The trombone, the slide trumpet and the ensemble traditon of the early Renaissance

Music historians are a reasonably congenial lot, but disagreement does occasionally ripple through our small community. One recent debate has been engendered by a contribution to this journal by Peter Downey concerning the Renaissance slide trumpet Dr Downey proposed the stimulating notion that the slide trumpet may not have existed at all, and that the instrument thus had no role in ensemble music of the 15th century. ¹