Top Brass

The harmonic series of the instrument only allows next-door notes within this key, so it will probably be 'aurally familiar' to you from various marches, Old English Trumpet Tunes (still occasionally played as wedding processionals) and oratorio movements, perhaps most obviously The Trumpet Shall Sound from Handel's Messiah

The instrument is also known as a 'Wagner Horn' or 'Bayreuth Tuba', but in many respects ~ the mouthpiece shape, fingering and indeed the sound produced ~ it is more akin to the French Horn than to the tuba or euphonium

Many forms of mute (like the bore and flare of a trumpet) are conical, but there is no such thing as a 'cone mute'

The clue is in the name! One of the many songs by Franz Schubert is a rollicking setting of a poem which, in English, begins: 'From off the street the post-horn rings'. This sound signal alerted people to the arrival of the mail-coach (by road, of course, in an age before railways and motorised vehicles): very evocative if you were awaiting urgent news from someone such as a relative, lover or distant business colleague. The 'ping' of an arriving text message or e-mail nowadays seems very tame by comparison. Sadly, in the Wilhelm Mueller poem, there is no letter from his beloved by this particular delivery!

The circumstances were bleak and ugly, but the film is somehow wonderfully heartening, with an obvious warm message about the power of fellowship through music. Perhaps the most evocative shot in the movie (at least for this reviewer) is when the band are back from winning a championship, the hired coach drops them off, and in foreshortened long-shot we see single musicians and small groups standing separately, with their instrument-cases, on the street, with the last of the camaraderie now fading, like so many stick-figures in a Lowry painting

A splendidly evocative name! Apparently it derives from old European words for 'pull/push', or possibly 'pull-pipe'

This makes the playing of conventional 'tunes' almost impossible, since these require 'conjunct motion' (= notes right next door to one another in the diatonic scale), but it lends itself to a range of distinctive shaped fanfares and other military signals that cannot too easily be confused with one another. The sounding of the 'Last Post' at Remembrance and other occasions is usually deeply evocative, as is the bugle part in Capt. A C Green's arrangement of Sunset, where the mainly falling bugle line comes in over the top of the hymn-like chorus of the rest of the (military) band during the 'Beating Retreat' ceremony

This work is pretty much 'one of a kind' .

Posaune = trombone; a slightly odd thought, if we were expecting 'an almighty, crisp and penetrating fanfare' of some kind rather than the slapsticky glissando of a trombone slide!
Players of large German (or German-styled) pipe organs will know that a 'Posaune' stop is often to be found on the pedal division, to add growl, pungency and clarity to the bass line in contrapuntal music, or general gravitas in other pieces or passages such as the climax of big marches

There will probably be at least one cornet (instrument) in the band, and my ice-cream may also be in the form of a cornet (i.e. served in a conical, or 'horn-shaped' wafer)!