The Renaissance slide trumpet

Among the developments that took place in instrumentmaking during the 14th and 15th centuries were various technical modifications to the instruments themselves and the emergence of idiomatic styles of writing for them. One instrument that underwent radical change was the trumpet. Although it had emerged from the Ars Nova with an extremely limited range and mainly as a military instrument, by the beginning of the Baroque it was a fully fledged instrument of music, the symbol of princely might employed just as widely at court and in church as on the field, and its range, in the words of Marin Mersenne, ‘[surpassed] the keyboards of spinets and organs’. ¹ Its transformation during the Renaissance has never been satisfactorily explained and has given rise to a number of theoretical propositions, many of them contradictory, concerning both the instrument and its use. Indeed, the performance of Renaissance music is now bedevilled by a ‘slide trumpet madness’ similar to the ‘Bach trumpet madness’ of the 1950s that plagued Baroque trumpet music. ² There is a need to redress the balance and provide a solution to the problem.