What wd old-world Baroque plyrs have thot of modern plyrs?

[Robert P]

Pardon the shorthand in the subject line but they're miserly with how many characters you can use.

Any aficionados of Baroque-era trumpeting care to speculate re: what old world players would have thought of the performances of modern players with natural/Baroque instruments? You think they'd hear Bahb Civiletti, Alison Balsom etc. and think they're fantastic or do you think modern performances would sound "off" to them?

I'm thinking primarily of natural trumpet (with and without holes) performances but go ahead and include those who use a picc to play Baroque literature as well.
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Getzen Eterna Severinsen
King Silver Flair
Besson 1000
Bundy
Chinese C

Getzen Eterna Bb/A piccolo
Chinese Rotary Bb/A piccolo

Chinese Flugel

[david johnson]

They might think - "They have all those valves and notes, why will they want to play the horn I have to put up with?" lol

[Bwat]

In a similar vein, This week I’ve been thinking about what the ancients would think of us moderns doing stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHJSd9nigSA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IlZgj2FAHA

It would be interesting if someone who can answer the original question would give some pointers to the literature for us interested amateur historians.

[cgaiii]

Bwat, interesting stuff.

For much of the way we currently play, I imagine baroque trumpet players might be irritated by the bad sound of harmony in equal temperament. Other than that, I am sure they would wonder, as a previous poster said, why we would use the old stuff when we have all this modern stuff as they wondered why we did not tune it properly.
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Bb: Schilke X3L AS SP, Yamaha YTR-6335S
C: Schilke CXL, Kanstul 1510-2
Picc: Kanstul 920
Bb Bugle: Kanstul
Bb Pocket: Manchester Brass
Flugel: Taylor Standard
Bass Trumpet: BAC Custom
Natural Tr: Custom Haas replica by Nikolai Mänttäri Morales

[noamiller]

To add on what everyone else has said, they would be surprised on how "pure" the sound is. Baroque playing was far from pure sounding, a lot of what we think of airy-ness and dissonant (they were in slightly different intonation configuration). They would be amazed at the vent system. There might have been vents in Wogel's inventions trumpet, but we don't know for sure.


Valves took a really long time to catch on and standardize, natural trumpets were still being played through early-mid 19th century... those valves systems were either too difficult to maintain and/or inefficient with the air flow. If you showed a Baroque trumpeter a modern trumpet, you would have a much easier time to convince them to switch over and learn the fingering system.

Now in regard to the picc - they would not have responded to that kindly. There was a controversy with the cornet not sounding like the trumpet. R. Strauss thought that the cornet was an abomination. It just does not have that heavy brassy fanfare sound, it's just too bright.

Bottom line, we don't know how exactly natural trumpets sounded like / played like 300 years ago, so there is no such thing as an authentic performance/ instrument. At this point the correct terminology is historically informed practice. People will tell you that they make trumpets from the original design of some big name trumpet maker, but those trumpets only represent a small population of players who used those (so it's not "THE" natural trumpet the can possibly represent all of Baroque and all of Europe)... and you cannot replicate the precise training they had.. the humidity they were experiencing.. the exact metal source, as well as the rooms/halls they would have played in. There are too many variables.

[Robert P]

[delano]

I think we’ll never know.

[cgaiii]