Bach trumpet
A high valved trumpet of the 19th/20th century for playing Bach’s Baroque natural-trumpet passages.
What it means
A Bach trumpet is a high-pitched trumpet with valves, built to play the extremely high trumpet parts of Baroque music securely. Instruments in high B♭ and in D are current, in practice above all the piccolo trumpet in B♭, which sounds an octave above the ordinary B♭ trumpet. It is built shorter and frequently has a fourth valve to fill out the low range. The name is misleading insofar as it is not a historical instrument but a construction of the late nineteenth century for a particular repertoire: the Belgian instrument maker Victor Mahillon built it in the late 1880s for the high trumpet parts of Bach and Handel; the present four-valve instrument was popularised in the twentieth century above all by Adolf Scherbaum and Maurice André.
Musical use
The Baroque natural trumpet has no valves and achieves its melody in the high clarino register, where the natural notes lie close together. This manner of playing largely fell out of use in the nineteenth century, while the repertoire continued to be performed. The high-pitched valve trumpet solved the problem: it makes the same notes available in a more comfortable range and with greater accuracy of hitting. Since the rise of historically informed performance practice the natural trumpet with finger or vent holes stands opposite it again; both ways are usual side by side today and sound distinctly different — the piccolo trumpet leaner and more brilliant, the natural trumpet rounder and closer in sound to the other Baroque instruments.
Performance practice
The piccolo trumpet calls for a very concentrated airstream with low air consumption; whoever works with the quantity as on the large trumpet overblows. Use a correspondingly smaller mouthpiece and plan short entries, because endurance quickly wanes. The intonation is sensitive and demands constant checking by ear, especially with the notes fingered by means of the fourth valve. Practise the passages concerned also on the ordinary trumpet, to secure the line musically, and change to the small instrument only then. Warm it up well before playing, or the tuning lies too low.