A REAL TRUMPET
SIR,—Whenever a gun goes off there is always a scattering and a crying among people who have not been hurt. I marked my target care- fully, having had my eye upon it for forty years and more, and hit it fairly and squarely. There are no grounds for dispute whatever.
Mr. Beaumont-Percival is annoyed because I said the trumpet was difficult to play and Mr. Holmes because a number of performers known to him are guiltless of an imposture which I said was 'widely,' not univesSally, practised.
Well, I am grateful to both for their interest in the subject and I hope the hue and cry, started by Mr. Stephen Toulmin, is kept up until the last bastard cornet is driven off the trumpet-desks in every symphony orchestra.
Mr. Beaumont-Percival affirms the trumpet to be easy to play. Be it so; I • will 'say nothing to discourage students from following Mr. Beaumont-Percival along the right path.
The dreadful gadget which, as a cornet, the brass-band has disowned, and to which no musician would dream of giving the name of trumpet, is known in the confraternity of the underworld as a slutch-pump ' and was never intended to do anything else than to spray additional noisomeness in the nocturnal haunts of the dissolute.
I have now before me a photograph of beginner-pupils in the wind-section of the Welsh National Youth Orchestra. There are two horns, one of which is held by my daughter, and two ' slutch-pumps.' The tutor of the wind-group was pictured in a news- paper photograph also holding a slutch- pump.' 1 would like to rub a few noses in these pictures.
Mr. Beaumont-Percival speaks of the long D-trumpet as if D were the only key in which the instrument is now built. That may be so, but trumpet parts require instruments in other keys. If these instruments are still made and played perhaps the manufacturers and Messrs. Eskdalc, Jackson, Walton, Mason, Bravington, Overton and other trumpetists of standing would kindly enlighten us.
Mr. Holmes need not wonder how much I know about trumpets: he can read my, letter again and look into Webster's Interna'tional Dictionary which contains drawings, both of the genuine cornet-a-piston and the valve- trumpet, which, implicitly, Mr. Holmes has never heard of. I do not, by any means. advocate a return to the natural trumpet; I simply demand the same integrity of musical attention to the valve-trumpet as is accorded to the valved French-horn. movable crook. The model was in use in the Welsh Youth Orchestra but it was not photo- graphed and I have never seen it. It is said to cost £170, to weigh about the same in avoirdupois and in appearance to resemble a cross between the entrails of an elephant and the works of a grandfather clock. What does Mr. Dennis Brain think about it ?
Mr. Holmes, I presume, is not a player himself but Mr. Beaumont-Percival is and nothing would delight me more than if he would join me on Snowdon summit, which facts my window, to greet the dawn with a fanfare of real trumpeting.
The correspondence only awaits professional observations, now six weeks tacit, for comple- tion and I thank both your correspondents for taking part in a job which, in the public interest, urgently needs to be done in the wiping out of a serious musical scandal.— Yours faithfully,
G. H. WILBRAHAM
Carieg Cam, Nant Gwynant, Beddgelert, Caernarl'OnShire
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