Author: Don L. Smithers

Publisher/Date: Netherlands: Frits Knuf (1988, revised 2nd edition) This second edition includes many updates and corrections of information in the first edition.

Format/Condition: New red cloth hardcover is in near fine condition: very light soiling to texblock – NOS [new old stock]; gold gilt lettering on spine. No dust jacket. 352 pages, measures approx 6×9 inches. Illustrated with musical examples and photographs [21 plates, many which are different from the first edition.] An appendix lists many works including scoring along with the editions/sources.

Description: Still the authoritative work on the subject for English speaking readers. Examines the development of the instrument from its early Renaissance precursors, to the pioneering work of the 17th century Bolognese school, Northern European Trumpet “Guilds” and Austro-Bohemian makers and players. Extensive catalogue of repertoire written for the instrument including the work of the Gabriellis, Praetorius, Torelli, Henry Purcell, and JS Bach

From the Foreword:

When I read this book in manuscript form some years ago I realized that it was one of considerable importance. What was more, I enjoyed the experience of reading it. This is only remarkable, perhaps, because for a hardened reader (sometimes, under compulsion, of the unreadable) enjoyment in reading is not inevitable. I would like to say that, once having picked up this book, I could not put it down. But that is not true. What is true is that, in every section of the book, large tracts of territory awaiting exploration are effectively and enticingly signposted and admirably described.

Dr Smithers is a musician both before and after he is a musicologist; and his concern is ever with the sounds that come from the trumpet and their wider significance.

In the Baroque era the trumpet was at the high point of its dignity and, on account of its associations and its appearance, it exerted an influence over persons and over communities that in a noise-soused age is difficult to appreciate. One may occasionally begin to feel this when one hears ceremonial music played on State occasions, or from the tower of a German church. A delightful poem quoted on page 122 gives some idea of the influence of a town brass ensemble in Germany in the seventeenth century. On page 158 Dr Smithers analyses the particular use of trumpets in a particular work—the fine Michaelmas cantata, Er erhub sich ein Streit im Himmel, by Johann Christoph Bach—and in so doing shows the inviolability of the music-life union in German life in the Baroque era.

Dr Smithers is not one who observes from a distance. He is a participant in his own story. He is, of course, a trumpcter of high distinction, who knows the Baroque repertoire of the instrument better, I suppose, than almost any other person. He also knows trumpeters. His book is not only about an instrument and its capabilities, but about people—about craftsmen who made instruments of great beauty (which are illustrated); about the organizations to which trumpet-players belonged and the matters of prestige and differential that formed the subject of debate within these organizations; about the transmutation of the earlier forms of Gebrauchsmusik into symbolic Kirchenmusik and hardly less symbolic Tafrimusik, or of the fire alarm into sonata and concerto.

Musical history is not a thing apart: it is history. Dr Smithers’s understanding of this principle illuminates a narrative which is given additional authority by the multiplicity of his sources. His musical travels—somewhat 4 la Burney—have led him across Europe and far inside the eastern territories, and his conjunction of facts and ideas, of aesthetics, economics and technology, put us all in his debt. What is more, he has given new life to a great mass of music. Dr Smithers describes the trumpet as the ‘most exalted’ instrument of the period under scrutiny. He treats it in fitting manner.