TRUMPET, in music, a brass wind instrument with cup shaped mouthpiece and a very characteristic tone. It consists of a brass or silver tube with a narrow cylin drical bore except for the bell joint, form ing from to a of the whole length, which is conical and terminates in a bell of mod erate diameter. The tube of the trumpet is doubled round upon itself to form a long irregular rectangle with rounded corners. A tuning slide consisting of two U-shaped cylindrical tubes fitting into each other is interpolated between the bell joint and the long cylindrical joint to which the mouth piece is attached.
The mouthpiece consists of a hemi spherical cup with a rim across which the lips stretch. The shape of the cup, and more especially of the bottom, in which is pierced a hole communicating with the main bore, is of the greatest importance on account of its influence on the tone quality and on the production of the higher har monics. It is recognized that the shallower and smaller the cup the more easily are the higher harmonics produced; the sharper the angle at the bottom of the cup the more brilliant and incisive is the timbre, given, of course, the correct style of blow .
blow ing. The diameter of the cup varies according to the pitch and to the lip-power of the player who chooses a cup to suit him.
There are three principal kinds of trumpets : (I) the natural trumpet, mainly used in cavalry regiments, in which the length of the tube and pitch are varied by means of crooks ; (2) the slide and double-slide trumpets, in which a chromatic compass is ob tained, as in the trombone, by double tubes sliding upon one an other without loss of air; (3) the valve trumpet, similar in its working to all other valve instruments. The first and second of these alone give the true trumpet timbre. The tone of the valve trumpet approximates to that of the cornet; nevertheless, it is now almost universally used.
In the trumpet the notes of the harmonic series from the 3rd to the loth or 16th upper partials are produced by the varied tension of the lips and pressure of breath called overblowing. The fundamental and the second harmonic are rarely obtainable, and are therefore left out of consideration; the next octave from the 4th to the 8th harmonics contains only the 3rd, 5th and minor 7th, and is therefore mainly suitable for fanfare figures based on the common chord. The diatonic octave is the highest and its upper notes are only reached by very good players on trumpets of medium pitch.
The lituus (q.v.) or cavalry trumpet of the Romans seems to have vanished with the fall of the Roman empire. Its successor, the cavalry trumpet of the 15th and succeeding centuries, was evolved from the straight busine, an instrument traced, by means of its name no less than by the delicate proportions of its tube and the shape of the bell, to the Roman buccina (q.v.). The bending of the tube of the trumpet in three parallel branches, thus creating its modern form, has usually been claimed for a Frenchman named Maurin (1498-1515). But the transforma tion was really made much earlier, probably in the Low Countries or north Italy; in any case it had already been accomplished in the bas-reliefs of Luca della Robbia intended to ornament the organ chamber of the cathedral of Florence where a trumpet having the tube bent back as just described is very distinctly figured. And this shape the instrument retained for more than 3oo years.
Later crooks and slides were introduced, then keys, and finally in 1815, Stolzel made the first completely satisfactory chromatic trumpet by the invention of the ventil or piston. (See VALVES and WIND INSTRUMENTS.)