Beginning during the Baroque era (well before the decline of the natural trumpeters art), musicians and craftsmen alike began a search for a truly chromatic trumpet. Two types of instruments – the “Flatt Trumpet” and the “Clockspring Slide Trumpet” bookend the late-Baroque era and give us glimpses of early solutions to the limitations of the natural instrument.

The Flatt Trumpet, written for quite frequently by Purcell represents a solution to one serious problem with the natural trumpet: the ability to only play in major keys. A double-slide instrument whose use during the late 17th century, this instrument allowed its user to alter the key into a “flatt” (minor) through the manipulation of one slide.

Some time after the invention of the Flatt Trumpet, an Englishman of the name John Hyde made some improvements to the basic double-slide trumpet. Adding a wound clockspring mechanism to one of the slides, Hyde created an instrument that allowed the music to move into the “flat” key and then – automatically thanks to the mechanism he invented! – move back into the original key center of the instrument.

While neither of these instruments was a truly chromatic instrument – they were really just variants on the natural trumpet of the day – the represent some of the first efforts to allow the inclusion of the trumpet in a much wider range of musical material.

Linked below is an excellent video of Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, performed on period-correct Flatt trumpets and a video of Crispian Steele-Perkins performing Handel’s Firework Music on a Baroque slide trumpet:

The decline of a great tradition

The great vent hole debate

J.S. Bach mass in B minor on period instruments

J.S. Bach meets Gottfried Reiche

Monteverdi / L’Orfeo

The Baroque Trumpet (Part 1)

The Renaissance Trumpet (Part 2)

The Renaissance Trumpet (Part 1)

The trumpet in the middle ages

A natural trumpet puzzle