World Association of Zoos and Aquariums

If you are a professional musician and use brass instruments you are to buy used instruments. Here you will see a lot of various kinds of these musical instruments.

The term “brass” historically derives from the stuff which was used in making these musical instruments. But nowadays copper and silver are also used in their creation. But in the Middle Ages people who didn't know how to produce it from metal used timber for the musical instruments of the similar method of sound production. French horn, tuba, trumpet, cornet, trombone and flugelhorn are included to the modern family of brass instruments.

An art of blowing a horn or a shell was known in the ancient centuries. Diverse variants of musical instruments appeared when people began to create them of metal. Those instruments were designed for martial, hunting and divine purposes.

Nowadays' brass instruments came from hunting bugles, military horns and postal clarions. Such musical instruments could only play natural scale sounds because at that time there weren't valve mechanisms in them. Different timbres of sounds were played only with the help of lips of a performer. At those centuries also fanfares and other sounds of hunting and martial purposes appeared. People began to use these sounds in orchestral music because of their natural scale.

With the increasing of metal working process and the production musical instruments of metal it became feasible to create pipes of various dimensions and finishing. During the progress of brass instruments and the improvement of different natural scale sound producing the notion of natural instruments appeared. There were no valve instruments, that is why such instruments could produce only natural scale. It was the age when guilds of trumpeters began to appear. They were separated into two types: chamber trumpeters that gave the performances in castles and martial pipers who were the military musicians.

Nineteenth century became the century when valve mechanism was created. It definitely changed the technique of performance and heightened the ability of brass instruments. The principle of that gear was in adding the crown in the main tube. It changed the form of instruments and the pitch was lowered.

Read the rest of this entry »