[Trombone-l] Antique horns

[Howard Weiner]

Better late than never...

At 23:20 14.02.2009 -0800, David Leep wrote:

>I now see that my proposed explanation assumes that the valves, when
>disengaged, favor the straight-through path as usual nowadays.  Since I
>can't see inside them and don't know the history, there may be another
>possibility -- what if the default position of the valves favors the side
>ports instead?  Then no-valves-down would yield the shortest path after all
>(via the first-valve crook), and pressing valves would generate positions 2
>through 7 as Adrian said, except that you would have to press not only the
>farthest valve you wanted but also hold down all lower-numbered ones as
>well.  (I don't know whether such a fingering scheme would be practical.
>Would it be more like woodwinds?  Other websites attribute 
>similar-looking six-valve trombones to Adolphe Sax.  Hmmm....)
>
>Does anyone know which of these two interpretations of the valve action is
>correct?

Here is a description of this instrument from a forthcoming article 
by Eugenia Mitroulia and Arnold Myers, "Adolphe Sax: Visionary of 
Plagiarist") Historic Brass Society Journal 20 (2008):

"In 1852 Sax took out a patent in which he addressed once again the 
problems resulting from the use of valves in combination. Initially 
he suggested joining together seven instruments with the same 
mouthpiece. Six valves would have been employed, each of which when 
operated would have engaged the instrument with which it was 
connected. A similar result was achieved in a less cumbersome way in 
the system Sax introduced that later became known as the independent 
valve system. Six of the instruments were each replaced by an 
additional tube that could be engaged by a valve. Supposing the 
instrument's pitch to be B-flat, when the first valve is operated it 
would give B-flat, the second would give A, the third A-flat, the 
fourth G, the fifth F-sharp, and the sixth F. With no valves it would 
give E. The instrument's nominal pitch thus is given by the operation 
of the first valve. The valves are ascending since they do not add 
extra tubing, but rather each of them isolates different amounts of 
the total tubing of the instrument. Moreover, if the player needed to 
change the pitch of the instrument, additional tubes could be 
supplied with tuning-slides.
Sax was definitely not the one who led the way in this field. The 
first recorded attempt, to our knowledge, came from an Englishman, 
John Shaw, who in 1824 was granted a patent for a similar system 
twenty-eight years before Sax."

Howard


--
Howard Weiner
h.weiner at online.de
http://howard-weiner.de/

Tosca jumped to a conclusion.