The Music and History of the Baroque Trumpet before 1721, Second Edition

This new edition of the definitive work on the history of the baroque trumpet in the 17th and early 18th centuries includes the latest material in the field plus hitherto unpublished sources of trumpet iconography.

Smithers surveys the related types of trumpets used from the period of Monteverdi through the era of Bach and Handel. He examines the repertory of trumpet music available before the appearance of Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto in F Major and provides a detailed analysis of the working conditions of trumpet players in various European countries during this period.

The choice of 1721 in this first study of the music, history, and manufacture of the trumpet as it existed before the Industrial Revolution was neither accidental nor arbitrary. The earliest and only dated source of J. S. Bach’s singular Second Brandenburg Concerto in F Major is both a musical and a chronological boundary between two quite different periods in the trumpet’s long history.

Richly annotated, this work features supplementary appendixes describing surviving sources of music composed originally for the nonmechanical baroque trumpet as well as current scholarship of note. This edition has twice as many photographs as the original printing, many reproduced for the first time.

Don L. Smithers is a music historian and performer. He is one of the few trumpeters currently committed to playing the baroque trumpet as it is known to have been played in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1979 he left his position as Director of the Collegium Musicum at the Royal Dutch Conservatory of Music in the Hague to write a large treatise on the music, history, symbolism, manufacture, and use of the classic trumpet from antiquity until the era of Beethoven. This work is still in progress.