The Brass

Five instruments, five timbres, one common method. The brass section comprises the horn, trumpet, trombone, bass trombone, and tuba; the line between brass and woodwind is not, as one might think, that of material but of method. A wooden flute is a woodwind; a brass saxophone is a woodwind. What unites the brass section is that the player’s vibrating lips set the air column in motion. The instrument is the amplifier of a buzz.

The horn is the section’s diplomat — the one brass voice that blends with woodwinds and strings as readily as with its own family. The trumpet is the brilliant edge, with the most carrying tone in the orchestra. The trombone is the section’s middle voice, with a slide in place of valves and an alto-tenor-bass register that the Renaissance already knew. The tuba, youngest of the section, is its bass — present in singular, never in pairs.

Specific scores call for instruments outside the standard five: the Wagner tuba (a hybrid horn-tuba, used in fours by Bruckner and Strauss), the cornet (in nineteenth-century French repertoire), the flugelhorn (Mahler, Vaughan Williams), the contrabass trombone, and the contrabass tuba. These are guests of the section, not residents, and a composer should expect that the players who cover them are ordinary brass players doubling.

The brass section is the orchestra’s heaviest force. A single trumpet can be heard above the entire string body; four horns at forte will dominate any wind chord; three trombones at fortissimo will silence everything else. This is why the section spends most of its time silent. Used too often, the weight ceases to register; used at the right moment, it changes everything.

The brass section is built in pairs and threes. The standard nineteenth-century body is four horns, two or three trumpets, three trombones (two tenor, one bass), and a tuba. From there the section scales upward; it almost never scales down.

• Classical — 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani; no trombones, no tuba. The orchestra of Mozart and Haydn. The trumpets and horns of this period are natural — without valves — and limited to the notes of the harmonic series.
• Beethoven and after — 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, no tuba. Beethoven adds the trombones for the first time in the Fifth Symphony’s finale; by his Ninth they are standard.
• Standard romantic — 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 1 tuba. Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák. Eleven players, the body that defines the symphonic repertoire.
• Wagnerian / late Romantic — 6 to 8 horns, 3 to 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, contrabass trombone or contrabass tuba. Wagner’s Ring, Bruckner, Strauss. Wagner tubas (in fours) often added.
• Mahlerian extreme — 8 horns, 5 to 8 trumpets, 4 trombones, tuba, sometimes offstage banda. The outer limit. Beyond this, the section ceases to balance with the rest of the orchestra.

The brass sit behind the woodwinds, raised. The horns are traditionally placed on the conductor’s left, with their bells facing right (away from the audience); the trumpets, trombones, and tuba sit opposite, with their bells facing forward. This is no idle fact — the horn is a directional instrument whose tone depends on the player’s right hand in the bell, and a horn aimed at the audience sounds quite different from one aimed at the back wall.

Trumpets and trombones often sit in a single line, with the tuba at the end. In larger sections the trombones rise behind the trumpets. The Wagner tubas, when present, sit with the horns (the same players cover them).

A brass player can sit through a slow movement without playing a note. This is not a deficiency of the writing; it is the writing. The brass section is most powerful where it is most rare, and the score that uses brass continuously will, by the second movement, have nothing left to say with them.

The brass section repays restraint and punishes routine. A trumpet line written without thought of how the player breathes, or how the chord balances, will be played; but it will be played with audible effort. Adler is severe on this point, and rightly so: there is no section in which good writing is more visible from a distance, or bad writing more painful at close quarters.

Every brass instrument has a range in which the player is comfortable, a higher range that can be sustained for short periods, and a top in which a single phrase consumes a player. High brass writing exhausts. A first trumpet asked for high C every thirty seconds for ten minutes will, by the end of the movement, sound like a different player.

The brass need to breathe more visibly than the winds, because their resistance is greater. Long held notes — the kind a string section enjoys — are taxing in the brass. Build phrases that contain natural breaks; if the line must hold across the section, stagger the breathing among the players.

The horn is the most demanding of the brass and the most rewarding of the section. Its tone changes with the position of the right hand in the bell — the technique of stopping (notated +) gives a metallic, slightly nasal sound; cuivré (brassy) is the same with the bell uncovered and the lip pressed. The horn has, by some way, the most variable colour in the brass section. Use it.

Horns are voiced in pairs: 1st and 3rd are the high horns, 2nd and 4th the low horns. A four-horn chord written with high, low, high, low (1–2–3–4) crosses voices in a way that simplifies the players’ parts and produces a more even chord than the obvious 1–2–3–4 descending stack.

The trumpet is the most aggressive instrument in the orchestra at forte and the most penetrating at piano. A single trumpet line at mezzo-piano will cut through a full string tutti without effort; write accordingly. Trumpets in pairs are most idiomatic; a third trumpet is a colour, not a doubling.

The trombone is, in three voices, the orchestra’s second body — capable of singing in slow chorale (the famous third movement of Brahms’s First) and of weighty fortissimo (everywhere). The slide moves slowly; rapid passages that would sit easily on a valve instrument may be impossible at speed. Plan slide movement.

One tuba carries the brass section. It is rarely soloistic — though when it is (the slow movement of Vaughan Williams’s Tuba Concerto, the gnome of Mussorgsky-Ravel’s Pictures) the effect is memorable. Most often the tuba doubles the bass trombone at the unison or octave below, providing the section’s foundation.

Brass mutes are not, as in the strings, simple darkening devices. Each mute changes the tone radically. The straight mute is bright and pinched; the cup mute is dark and soft; the harmon (rarely orchestral) is hollow; the wah-wah is a blues device. A muted brass section is not a quiet brass section but a different instrument. Allow time to insert and remove mutes — at least three seconds, more in fast tempi.

Brass chorales — four to eight voices in slow harmonic motion — are among the section’s most honoured uses, from Gabrieli through Bruckner. Voice them widely (no thirds in the bass), give them tempo to breathe, and they will sound for as long as brass exists.

• A brass entry written piano subito after a long rest will sound tentative unless prepared. Mark the cue, or the player will edge in.
• Three or more trombones playing in close harmony in the low register will sound muddy. Spread them.
• High writing for the third trumpet is a familiar mistake; the third trumpet is a low instrument by repertoire and habit.
• The horn at piano in the middle register is the orchestra’s most beautiful sound. Write for it whenever the music permits.
• When in doubt, score the brass less than you think you need. They will fill the hall.

A short, partial list — five places to begin if one wishes to know what the brass section can do, and what composers have asked of it.

1. № 01

   Bruckner — Symphony No. 8

   Finale, brass chorale

   Eight horns (four on Wagner tubas), three trumpets, three trombones, contrabass tuba — the most monumental brass writing in the canon.

   Listen on Spotify
2. № 02

   Mahler — Symphony No. 5

   Opening trumpet solo

   A solo trumpet in the silence of the hall — the section announcing itself in nine notes.

   Listen on Spotify
3. № 03

   Wagner — Götterdämmerung

   Siegfried’s Funeral March

   Trombones, tuba, and the four Wagner tubas at full weight — the brass as a single, terrible voice.

   Listen on Spotify
4. № 04

   Strauss — Ein Heldenleben

   Opening

   Eight horns in unison, low and rising — the brass as the orchestra’s hero, hardly arguing the case.

   Listen on Spotify
5. № 05

   Stravinsky — Symphony of Psalms

   First movement

   A wind-and-brass orchestra without violins or violas. The brass as architecture.

   Listen on Spotify

Further entries will be added as our study deepens.

The brass section is the youngest of the four. The instruments themselves are old — trumpets and horns predate the orchestra by millennia — but the orchestra’s brass, in anything resembling its present constitution, is a creature of the nineteenth century.

Until the 1820s, trumpets and horns were natural: simple coiled or bent tubes, capable only of the notes in the harmonic series of their fundamental pitch. The trumpet had high clarino passages above the staff; the horn had its hand-stopping technique for filling in the missing notes; both were limited and both were idiomatic. A horn line in Mozart is a different thing from a horn line in Strauss, and the difference is not stylistic but mechanical.

The trombone — the older sackbut — was a Renaissance instrument, used in church and in the opera pit. It entered the symphony only with Beethoven, and only in the symphony’s final movements at first. Its fully chromatic slide gave it the flexibility the horn and trumpet then lacked, and made it the section’s most reliable voice for sustained harmony.

The piston valve, patented in 1815 by Stölzel and Blühmel, made the trumpet and horn fully chromatic. It was adopted slowly — Brahms wrote for natural horn out of preference long after the valve had won — but by 1850 the valve was standard, and brass writing thereafter could move freely through every key. The instruments Mahler had on the platform were, in mechanism, the instruments played today.

The tuba is the section’s newcomer. Patented in Berlin in 1835 by Wieprecht and Moritz, it replaced the older serpent and ophicleide in the orchestral bass within a generation. Berlioz used it immediately; Wagner standardised it; by the end of the nineteenth century no symphony orchestra was complete without it.

Wagner is the brass section’s great dramatist. The Ring introduces the four Wagner tubas (a horn-tuba hybrid played by the third pair of horns), the contrabass trombone, and the contrabass tuba, and gives each its own register and character. After Wagner the brass section was no longer an accent on the orchestra: it was a body in its own right.

Strauss, Mahler, and Schoenberg pressed the section to its outer limit. Stravinsky, Hindemith, and the neoclassicists pulled back — scoring for chamber brass, treating the section with cool precision rather than ceremonial weight. The brass section today is asked to do both: to sing the Bruckner adagio chorale and to articulate the Stravinsky fanfare, often in the same week.