Page:EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu/342

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TRUMBULL, L.—TRUMPET
325

His public papers have been printed in the Massachusetts Historical Society's Collections, 5th series, vols. ix.-x. (Boston, 1885-1888), and 7th series, vols. ii.-iii. (1902). See I.W. Stuart, Life of Jonathan Trumbull, sen. (Boston, 1859).

His son Jonathan (1740-1809) graduated at Harvard in 1759, served in the War of Independence as paymaster-general of the northern department in 1775-1778 and as a military secretary of Washington in 1778-1783, and was a member of the national House of Representatives in 1789-1795, serving as Speaker in 1791-1793, and of the United States Senate in 1795-1796; he was lieutenant-governor of Connecticut in 1796-1798, and governor in 1798-1809. Another son, Joseph (1737-1778), was a member of the first Continental Congress (1774-1775), became commissary-general of stores of the Continental army in July 1775 and commissary-general of purchases in June 1777, resigned in August 1777, and from November 1777 to April 1778 was commissioner for the board of war. A grandson of the first Jonathan, Joseph (1782-1861), was a Whig representative in Congress in 1834-1835 and in 1839-1843, and was governor of Connecticut in 1849-1850.


TRUMBULL, LYMAN (1813-1896), American jurist and political leader, was born at Colchester, Connecticut, on the 12th of October 1813, and was a grandson of Benjamin Trumbull (1735-1820), a Congregational preacher and the author of a useful Complete History of Connecticut (2 vols., 1818). He taught in Georgia, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1837. Removing to Belleville, Illinois, in the same year, he was elected to the state House of Representatives as a Democrat in 1840, and in 1841-1843 was secretary of state of Illinois. In 1848-1853 he was a justice of the state Supreme Court, and in 1855-1873 was a member of the United States Senate. Elected as an Anti-Nebraska Democrat, he naturally joined the Republicans, and when this party secured control in the Senate he was made chairman of the important judiciary committee, from which he reported the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States abolishing slavery. Throughout the Civil War he was a trusted counsellor of the president. In the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson he was one of the seven Republicans who voted to acquit, and he afterwards returned to the Democratic party. After 1873 he practised law in Chicago, was the Democratic candidate for governor of Illinois in 1880, became a Populist in 1894, and defended the railway strikers in Chicago in the same year. He died in Chicago on the 25th of June 1896.


TRUMP (1) (O. Fr. trompe), originally the name of a musical instrument, of which “trumpet” is a diminutive; the term is now chiefly used in the sense of the sound of a trumpet, or a sound resembling it, such as is made by an elephant. It has been usually accepted that the Romanic forms (cf. Span. and Port. trompa) represent a corruption of Latin tuba, tube. On the other hand a distinct imitative or echoic origin is sometimes assigned. (2) In the sense of a playing card belonging to the suit which beats all other cards of other suits for the period during which its rank lasts, “trump” is a corruption of “triumph.” The name was first used of a game of cards, also known as “ruff,” which was the parent of the modern game of whist. There are traces in English of an early confusion with a term meaning to deceive or trick, cf. “trumpery,” properly deceit, imposture, hence idle talk, gossip, now chiefly used as an adjective, worthless, trivial. This is an adaptation of French tromper, to deceive, which, according to the generally received explanation, meant “to play on the trumpet,” se tromper de quelqu'un being equivalent to play with a person, hence to cheat.


TRUMPET (Fr. trompette, clairon; Ger. Trompete, Klarino, Trummet; Ital. tromba, trombetta, clarino), in music, a brass wind instrument with cup-shaped mouthpiece and a very characteristic tone. It consists of a brass or silver tube with a narrow cylindrical bore except for the bell joint, forming from ⅓ to ¼ of the whole length, which is conical and terminates in a bell of moderate diameter. The tube of the trumpet is doubled round upon itself to form a long irregular rectangle with rounded corners. A tuning slide consisting of two U-shaped cylindrical tubes fitting into each other is interpolated between the bell joint and the long cylindrical joint to which the mouthpiece is attached. The mouthpiece consists of a hemispherical cup with a rim across which the lips stretch. The shape of the cup, and more especially of the bottom, in which is pierced a hole communicating with the main bore, is of the greatest importance on account of its influence on the tone quality and on the production of the higher harmonics (see Mouthpiece). The shallower and smaller the cup the more easily are the higher harmonics produced; the sharper the angle at the bottom of the cup the more brilliant and incisive is the timbre, given, of course, the correct style of blowing. The diameter of the cup varies according to the pitch and to the lip-power of the player who chooses one to suit him. See Horn for the laws governing the acoustic properties of brass tubes and the production of sound by means of the lips stretched like a vibrating membrane across the mouthpiece.


Fig. 1. — Military Trumpet in F

(Besson).


There are three principal kinds of trumpets: (1) the natural trumpet, mainly used in cavalry regiments, in which the length of the tube and pitch are varied by means of crooks; (2) the slide and double-slide trumpets, in which a chromatic compass is obtained, as in the trombone, by double tubes sliding upon one another without loss of air; (3) the valve trumpet, similar in its working to all other valve instruments. The first and second of these alone give the true trumpet timbre; the tone of the valve trumpet approximates to that of the cornet, nevertheless, it is now almost universally used.

In the trumpet the notes of the harmonic series from the 3rd to the 10th or 16th upper partials are produced by the varied tension of the lips and pressure of breath called overblowing. The fundamental and the second harmonic are rarely obtainable, and are therefore left out of consideration; the next octave from the 4th to the 8th harmonics contains only the 3rd, 5th and minor 7th, and is therefore mainly suitable for fanfare figures based on the common chord. The diatonic octave is the highest and its upper notes are only reached by very good players on trumpets of medium pitch. Examination of the scoring for the trumpet before any satisfactory means of bridging over the gaps in the compass had been found, shows how little the composers, and especially Bach, allowed themselves to be daunted by the limited resources at their disposal. A curious phenomenon has been observed[1] in connexion with the harmonic series of the trumpet, when the instrument is played by means of a special clarino mouthpiece (a shallow one enabling the performer to reach the higher harmonics), in which the passage at the bottom of the cup inaugurated by the sharp angle (known as the grain in French) is prolonged in cylindrical instead of conical bore for a distance of about 10 cm. (4 in.) right into the main tube. This peculiar construction of the mouthpiece, which might be considered insignificant, so upsets the acoustic properties of the tube that extra notes can be interpolated between the legitimate notes of the harmonic series thus: —

&c.

The black notes represent the extra notes, which in the next octave transform the diatonic into a chromatic scale.

This phenomenon may perhaps furnish an explanation of some peculiarities in the scoring of Bach and other composers of his day, and also in accounts of certain performances on the trumpet which have read[2] as fairy tales. It is probable that the clarino mouthpiece was one of the secrets of the gilds which has remained undiscovered till now. D. J. Blaikley writes[3]: “I had an opportunity yesterday of trying the trumpet mouthpiece as described by Mahillon with the 'grain' or 'throat,' as we would call it, extended for about 10 cm. and terminating abruptly. With such a mouthpiece, used by itself without any trumpet, I could easily get notes from that is to say, that a continuous glide ranging over that compass can be made, the pitch at any moment being determined by the lip-pressure, rather than by the small air-column. When such a distorted mouthpiece is fitted to a

  1. See V. Mahillon, La Trompette, son histoire, sa théorie, sa construction (Brussels and London, 1907, pp. 29-30).
  2. See Fetis, Biographie universelle des musiciens, “Fantini.”
  3. Letter to the present writer, 6th of February 1909.