Date Available

5-6-2025

Year of Publication

2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA)

College

Fine Arts

Department/School/Program

Music Performance

Faculty

Dr. Jason Dovel

Faculty

Dr. Martina Vasil

Abstract

The repertoire for trumpet in the Baroque era is overwhelmingly in major keys for obvious reasons. As natural trumpet is limited by design to play the notes of the harmonic series, most players have little access to sonorities outside the major scale and arpeggios within the series without the help of technical innovations such as the slide, and much later, vent-holes. Baroque trumpet makers built valveless natural trumpets, which are limited by design to play the notes of the harmonic series. Since the fundamental physics limit the musical notes available to the natural trumpet, minor key is not an essentially viable option for the trumpet; and yet, composers wrote musical works in the minor key for the instrument during the era.

Through exploring several works written by Johann Sebastian Bach, Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, Pavel Josef Vejvanovský amongst others, this paper aims to examine the marked repertoire written in minor key for trumpet in the Baroque period; explain the difficulties of performing such works, as well as possible solutions to overcome the challenges; and suggest other opportunities the learned techniques can lead to. The paper reintroduces these minor repertoires into the Baroque trumpet canon and offers trumpet players more diversity in the Baroque trumpet soundscape.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2025.41

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