. And it reveals the hidden histories of the trombone and its players in different periods and different countries. The book looks not only at the trombone within classical music, but at its place in jazz, popular music, popular religion and light music. Herbert examines the development of written repertoires in the sixteenth century, the ‘golden age’ of the instrument in the seventeenth century, its descent into obscurity in the eighteenth century and its re-emergence in the expanded symphony and opera orchestras and military bands of the Romantic era. The popular music explosion of the nineteenth century brought amateur players and showmen soloists. The impact of jazz was fundamental to the trombone, providing an alternative to the conservatoire tradition. By the late twentieth century its techniques had filtered into the performance idioms of almost all styles of music and transformed ideas about virtuosity and lyricism in trombone playing.

The book was featured on the BBC’s Music Matters programme, broadcast on Sunday 19 February 2006. In case you missed it, the programme featured interviews with Dr Herbert, members of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama trombone ensemble, as well as soloist Christian Lindberg, jazz trombonist Annie Whitehead and newscaster trombonist John Suchet and you can listen to the programme online until 5 March.

BBC presenter Petroc Trelawny:

The trombone is often a neglected instrument … perhaps all too often seen as lacking the cool chic of some of its colleagues elsewhere in the orchestra.

John Suchet:

What a sound!

Annie Whitehead:

It was the sound that attracted me.

Dr Trevor Herbert:

The trombone was one of the most used and certainly one of the most highly regarded of instruments that was used in the 16th century and the early part of the 17th century. Towards the end of the 17th century there’s lots of evidence that it was falling out of fashion; lots of evidence that instruments were lying around in boxes broken and lots of evidence that players were put out of work.

It started being regarded as an instrument used only by the waits as sort of loud, boisterous instruments in civic bands.

It had a very bad reputation. It was not something that really had a tradition behind it, and so you find an enormous amount of the playing of trombone players in sections who were regarded as too loud, too brassy. The famous trombone solo in the Tuba Mirum in Mozart’s Requiem, for example, was regarded by many critics in the 19th century as a mistake on the part of Mozart. Very often that particular solo was played on a bassoon rather than a trombone, because it was not credited that a trombone player could play it.

In the 19th century, the military was custodian of by far the highest standards of brass playing of all types, so players, even though they were still criticised for being too loud, were able to play as a section of trombone players in a way that we hear them today.