Definitions and problems

When we hear the term ‘brass instruments’, most of us think first of standard western instruments such as the trumpet or trombone, polished precision instruments with valves or slides. These can be found all over the world today, not least in vernacular brass bands or popular music ensembles, where they exist alongside other markers of musical modernity – trap sets, keyboard synthesisers and electric guitars. This, however, is but the tip of an enormous iceberg. In looking beyond the western world, we must broaden our definition of ‘brass instruments’. In their 1914 ‘Classification of Musical Instruments’, Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs applied the term ‘trumpet’ to any instrument in which ‘the airstream passes through the player's vibrating lips, so gaining intermittent access to the air column which is to be made to vibrate’. They divided this basic category into two subgroups – natural trumpets (‘without extra devices to alter pitch’) and chromatic trumpets (‘with extra devices to modify the pitch’). Further subdivisions were made on the basis of shape (conch shell or tubular in the case of natural trumpets, conical or cylindrical tubing in the case of chromatic trumpets) and means of playing (side-blown or end-blown).

While the Hornbostel–Sachs system attempts to encompass lip-vibrated instruments of all shapes and sizes, it has serious shortcomings when dealing with the non-western world. The major problem is one of lopsidedness: since the only ‘chromatic trumpets’ are western, the rest of the world has to be subsumed under the category ‘natural trumpets’. If we exclude conch-shell trumpets, a relatively small and distinctive subgroup, it leaves a bewildering variety of instruments under the catch-all heading 'tubular trumpets'. For practical purposes, then, a recent modification of the system by Genevieve Dournon, with subdivisions based on structure, shape and material, is better proportioned and allows more sophisticated distinctions among non-western instruments (see Table I).