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    After Covid, Playing Trumpet Taught Me How to Breathe Again

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    The benefits of group (music) therapy.Our director stepped onto the podium, and the auditorium stilled to an expectant silence. The black sequins on her conducting dress flared in the stage lights; the audience behind her was lost to the glare. With a glance and a whispered word, she gave us final instructions. As she raised her baton, we all breathed in time; on the downbeat, we exploded into sound. The song was “The Hounds of Spring,” by Alfred Reed, and I can still hear the opening bars. That concert, the entirety of which felt downright enchanted, propelled me into music college, where I studied music education, learning the basics of a dozen instruments so I could teach them someday. After a year, I turned in my loaner instruments, transferred to a new school and changed my major. At 18, I wanted to save the world, and I thought I could do it better some other way.Two decades later, in November 2020, worn out by lockdown, I longed to use my mind for something other than worry, to fill my living room with a sound that wasn’t the tinny, competing voices of my children’s virtual school. I played the trumpet for only a couple of months during college, after working with woodwinds and strings in high school, and I imagined studying fingering charts again and summoning a sense memory of correct embouchure. I messaged my middle-school band director, a brass player, and we swapped listings until I sent her the model number of a solid, beginner-level trumpet for $70. Two minutes later, her reply: “Oh, yes! Grab it!” Reconnecting with the trumpet was a delight, but playing alone in my living room was a discipline I didn’t keep for long.Covid caught up to me in May of this year. My symptoms were not dangerous, but they were persistent; I counted 12 days, 14, 16, and I still couldn’t eat normally or function for more than a few hours without exhaustion and physical pain. My mental-health symptoms, meanwhile, were devastating and worsened as the days passed. I couldn’t see the point of anything; I couldn’t stop crying; I couldn’t imagine a time when these things would change.I left the house, in those days, only to go to my daughter’s softball games, a five-minute drive from home, where I could prop myself in a camp chair yards from anyone else, sip Gatorade and feel the sun on my back. If life is pointless, I thought, thank God for softball. And then I thought, OK — if life is pointless, then why not do some things just because they’re fun?Seventy of us count and breathe and quite literally vibrate together.So I decided to relearn trumpet in a more committed way: by joining a community band. I found a no-audition ensemble near me and filled out the online interest form. I received a welcome text from my new section leader and a card in the mail, telling me how the band was sure to be better because I had joined. The first time I attended rehearsal, I played a single note, badly, then spent the rest of the 90 minutes listening. Throughout the following week, I practiced at home every day, switching on the metronome and playing long tones until my lips gave out. When the next Tuesday evening rolled around, I could play. Not well, but well enough. It felt astonishing, a revelation: Sometimes, things get better instead of worse.The trumpet only has three keys, called valves, which are played in seven combinations to make all of the possible notes. Depressing the first valve, for instance, can produce a low B-flat, an F, a higher B-flat, a D and several other notes I can’t reach. The difference between one and another depends on the frequency of the lips’ buzz. It is equal parts science and art. And it’s more difficult than I remembered.Nonetheless, on Tuesday nights, I grab my $70 trumpet and load my backpack with music, stand, mute, fingering chart, valve oil and slide grease, plus a towel to catch the mix of spit and condensation that brass players insist on calling “water.” I slip in the door, nodding to my fellow third trumpets as I set up and warm up. When the conductor — the volunteer director of this band for 42 years — raises his baton, I count like mad, leave out the notes I know full well I can’t hit and do my best on the others. I spend rehearsal listening, hard, to try to merge myself into the whole. Seventy of us — blue-collar workers and office administrators and retirees, woodwinds and brass and percussionists — count and breathe and quite literally vibrate together. We’re often out of tune or unpracticed. We sometimes dissolve into chaos, and then laughter. When time is up, I pack my bag, nod to my section mates again and slip back out the door into the night.In the months following my Covid infection, the most severe depression of my life gave way to the most severe anxiety. Normal days were rife with triggers: the car, the office, meetings, therapy, food, the doctor, social engagements. Community-band rehearsal was no exception, but I went anyway.I wasn’t always sure why. It was, as I had hoped, fun. But it was also more. Tracking the notes, counting the beats, linking the notes on the page to the correct fingering, frequency, breath and duration — it seems like a miracle that it ever works. Multiply that by 70 players, and it can feel like witnessing the impossible. Somehow community band did what I knew music could do when I enrolled in college, before I changed my mind about my future: It saved me. It drew me out — of my home, of my head. It taught me how to breathe again.Shea Tuttle is the author of “Exactly as You Are: The Life and Faith of Mister Rogers,” co-author with Michael G. Long of “Phyllis Frye and the Fight for Transgender Rights” and co-editor of two collections on faith and justice. More

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      Jaimie Branch, Trumpeter Who Crossed Genre Lines, Dies at 39

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      One of the most dynamic trumpet players in contemporary music, she forged a direct emotional, and even spiritual, connection with her listeners.Jaimie Branch, an innovative avant-garde trumpet player and composer whose punk-rock intensity and commitment to experimentation and to dissolving the distinctions between genres invigorated the music scenes of New York and Chicago, died on Aug. 22 at her home in Red Hook, Brooklyn. She was 39.Her death was announced by International Anthem, the Chicago-based label that released albums by her groups Fly or Die and Anteloper. No cause was given.Over the last decade, Ms. Branch emerged as one of the most dynamic trumpet players in contemporary music, coaxing a remarkable range of sounds from her horn. She used electronic effects and toy noisemakers (including a Fisher Price Happy Apple from the 1970s) to further extend her sonic spectrum. She would often play a complicated passage, step back and scream, and then plunge back into playing without missing a beat.“I mean every note that I play,” she told the online music journal Aquarium Drunkard in 2019. “When I’m up there, I’m putting it all out on the table. It’s like high risk, high reward.”Ms. Branch forged an emotional, even spiritual, connection with listeners. Her energy could barely be constrained by the stage, filling a room not just with the sound of her trumpet but also with the force of her presence.Offstage, she was just as magnetic. Known to friends as Breezy, she was a gregarious figure, as averse to formality and affectation as she was to capital letters (she preferred her name and song titles lowercase).Ms. Branch was conservatory-trained, but her stage attire was unconventional for jazz circles: an Adidas track suit, a kimono draped over a “Young Latin & Proud” T-shirt, a baggy Outkast “ATLiens” baseball jersey. Her head was always covered, whether by a hoodie, a jauntily askew baseball cap or a knit toque, and her forearms were festooned with colorful tattoos.“She was the quintessential example of ‘honest music,’” Scott McNiece, International Anthem’s co-founder and director of artists and repertoire, said in an interview. “Music that has the capacity to change people’s lives and change the world, which everyone needs now more than ever.”Ms. Branch composed most of the music with Fly or Die, a quartet whose other members were Chad Taylor on drums, Jason Ajemian on bass and Lester St. Louis on cello (who replaced Tomeka Reid after the group’s first album, called simply “Fly or Die”). She favored improvisation for Anteloper, a dub-influenced duo with the drummer Jason Nazary, both of whom also doubled on synthesizers and other electronic gear.While she regularly performed concerts for cultural programmers like Roulette (where she was a 2020 resident artist) and Arts for Art, Ms. Branch was equally at home creating dissonant synthesizer squiggles on a noise-rock bill at Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, or playing an impromptu jam session at the San Pedro Inn in Red Hook with her most recent trio, c’est trois, with the bassist Luke Stewart and the drummer Tcheser Holmes.In a 2017 article on women in jazz, the New York Times critic Giovanni Russonello described “Fly or Die” as one of “the most startling debut albums in jazz this year,” adding that “Ms. Branch uses extended technique and blustery abstraction to a dizzying effect.” In DownBeat magazine’s 2020 critics poll, Ms. Branch was voted “rising star” on trumpet.Ms. Branch in action with her group Fly or Die at the Winter Jazzfest in New York in 2018.Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York TimesOn the 2019 album “Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise,” she revealed her impressive singing voice on two songs, one of which, “prayer for amerikkka pt. 1 & 2,” recounts the story of a young Central American woman detained after crossing the Southern border. (The song was based on the actual case of an El Salvadoran teenager whom Ms. Branch’s mother had assisted.)Despite the power of her trumpet playing, Jaimie felt very vulnerable, her sister, Kate Branch said in an interview, and she felt even more so when singing, adding, “She really cared about the message.”Jaimie Rebecca Branch was born on June 17, 1983, in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island. Her father, Kenneth, was a mechanical engineer; her mother, Soledad (Barbour) Branch, known as Sally, is a psychotherapist and social worker. “Jaimie” is spelled the way it is, her sister said, because the girls’ Colombian maternal grandmother couldn’t understand why their mother would call her daughter Jaime, a boy’s name, “so my mom added another ‘i’ so my grandmother could properly pronounce it.”Jaimie started playing piano at age 3 and wrote her first song, “My Dreams End in the Sky,” at 6. A small orchestra at the family’s church in Long Island performed it, and Jaimie sang it and dedicated it to a retiring minister.When she was 9, the family moved to Kenilworth, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, where she began playing trumpet in the school band. After playing extensively at New Trier High School in Winnetka (including a stint in a ska-punk group, the Indecisives), she moved to Boston to attend the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied jazz performance.After graduation Ms. Branch moved to Chicago, where she became a fixture of the jazz scene. “You could hear her all-encompassing sound just by looking her straight in the eyes,” the trumpeter Rob Mazurek, a frequent Chicago collaborator, said in an email.She left Chicago in 2012 to attend graduate school at Towson University in Baltimore, but departed a few credits short of a master’s degree in jazz performance. She told The Chicago Reader in 2017 that she had begun using heroin in 2008, and she struggled with opioids for years, enrolling in multiple inpatient treatment programs, most recently on Long Island in 2015.Following her time in that program, Ms. Branch moved to Red Hook. She gigged constantly, whether as the leader of her own groups or as a guest in the ensembles of the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and the vocalist Fay Victor.“She was a true collaborator, and that’s why she was so damn good at playing this music,” said the Brooklyn composer and vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, who began improvising with Ms. Branch soon after she arrived in Brooklyn. “She could listen, give and receive in equal measure with an unparalleled generosity. She had so many extremely close friends who also were collaborators, and because of that she wanted each individual to be really strong and strengthen the community as a whole.”In addition to her sister, Ms. Branch is survived by her mother and two half brothers, Clark and Russell. Her father died in 2017; the first Fly or Die album was dedicated to him.Ms. Branch had recently finished mixing Fly or Die’s third studio album. Ever seeking new sounds, she was also discussing potential projects like dub remixes of Anteloper and exploring her interest in the Chicago electronic dance music genre known as footwork.“A lot of her collaborators were jazz musicians,” said Piotr Orlov, a friend and supporter who wrote the liner notes for the 2021 album “Fly or Die Live,” “but ‘the music’ for her was much broader, always filled with rhythm for moving, improvisation for keeping it interesting or unexpected, and camaraderie. Which is why the connections she made between so-called jazz and contemporary classical, beats and electronic music, rappers and dancers, standards and the hard-core songbook, were completely organic, and always fascinating.”On Wednesday night, as news of Ms. Branch’s death spread, about 75 of her friends and fellow musicians gathered on Valentino Pier in Red Hook, a few blocks from her apartment. As “Fly or Die Live” played through a phone propped up against a small, tinny-sounding megaphone, some in the crowd tapped out beats on drums or on the concrete, others banged tambourines and sleigh bells, and the young saxophonist Zoh Amba played melancholic funereal blasts.From across the Red Hook Channel the distant sound of another trumpet could be heard, most likely from a mariachi band in a waterfront bar, joining the music in a phantom collaboration. More

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      Franz Streitwieser, Trumpet Maestro With a Trove of Brass, Dies at 82

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      He accumulated more than 1,000 items with provenances spanning centuries, all housed for a time in a converted barn in rural Pennsylvania.Franz Streitwieser, a German-born trumpeter who amassed a collection of brass instruments that encompassed centuries of music history and drew musicians from around the world to its home in a converted barn in Pennsylvania, died on Nov. 8 in a hospice in Sebring, Fla. He was 82.The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, his son Bernhard said.While a performer by profession — on one of the most extroverted of orchestral instruments, no less — Mr. Streitwieser had the soul of an archivist.He took a 19th-century yellow-and-white barn in bucolic Pennsylvania and converted it into a museum to house one of the world’s largest collections of brass instruments and to serve as well as a concert space. The Streitwieser Foundation Trumpet Museum, in Pottstown, opened in 1980 and was home to approximately 1,000 items until 1995, when it found a new home in Europe.Mr. Streitwieser (pronounced STRITE-vee-zer) sought to elevate the trumpet’s status.“When somebody finds an old violin in the attic, they think it’s a Stradivarius and it’s valuable,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1983. “But when somebody finds an old brass instrument in the attic, they just throw it out. We want to change that.”In addition to its standard brass fare, including valved trumpets, French horns and trombones, the museum showcased a variety of curiosities: over-the-shoulder trumpets used in the Civil War, replicas of Bronze Age Viking trumpets, horns carved from elephant tusks. Visitors would have encountered a life-size cardboard cutout of the composer John Philip Sousa and a 12-foot-long horn carved from pine wood, made for Swiss shepherds.Mr. Streitwieser situated the museum in Pottstown because he and his wife, Katherine, had moved there to be closer to her relatives. She was a descendant of the DuPont family, of chemical company renown, which helped support the museum.The museum stood on a 17-acre plot called Fairway Farm (it also had a bed-and-breakfast), and it drew brass devotees from far and wide. The music historian Herbert Heyde, who later curated the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s instrument collection, spent six months cataloging the Pottstown museum’s contents in the 1990s.But Pottstown, which is about 40 miles from Philadelphia and closer in culture to the state’s rural center, lacked strong funding for arts programs, and attendance at the museum lagged. After Ms. Streitwieser’s death in 1993, Mr. Streitwieser could not afford to keep the museum going and was forced to find a new home for his trove. Local universities expressed interest, but none had the space.It was Austria to the rescue. Kremsegg Castle, near Linz, was establishing a government-funded musical instrument museum, and officials there knew of Mr. Streitwieser as a prominent collector. They offered to take in his holdings — and him as well, as a consultant. The collection was packed up and sent off in 1995.Franz Xaver Streitwieser was born on Sept. 16, 1939, in Laufen, Germany, a Bavarian town just across the border from Austria. He was one of five children of Simon and Cecilia (Auer) Streitwieser, who were farmers.As a boy, Franz visited a music store with his mother one day and felt drawn to a gleaming brass trumpet. But it was prohibitively expensive, so the shopkeeper pointed him to a tarnished, less costly trumpet toward the back of the store. He bought it, and after a teacher of his gave him a can of polish, it gleamed. It was the first of many instruments in his life.Franz soon joined the town band and went on to Mozarteum University Salzburg in Austria, graduating in 1961 with a degree in trumpet performance.While at the university he met Katherine Schutt, an oboe and piano student from Wilmington, Del. Their courtship played out during the filming of “The Sound of Music” in and around Salzburg, and the couple became extras in several scenes.Mr. Streitwieser and Ms. Schutt married in 1963. They lived mainly in Freiburg, Germany, where Mr. Streitwieser was principal trumpet of the Freiburg Philharmonic from 1965 to 1972. Traveling to the United States regularly, he spent a year in New York City studying at Juilliard. The couple had five children, one of whom, Heinrich, died in infancy.Mr. Streitwieser began collecting brass instruments early on in Freiburg — his son Bernhard said the family home sometimes resembled a trumpet repair shop.In 1977, Mr. Streitwieser worked with the German instrument maker Hans Gillhaus in designing a modern version of the corno da caccia, a circular horn popular in the 18th century; they called it a clarinhorn.The family moved to Pottstown in 1978. Mr. Streitwieser played in local orchestras and in 1980 received a master’s degree in music from the University of South Dakota. With Ralph T. Dudgeon, he wrote “The Flügelhorn” (2004), a history of that member of the trumpet family.After the death of his first wife, Mr. Streitwieser married Katharine Bright in 1994 and soon moved with her to Austria in the company of his brass collection. The couple spent half the year in an apartment in the 13th-century Kremsegg Castle, at home among their horns. The rest of the time they lived in Florida, moving for good to Lake Wales, in the central part of the state, in 2004. Mr. Streitwieser founded a brass quintet and continued to perform in local festivals.The Streitwieser collection remained at Kremsegg until the musical instrument museum closed in 2018. Much of its contents were moved to Linz Castle and Museum or other museums in Upper Austria.In addition to his son Bernhard, Mr. Streitwieser is survived by his wife; his sons Erik and Charles; his daughter, Christiane Bunn; his stepdaughter, Henrietta Trachsel; a sister, Anna Breitkreutz Neumann; and 13 grandchildren.Dr. Dudgeon, who also played music with Mr. Streitwieser and help catalog the brass collection, said he first heard of him in the 1970s. He had come to pick up a purchase from a Massachusetts music store and found that the shop had very few brass instruments left.He knew he had to meet Mr. Streitwieser, he said, when the shopkeeper told him that “a Bavarian fellow came in and bought them all.” More

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      The Trumpeter Adam O’Farrill’s Art of Avoiding the Obvious

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      The son and grandson of Latin jazz royalty is releasing a new album with his quartet Stranger Days, and it’s their most melodically engaging yet.If you pay close enough attention to jazz, Adam O’Farrill might have landed on your radar about a decade ago, when he was still an adolescent. His last name is immediately recognizable — his father and grandfather are Latin jazz royalty — but he stood apart even then, mostly by hanging back and letting his trumpet speak for itself.Since his teens, O’Farrill has prioritized restraint, so that his huge range of inspirations — Olivier Messiaen’s compositions, Miles Davis’s 1970s work, the films of Alfonso Cuarón, the novels of D.H. Lawrence, the contemporary American-Swedish composer Kali Malone — could emulsify into something personal, and devilishly tough to pin down.“I don’t really feel the need to pastiche too heavily,” he said in a phone interview last month, while visiting family in Southern California. “The point is really how you digest it — and in letting that be its own thing, and letting the influences sort of surface when you least expect.”That, he said, feels “more exciting than trying to prove that you’re coming from somewhere” in particular.Now 26, O’Farrill this year was voted the No. 1 “rising star trumpeter” in the DownBeat magazine critics’ poll, and there’s little disagreement that he is among the leading trumpeters in jazz — and perhaps the music’s next major improviser.For the last seven years he has led Stranger Days, a quartet that also features his brother, Zach O’Farrill, on drums, as well as the bassist Walter Stinson. Until last year, its tenor saxophonist was Chad Lefkowitz-Brown; after a brief hiatus, the band recently returned with a new saxophonist, Xavier Del Castillo.On Nov. 12, Stranger Days will release “Visions of Your Other,” its third album, and O’Farrill’s most melodically engaging effort yet.O’Farrill was mentored by the musicians around his father, Arturo O’Farrill, in whose Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra he still occasionally plays.Camilo Fuentealba for The New York TimesWith its spare lineup, the band has given O’Farrill ample room to play around with dimension, scale and tension in his compositions. He thinks of Stinson’s bass as the group’s sonic center, and challenges himself to orient his layers of dynamic melody around that point, even if it’s constantly shifting.Near the end of “Visions of Your Other” comes a standout, “Hopeful Heart,” a neatly balanced tune in an odd meter. O’Farrill begins his solo about halfway through the track, and it sounds as if he’s starting a conversation with a stranger, tentative and broadcasting caution. Then the harmony shifts, and he seems to find a riverbed coursing through the chord changes: His improvising begins to roll down easily, as simple and elegant as the trumpet playing on an old Mexican danzón record.But that flood of momentum only lasts a few bars; soon he pulls back again, holding his notes longer, and subtly gesturing at the influence of the contemporary trumpet star Ambrose Akinmusire. He alternates between beautifully diatonic notes and more worrisome ones, asking you to notice both.O’Farrill grew up enmeshed in New York’s jazz and Latin music scenes, and was mentored by the musicians around his father, Arturo O’Farrill, a Grammy-winning pianist, in whose Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra he still occasionally plays.He started out on piano at age 6, and was almost immediately composing tunes of his own. He took up the trumpet two years later, and started to learn the art of improvising.Anna Webber, a rising saxophonist and composer, has worked with O’Farrill in various situations since he was in high school — though she didn’t realize then how young he was. “He just had this patience and maturity and confidence to his playing,” she said. “Even when he was I guess 17 or 18, it felt like it was already there.”O’Farrill is an expert at “not throwing everything you have into a particular solo,” she said, “always trying to find something new in a given piece, but always letting the music choose which direction you go in.”“I don’t really feel the need to pastiche too heavily,” O’Farrill said. “The point is really how you digest it — and in letting that be its own thing, and letting the influences sort of surface when you least expect.”Camilo Fuentealba for The New York TimesWebber recently invited him to be a part of the band that recorded “Idiom,” her album of dense and rigorous experimental compositions. As she prepared the music, she had one-on-one conversations with each of the group’s 13 members, to ensure the ensemble would feel like an organism in motion, not a firing squad of hired guns. (That band will perform music from “Idiom” on Sep. 23 at Roulette.)Moved, O’Farrill said he was inspired to bring this approach to his own large-ensemble project, Bird Blown Out of Latitude, a nine-piece group for which he wrote a suite of electroacoustic music that surges with rock energy and toggles, sometimes abruptly, between borderline over-spill and near-total silence.Thinking about his son’s sense of efficiency and control, Arturo O’Farrill acknowledged that training in Afro-Latin music forces a trumpeter to learn the importance of precision and leaving space. But he also touched on another of Adam’s childhood pastimes: video games.“The golden rule of video games is that you don’t look at the avatar, you look at the shadow,” Arturo O’Farrill said. “It’s about not declaring. Not stating the obvious, not following the avatar.”It’s through video games that Adam first found out about Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Japanese musician whose old band, Yellow Magic Orchestra, planted the seeds in the 1970s and ’80s for what would become chiptune, or early arcade-game music. “Visions of Your Other” opens with a restive, cycling cover of Sakamoto’s “Stakra.”“He’s a real master of taking a lot of pillars of musical convention — whether it’s pop or more Romantic, Schumann-esque things — and both respecting and dismantling them,” O’Farrill said, explaining what he loves in Sakamoto’s music, though it sounded as if he could be describing his own work. “That’s what’s so brilliant about his voice: It’s both deeply individual and very grounded in musical history, and relatable.” More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Trumpet

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      Listen to Louis Armstrong’s sweetness, Miles Davis’s wild squall, Handel’s Baroque majesty and other favorites.In the past we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies and Stravinsky.Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the trumpet. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Javier C. Hernández, Times classical music and dance reporterThe musical term “intrada” suggests a fanfare, music to mark an entrance. This one, written in 1947 by the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, captures the many personalities of the trumpet: noble and bombastic, mischievous and meditative. Hakan Hardenberger seamlessly glides between these moods, driving the energy through the rollicking finale.Honegger’s Intrada in CRoland Pontinen, piano (Bis)◆ ◆ ◆Terence Blanchard, trumpeter and composerHere is my impassioned clarion call to understand the trumpet! See that exclamation point? That’s what a trumpet does. It punctuates emotions. My trumpet teacher Bill Fielder would always ask, “What is the trumpet?” I would ponder for a moment and offer an encyclopedic answer like “A metal instrument with … blah, blah, blah.” To that Mr. Fielder would say, “It is a mirror of your mind.”Ordinarily, I would invite you to listen to Miles Davis’s “Porgy and Bess,” a classic collaboration between Miles and Gil Evans. This album set the stage for people thinking differently about the orchestra and jazz. But as I write this, yesterday was the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. My song “Funeral Dirge,” from the album “A Tale of God’s Will,” originally composed for the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s first Katrina documentary, “When the Levees Broke,” still haunts me today. Actually, I don’t feel like I composed it. I feel like it was being screamed at me: my personal clarion call to hear and weep with my hometown, New Orleans.Dead bodies floating. Dead bodies on top of cars. Dead bodies in the grass. Dead bodies in places I knew. Dead bodies in neighborhoods I grew up in. I saw these bodies in the raw footage of Spike’s documentary. One dead body I didn’t see in the video was that of an old neighborhood friend who died trying to help people stay on their roofs while floodwaters raged beneath. I never cried so much, shedding tears for the many bodies I saw, and the many, many more I didn’t see. This dirge is my tribute to those brave, valiant, fallen heroes. God bless those souls from Katrina — and, today, those souls from Ida.Terence Blanchard’s “Funeral Dirge”(Blue Note)◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times writerConventional wisdom holds that Louis Armstrong’s peak came with his pathbreaking recordings of the late 1920s and early ’30s. Don’t believe it! He remained a potent creative force well into the middle of the century, and his 1947 Town Hall performance of “Dear Old Southland” shows how he continued to deepen his understanding of a tune.This duo rendition, with the pianist Dick Cary, starts out as a stiff-upper-lip confession; the opening trumpet lines suggest a speaker confiding some sadness in a suavely guarded manner. But eventually the attempt to keep up appearances dissolves, as Armstrong sends torrents of welled-up feeling bawling forth. The beaming assurance of his technique — bending notes, reaching for new climaxes — gives this unraveling unmistakable dignity. And the ending’s brief hint of a striding, sunnier future provides one more look at the malleability of a soul.Turner Layton’s “Dear Old Southland”(Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Joan Tower, composerThe best way to get to know an instrument is to write for it. It’s like getting to know somebody well; you learn their strengths, their weaknesses. The trumpet has a very limited range: Writing this four-trumpet piece was like being in prison, because the range is so small; it’s like four people in a little room. But inside those two and a half octaves it can really climb. If you go from an A to a C, it’s like you’re going from the basement to the sky.Joan Tower’s “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No. 5”American Brass Quintet (Summit)◆ ◆ ◆Wadada Leo Smith, trumpeter and composerWho would have imagined that light touching light is connected to comprehension, that inspiration and creativity are bound together in the heart and soul of a true artist? Hearing Miles Davis’s “Calypso Frelimo” was for me an inspired moment of music as art.The piece begins at a shockingly intense level. First the trumpet solo, beautifully inspired music with long-and short-changing sonics, bellowing glissando multiphonics interspersed with nuanced micro-sonics: pure melodic development with a creative range matched by emotion, and just the right amount of space and silence perfectly arched across a vast, still environment mysteriously, without effort.Miles Davis’s “Calypso Frelimo”(Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Marie Speziale, Cincinnati Symphony trumpeter, 1964-96The first time I heard a recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, I was mesmerized by the metamorphosis of the sound of the trumpet to the eloquent, distant timbre of the post horn, emerging from offstage in the third movement. This was Leonard Bernstein’s version with the New York Philharmonic, with John Ware playing the solo, and as a very young trumpeter who had grown up steeped in commercial and Afro-Cuban music, I had never heard such a simple yet poignant melody. It was one of the listening experiences that had the most impact on my early career as a symphony orchestra musician.Mahler’s Third Symphony(Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Mark Stryker, critic and author of “Jazz From Detroit”Kenny Dorham (1924-72) did not command attention with Gabriel-like power and bravura technique. A favorite of jazz connoisseurs, he seduced listeners with the soulful warmth, colorful wit and understated wisdom of the hippest bon vivant on the scene. Everything about his approach to the trumpet and improvisation was expressive, relaxed and personal. The dappled smears of his crepuscular tone and the flirty bounce he brings to the standard “I Had the Craziest Dream” in 1959 make a beeline for your heart. His improvised phrases, delivered with nonchalant charm, enchant you with clever melodic and rhythmic rhymes and piquant note choices. He’s telling a story, inviting you into his dream — where you not only fall in love with the trumpet, but also the man with the horn.Harry Warren’s “I Had the Craziest Dream”(New Jazz)◆ ◆ ◆David Allen, Times writerEvery year “Messiah” comes around, and every year, almost at the end, comes the moment to hold your breath. Many performances of Handel’s classic oratorio now take place on period instruments, and the Baroque trumpet is an unwieldy beast: long, straight and lacking the valves that allow players on modern trumpets to hit notes reliably. So while it hopefully doesn’t sound like it, the soaring, angelic, regal solo part that crowns this bass aria is a merciless test of skill, as the player announces the Day of Judgment — and endures his or her own.Handel’s “The trumpet shall sound”Chris Dicken, trumpet; Matthew Brook, bass; Dunedin Consort; John Butt, conductor (Linn)◆ ◆ ◆Leonard Slatkin, conductorIn 1958 my father, the conductor Felix Slatkin, commissioned the composer Leo Arnaud to create pieces that would demonstrate the then-new audio format of stereo. Utilizing various military fanfares as well as original tunes, “Bugler’s Dream” included what would become known as “The Olympic Fanfare.” The track was featured on a Capitol Records album called “Charge!” and has been reissued several times.With trumpets of all sizes and the musicians separated into two different studios, there was simply no better way to show off not only the new technology but also the incredible skill of the 26 players. If you do not love the trumpet after listening to this, I suggest the track that contains the 12 bagpipers.Leo Arnaud’s “Bugler’s Dream”The Military Band (Beulah)◆ ◆ ◆Nate Wooley, trumpeter and composerThe trumpet is an length of impossible plumbing — physically demanding and fickle — and playing it involves an act of illusory control. Trumpet players, at their best, give up some part of this deception, and their imperfection lets the listener in on a secret: the musician’s humanity. They strive toward something essential and the failure to reach it shows their true virtuosity. What Ron Miles achieves on “Witness” demands that he go beyond his prodigious technique, and the heart-rending sound that comes from his breaking of the illusion is the trumpet at its most essential: vulnerable, virtuosic and real.Ron Miles’s “Witness”(Capri)◆ ◆ ◆Zachary Woolfe, Times classical music editorNo fewer than 14 trumpets (and 11 other brasses) blaze mightily through the fanfare finale of Janacek’s Sinfonietta. Written in 1926 for the opening of a mass gymnastics festival that was part fitness bonanza, part explosion of Czech national pride, the work was inspired by a military band its composer heard — and whose raw, brilliant sound and determined spirit he sought to capture. An armed forces paean sounds awful, but Janacek created something both local — a portrait of Brno, his hometown — and universal. The music reflects not reactionary jingoism, but wild liberation.Janacek’s SinfoniettaBavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; Rafael Kubelik, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)◆ ◆ ◆Steph Richards, trumpeter and composerJohnny Coles paints a spectrum of the trumpet’s timbre possibilities at their finest: soft blues, golden butter tones and brazen oranges that reveal a tender underside of the horn. He makes it easy to forget that the trumpet was born as an instrument of fanfare and war. But ultimately it’s the breadth of expression I love most here, the spaces left in order to bring these colors to light. And while Coles’s harmonic contours glide mostly inside the lines, the fleeting moments where the trumpet skates outside — smearing, curving, soaring — bring forward a purple-hued beauty, sounding the blues inside a feminine form.Gil Evans’s “Sunken Treasure”Gil Evans Orchestra (Verve)◆ ◆ ◆C.J. Camerieri, trumpeterIn this recording, I’m drawn to how the trumpet speaks the message of the song as clearly as the lyrics. In my career I’ve seen firsthand how the compositions of Gabriella Smith, the poetry of Paul Simon and the power of Justin Vernon’s voice can express a wide range of feelings so directly. If you think about music as the communication of complex human emotions from an artist to a listener through sound — and if you think about classical music more broadly in the American tradition — no one does it better than Louis Armstrong. What initially drew me to the trumpet, and keeps on drawing me, is how similar the sound is to the human voice, both in its expressive capabilities and its means of production: breath, vibration, projection.Fats Waller’s “Black and Blue”Live in New York, July 22, 1929◆ ◆ ◆Vanessa Rivera, Ohio State University Marching Band trumpeterAlessandro Ignazio Marcello’s Concerto in C minor was originally an oboe concerto, but has since been adapted to be played by other instruments, and one of its more popular recordings features Tine Thing Helseth on piccolo trumpet. The first time I heard this piece, I was in the sixth grade. I didn’t know what a piccolo trumpet was at the time, but I knew that eventually I wanted to get to a point in my career when I would be able to play a piece as rich and interesting as this one.Alessandro Marcello’s Concerto in C minorNorwegian Radio Orchestra; Andrew Manze, conductor◆ ◆ ◆Anthony Tommasini, Times chief classical music criticLeroy Anderson, the master of the light orchestral miniature, recalled that his 1949 piece “A Trumpeter’s Holiday” had its origins backstage during a Boston Pops concert. The great trumpeter Roger Voisin, then principal with the Pops, was complaining that trumpet works tended to be loud, martial, triumphant. Voisin suggested that Anderson try writing something different.The result was this mellow lullaby. Of course, it was still a trumpet piece, so Anderson couldn’t help letting jazzy bits slip in: The beguiling melody has a slightly jumpy repeated-note figure, even as the orchestra maintains a lulling mood in the background, and a middle section turns restless and syncopated in a moment of mischief.Leroy Anderson’s “A Trumpeter’s Lullaby”Susan Slaughter, trumpet; St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin, conductor (Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Joshua Barone, Times editorAs a violin-playing child, I was slow to appreciate the trumpet, which seemed, like other brass instruments, temperamental and resistant to expressiveness — especially compared with strings. How wrong I was. Take the Thursday installment of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s seven-day opera cycle “Licht.” The drama of Act II, “Michaels Reise um die Erde” (“Michael’s Journey Around the Earth”), unfolds with the characters represented with instruments, not singing voices. In this excerpt, Michael (portrayed by a trumpet) and Eve (a basset horn) engage in a duet that’s flirtatious, funny and — contrary to what I once naïvely believed — full of humanity.Stockhausen’s “Michaels Reise um die Erde”Markus Stockhausen, trumpet; Suzanne Stephens, basset horn (ECM)◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Musical Chairs? Why Swapping Seats Could Reduce Orchestra Aerosols.

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      Moving super-spreading instruments, like the trumpet, closer to air vents could limit the aerosol buildup on stage, according to a new study.If musical instruments were people, trumpets would be super spreaders. When a trumpeter blows into the mouthpiece, tiny respiratory droplets, known as aerosols, travel out of the musician’s mouth, whiz through the brass tubing and spray into the air.During a deadly pandemic, when a musician might unwittingly be exhaling an infectious virus, that poses a potential problem for orchestras. And the trumpet is not the only musical health hazard.“Wind instruments are like machines to aerosolize respiratory droplets,” said Tony Saad, a chemical engineer and expert in computational fluid dynamics at the University of Utah.A simple but radical change — rearranging the musicians — could significantly reduce the aerosol buildup on stage, Dr. Saad and his colleagues reported in a new study, which was published in Science Advances on Wednesday.The work began last summer, when the Utah Symphony began to wonder whether, and how, they could return to performing safely.“They were looking for people that could provide insight into mitigation strategies that people would have some faith in,” said James Sutherland, a chemical engineer at the University of Utah and a co-author of the study.Comparison of aerosol concentrations, both instantaneous and averaged, for the baseline scenario and for the proposed mitigation strategy.Hedworth et alThe researchers created a detailed computer model of the symphony’s concert hall, noting the location of every air vent and the rate of air flow through the HVAC system.Then they mapped the typical position of each musician. The Utah Symphony, like most modern orchestras, positioned its musicians in a standard pattern, with the string instruments at the front of the stage, followed by several rows of woodwinds and brass instruments — the flutes and oboes, then the bassoons and clarinets, and then the trumpets and French horns. The trombones and the percussion section were positioned at the very back of the stage.To model the spread of aerosols during a concert, they incorporated recent research led by Jiarong Hong, a mechanical engineer at the University of Minnesota. Working with the Minnesota Orchestra, Dr. Hong and his colleagues had measured the concentration and size of aerosol particles emitted by a variety of different wind instruments. (Among their findings: The trumpet, bass trombone and oboe posed the highest risk.)With these parameters in place, Dr. Saad and Dr. Sutherland used what are known as computational fluid dynamics simulations to model how the air, and aerosols, would flow through the Utah concert hall when all the musicians were playing.The simulation revealed complex patterns of airflow. In general, the air flowed down from the air supply vents in the ceiling to the air return vents in the floor at the back of the stage. But two distinct vortices, at the front and the back of the stage, also formed, they found. “You see these large regions that are recirculating like a big tornado,” Dr. Saad said.Aerosols can get caught in these vortices, swirling around and around the stage and building up over time.The trumpets, which emitted large, concentrated aerosol clouds, posed a particular problem. As the instruments’ aerosol plumes traveled toward the air vents at the back of the stage, they passed directly through the percussionists’ breathing zone.“We saw this and said, ‘OK, this is a big problem, we’ve got to solve this,’” Dr. Sutherland said. “And given the insight we had into how the flow was moving, we said, ‘Well, let’s move some of these instruments around.’”They knew the idea might be controversial; orchestras have generally been arranged the same way for decades, for reasons that include both acoustics and tradition. “We asked them when we started the project, ‘What constraints do we have to work with? Can we move people?’” Dr. Sutherland said. “And they said, ‘You do whatever you think you can to mitigate risk.’”A visualization of the proposed seating arrangement for the orchestra. Colors indicate the speed at which the respiratory aerosols are being emitted at (red is high, blue is low) and size indicates the amount of aerosols emitted per second.Hedworth et alThey moved the trumpets to the very back of the stage, right next to the air-return vents. Then they shifted the other wind instruments from the middle of the stage, moving them either closer to the back air vents or to the stage doors, which they suggested opening.These moves, the team hoped, would allow the aerosols to flow directly out of the concert hall, without passing through the breathing zones of other musicians or getting caught in an onstage vortex. “You want the smoker to sit close to the window,” Dr. Saad said. “That’s exactly what we did here.”Finally, they moved the instruments that do not generate aerosols at all — the piano and the percussion section — to the center of the stage. Together, these tweaks reduced the average aerosol concentration in the musicians’ breathing zones a hundredfold, the researchers calculated.Although the precise air flow patterns will be different in every venue, the general principles should hold everywhere, the team said. Orchestras can reduce the risk of aerosol spread by positioning the highest risk instruments near open doors and air return vents. (Orchestras that cannot do their own computer modeling could put a fog machine onstage and track how the fog flows, the researchers suggested.)Dr. Hong, who was not involved in the Utah study, praised the modeling work. “Simulating the flow inside an orchestra hall is not easy,” he said. “They did beautiful work in terms of characterizing flow.”But he questioned whether moving musicians was really a practical solution. “We work with musicians closely, and they don’t like to be rearranged,” he said. (He did note, however, that “for a student band, I think it’s perfectly fine.”)Instead, he proposed a different, albeit equally unconventional, solution: Masks, for the instruments. In a recent study, he found that covering the bell of a trumpet with a single layer of acoustic fabric could reduce particle emissions by about 60 percent without compromising sound quality.The Utah Symphony, for its part, proved open to rethinking the seating. And when it took the stage last fall, it did so with the stage doors open and the wind instruments at the rear.“That was a huge challenge for the musicians,” said Steven Brosvik, the president and chief executive of the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera. “But they all dove into it, and said, ‘Let’s go, let’s give it a try.’”It took a few weeks for the musicians to get comfortable with the new arrangement, and they plan to return to their traditional seating configuration this fall, Mr. Brosvik said. But the simulations gave the musicians peace of mind and allowed them to get back onstage, he said: “For us, it was life changing.”The researchers were pleased with how willing the musicians were to embrace an unusual solution, although their findings may have hit some instrumentalists harder than others. As Dr. Sutherland said, “We had to apologize to the trumpets in advance.” More