Yuck-Duck-a-Daaah! My life as a trombone

Much as Mozart learnt that you cannot write your own Requiem when you’re dead, so have I come to realise that the trombone is not just a brass pipe I used to blow down. Too late the penny drops…

IT IS A CALL to action. Even without context it is clearly one. Stentorian. Heavy. Imperious.

“TU-BA … MI-rum spar-gens so-o-o-NUM…!”

It sits as solid in the mind as an anvil, its message hammered out in syllables you can do very little with, unless you are a Roman Catholic priest. For this is the language variant we call Church Latin. “Tuba mirum” is not a plea, or a command. It is a description of a scenario that can only result in your action, otherwise all that is yours will be assuredly lost. It is expressly designed to impose itself upon your civility, re-purpose your quietest thoughts; it desires to straighten all your intentions out into a javelin that flies as fast and true as a clothyard arrow. Catholic, Calvinist, Anglican, Presbyterian (or none of these), this is an occasion when your best interests are served in finding the truth within yourself, and quickly. The urgency is plain.

For this is not a rehearsal of the Last Trump. These are its first notes.

AS YOU MIGHT expect, there has never been much call for the use of apocalyptic Church Latin in the mass-market music of the postwar period, although there has been the occasional near miss. Allowances should always be made for Little Richard, for example. “Wam-bam a-lu-mam a-laam bam BOOOM!” in Church Latin is “Wam-bam a-lu-mam a-laam bam BOOOM!”

So let us not concern ourselves with rock ’n’ roll’s frankly tangential relationship with the liturgy, or whether “Tuba mirum” might have some renewed relevance for the spirited but doomed youth of today. Let’s just get the translators in. The ones who do Church Latin into English: Mr Wycliffe and his lads. Fancy having a bash at this, chaps? We need to do better than the Vulgate or Middle English, and exceed even Chaucer in intelligibility, so that all may mutter in greater accordance than ever before. Come on. What are you waiting for?… Go!

Tuba mirum spargens sonum

Per sepulcra regionum

Coget omnes ante thronum

“The trumpet scatters its wondrous sound among the tombs of the earth — and all shall gather before the throne!”

Thank you Mr Wycliffe, and your team. And thank you AI for bringing to the scholars’ deliberations a hint of urgency, for it is certain that this simple translation would otherwise have inched towards completion at the pace of a 14^th-century scriptural quibble. Let us get on with it then…

“The trumpet scatters its wondrous sound among the tombs of the earth — and all shall gather before the throne!”

Forthright. Imperious. The minatory vocabulary of the Day of Judgment, when all — even the dead ones — shall be called before God’s seat to hear His views on the matter that really matters: who’s been good and who has not. All three of Him, firing on all cylinders. It makes for an efficiency in judgment that has few equals. Okay, sorry… no equals. And BOOM! What is that wondrous sound, the sound that coils about the commanding words of yonder thundering portly bass like a serpent?

Hold fast. Hold slow. That sound, sir, betimes I’ll have you know — it is no trumpet…

I WAS TWELVE when I took up the trombone.

I liked trombones — which is why I did it, with my parents’ generous support. But why did I like trombones? Was I not even slightly captured by the sensitising notes of my inner oboe? Apparently not. I preferred the tonal characteristics of the trombone and was unconcerned by its inferior agility. There were other factors too: the instrument’s fundamental slipperiness, for one, which makes its relationship with exact tuning never less than contingent. Tick-tick-tick! How often are rehearsing orchestral brass sections subject to the following denunciation from the conductor’s podium: “Trombones! Yes, you lot. You’re flat! Yes, all of you!”

But setting aside the pissy fusspottery that inevitably comes with pitch issues (pitchiness is the halitosis of the orchestral world — it causes genuine social offence, in orchestras), I can say no better than it was indeed the instrument’s core tone and richly human middling register that took me: the sound behind the press of air. The interior warmth. But still, even then I cannot pretend that the slightly disreputable vibe that trombones radiate, just by being that shape and sounding as they do, did not count for some delectation too (I did not know when I was a smitten boy that the horn would one day lend its name to a very specific sexual kink — no, you look it up); also, the way you can line up two or three or four of them, like a battery of field guns, and they’ll really shift some air… Trombones mass well, and if you know what you’re doing with the harmonic ordnance that makes them lethal, then they can shake up the local environment while also warming it with tone as wide and hot as any Reformation hell mouth.

George Chisholm, the world’s funniest Scottish jazz trombonist — he bore significant responsibility for my enthusiasm. The word, “trombone”, too. Not funny or vulgar to any real extent, but humming with an overtone of sauciness all the same — and has there ever been a better-named instrument than the trombone’s 16^th-century forebear, the sackbut?

No.

Not even electric guitars stirred me in the way that trombones did then, and they stir me still, inordinately so when massed in my mind. Because trombones, trombones in number, embody a special mystery in me that is lifelong in its tenure and is not to be understood. Not yet anyway. I am not yet ready — though a lot closer now than I used to be when first learning the basic parps.

What can I say that might be even faintly meaningful to a trombone neophyte, given the impertinent assumption that you are one (for which I apologise if you’re not)?

Well, I certainly think that it is true that this most mechanically uncomplicated yet also delicately engineered of brass instruments possesses some essential property that illuminates the darkest region of my inner world. It’s one I have always experienced difficulty in naming. And this seriousness seemed somehow to be at odds with the instrument’s essentially playful, even silly nature. I could never name that property, that shining propensity, when I was a trombonist, but I could feel it in the bones of my soul, and it was not funny in the least.

I was the eldest child in one of those modest provincial middle-class families in which everyone was expected to play a musical instrument, as a principal fortification of your education as well as a cheat-code to the grace in life. And so to that end a battered old silver trombone was borrowed from a retiring local trombonist, who’d recently stopped playing in the Salvation Army band through sheer weariness (trombones really take it out of you). Stan Hawkins was his name. Mr Hawkins to me. I was given a few perfunctory lessons on this difficult narrow-bore instrument, which in truth seemed more sackbut than trombone in its silvery hue, poor balance and small bell. A suitable period of acclimatisation was decided on in which to establish whether I was made of the right stuff for the life of the trombonista; and then, when that test had been passed, my parents actually bought me one — not a posh one but a very decent basic tenor bone that served until the sad day came when the door closed on my trombone life forever. Music and its ancillaries were the only things, apart from books, that spare money was ever spent on in our house (certainly more than on holidays, motor vehicles or anything that bore the authentic 1960s designation of “luxury”), something for which I remain sternly grateful. I am fully aware of the privilege that access to such a shiny thing represents, even though I no longer play it and was never particularly good at it when I did — so in some eyes it was a privilege wasted. I have complicated feelings about that.

I was a wilfully limited sort of trombonist, too, reasonably good at those things I enjoyed and saw a point to musically, but nervous and easily put off, especially when I had the excuse of not really liking the music I was supposed to be playing. Also, I did not like to be made to go fast in weird keys (any key with sharps in its signature, basically). Trombones don’t do that, not naturally anyway. They are more naturally inclined to sit smouldering pointlessly at the back of giant Romantic-style orchestras, strapped tightly in to their operating key of B-flat (just because an instrument is “in B-flat” does not mean it must only play music in that key, incidentally), waiting, counting, grimly thirsting for the two-bar oasis shimmering in the far temporal distance into which they will one day plunge their faces and go “yuck-duck-a-daaarrgle!”, to introduce a hint of the forceful to yet another dreary programmatic composition “from Nature” by some Scandinavian in a starched collar and pince-nez — and then they’ll stump off down the pub. Nevertheless, and in view of that sense of wounded indignation and to counterbalance their tribal grumpiness just a tad, let it be said that the orchestral trombone section really does sometimes get to play big tunes in the 19th century. Sometimes.

Thanks to Beethoven. Beethoven was the transitional composer-object who ensured that the Romantic outlook he embodied did not exceed the bounds of Classicism’s formal rules by too much too quickly (this was the stuff that made him before he made it, went deaf and became a supporter of Revolution etc). The differences of scale in the coming music were huge. LvB at least had the good sense as a transitional figure to extend an invitation to the monstrous regiment of Posaunen — their effortless chromaticism, their range, their massive weight of shot — to lend a shoulder to the wheel of this exciting new enterprise. He doesn’t give the bones a huge amount to do, but it was more than anyone else had done in the best part of 200 years. Not since Monteverdi…

After Beethoven, you find trombones everywhere in orchestral music, always hinting at a still greater potential for bigness and warmth than had as yet been harnessed by the whopping orchestras of the era, which now just grew and grew: in Wagner, the Russians, probably Dvorak, Bruckner and Fauré, grotesque old Berlioz, Brahms — everywhere you looked and listened there were trombones, becoming more respectable by the hour. Or so you’d think. Certainly no one was getting carried away in the early stages of the 19^th century. Bigness did not abound, not as a norm. And trombones in Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms were distributed here and there judiciously and with purpose, wherever a fanfaring passage was required, or the composer needed to darken his tonal palette.

But the summary truth of it is that 19th-century trombones saw significantly more playing time in the orchestral setting, technically, than they had in the 18^th century. Really, the orchestral trombone, during the long sequence of decades that came to be neatly parcelled up as the High Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods of music history (roughly 1650-1880) … well, the instrument evolved slightly as a musical force, while remaining as trapped as ever within its social stereotype. Until the sudden and most welcome appearance of lots of female trombonists over the past thirty or forty years, trombones were universally regarded at best as a bit of rough, a giggling brute with a smoker’s cough in an outsized Hawaiian shirt, always deployed right at the back of whichever ensemble happened to employ him, even further back than the trumpets and about level with the percussion — because every culture on earth hides its embarrassments… “No, really!” yells everyone in the music world even today. “The trombone should stay in its lane. Common sense says so.” And its lane, according to the fine judgments of those Titans of the Baroque, Antonio Vivaldi and JS Bach, was a lane that was already occupied. It was occupied by people singing.

It seems barely conceivable that I should be writing these words, but there it is: in the minds of the very greatest composers of the Late Baroque, the trombone never served its purpose better than when discreetly doubling vocal parts in cantatas and motets. A nice bit of padding, then. Enriching the mix. Lending discreet support. (You might be surprised to learn in that case — as I certainly was — that the trombone section was not routinely required to take its tea breaks in the cupboard under the stairs.)

Historically then, to find consistent, properly respectful writing for the trombone, you have to go back still further, well before peak-Baroque in the first half of the 18^th century to the churchy Renaissance beginnings of Early Baroque (the very late 16^th and early 17^th centuries) in Venice, with Claudio Monteverdi and, before him, Giovanni Gabrieli. The ’Bone Men. These fellows really knew their sackbuts from their elbows and wrote sympathetically and, more importantly, incessantly for the instrument, especially during the latter’s tenure as Organist and Choirmaster of the Basilica of San Marco. Gabrieli, in particular, was enthusiastic about the potential for spatial effects in that enormous, chambered building and was forever experimenting with the placement of choral and instrumental units in different lofts and galleries about the place for maximal exploitation of the seven-second reverb engendered by the vast enclosed distances built in to the place — antiphonal chunks of raw musical sound, in the shape of the multitude of canzons Gabrieli composed for just this purpose, which must have made congregant minds boggle as the focus of their hearing was pulled from one overhead locus musicorum to another, in an effect that a much later generation of music fans might consider analogous with the frantic stereo panning of recorded 1960s psychedelic rock and pop.

Giovanni Gabrieli: bring me your sackbuts!

It is incumbent on me at this juncture, I think, to make it as plain as I can that the ensemble church music of the Early Baroque had no other kinship with the psychedelic, except where it was literally borrowed as a contextual effect by pop in the mid-1960s (The Beatles? Well, George Martin). Quite unlike psychedelic pop, the church music of Gabrieli and Monteverdi, Frescobaldi, Schütz and Scheidt often feels solid, sonorous, stately. It has rhythmic drive even at slow tempo. It favours the monophonic over polyphony (ie it might be said, usually, to consist in tunes and dense harmonised accompaniment). Harmony is now beginning to feel less rawly modal, more key-centred and is often, in itself, highly affective (and less wriggly in feel) — the theory of how Baroque chordal suspension differs from that of the Renaissance is about as abstruse as musicology gets and, despite having just attempted to read a scholarly paper on it, I would not have the foggiest idea of how to explain it efficiently and usefully here to the general reader; suffice it to say that the resolving suspended discord was the money-shot in music right across the Renaissance / Baroque, peaking early in that transition with Monteverdi’s luscious madrigals and then again, towards the end of the Baroque, in Pergolesi’s off-the-scale beautiful Stabat Mater, one languorous suspension precipitating another in entire weather systems of discord and resolution. Tonal harmony now brings heft and density to the composer’s colour box and, crucially, is anchored in time and harmonic space by the underpinning of the basso continuo — the bassline that plays through: the driving tread of the emotions, alive and in living motion.

Yet the church music of the Venetian Early Baroque also had a taproot sunk into the deep history of the attention-seeking, deliberately intimidating and far from spiritual musical stub we call ‘fanfare’. Fanfares had always existed to ritualise social prestige and give notice of imminent action of one kind or another (often violent), at least since the ramparts of Jericho had met so famously with their fate. And fanfare still obviously had a place in both the royal courts and theatres of the Early Baroque period. Naturally, the apses, chantries, naves and transepts subdividing the basilicas of the established Roman Catholic Church — that imperfect model of a conflated court and theatre, squatting heavily at the centre of all things, quivering with its own power — would also make the ideal nursery for fanfare’s line. And that is what honking sackbuts do best. The sackbut was, for a longish while, the ideal engine for the abstract expression of material power. For a while everyone wanted sackbuts, regiments of them, almost as much as they wanted arquebusiers.

I WAS FORTUNATE indeed that my first gig as a trombonist came my way when I’d been having lessons for no more than a year, at the age of thirteen, before I’d even qualified for membership of the school orchestra and been inveigled into the soft tentacles of the Romantic 19^th century repertoire. The job on offer to me entailed the provision of incidental honks for that year’s school play.

I attended (on a highly questionable 11-plus state scholarship) an independent grammar school in my East Anglian hometown, an institution which, in the 1970s, seemed to be rather more interested in its own status and reputation than in providing a properly considered and stimulating education for its five hundred-or-so boys. The school’s principal MO was to bang exam-passing facts and information into you with a heavy didactic mallet, while allowing itself and its teaching agents to appear weary and/or cripplingly bored with the whole procedure, its purpose and the boys alike — and it ignored or punished you if you gagged on the diet. I did not learn much at “that school”, as my father always referred to it savagely, because I simply didn’t feel like choking on exam fodder; and, from where I sat (or rather cowered), I was not really taught much either — not in a style commensurate with what I considered in all my sulky, refusenik pomposity to be the ideal of good teaching.

The school even insisted on attaching itself to what it chose to regard as an elite syllabus, examined by an elite exam board. Add that to an institutional obsession with conformity and it is hardly surprising that the place turned out Oxbridge-educated captains of industry, finance, the military and science by the dozen, while a slouching, long-haired, smelly rabble of determined non-conformists hung back from the light of a “good education” and lost themselves in the shadows of their own failure.

At twelve and thirteen I had not yet fully achieved membership of that brotherhood and was still susceptible to polite invitations to participate in attractive-sounding activities. The school play was of course a way for the school to flaunt its high expectations of its students to the most critical market sector out there: parents. And just two of the shows you were never, ever going to see performed on the elegantly carpentered stage in that same school hall were those standard state-school classics of 1960s, ’70s and ’80s fun and satiric games, The Rocky Horror Show and Oh! What a Lovely War!. That was because the school play at my school was required to be Shakespeare, not vogue-ish tat.

I can feel you shuddering from here. Stop it.

I love Shakespeare — even Coriolanus, which I’ve never seen, never read in its entirety, nor ever felt inclined to investigate for its lurid origins as a story (I like the Histories, the Tragedies and the Late Weird Ones, and have few feelings about the snarl of uneasy Classicalist plays which precede the Late Weirdos in the standard Shakespearean chronology). But I have participated, after a fashion, in a few performances of Coriolanus albeit without actually seeing the action unfolding on the stage. That was because I was placed for most of its duration in an elevated backstage gallery all alone in the dark but for a lamp, a music-stand with some hand-transcribed music clipped to its chipped brass frame, and only my trombone for company. At thirteen I was responsible for the delivery of warlike fanfares and other associated toots in the most bloodthirsty of all Shakespeare’s plays.

I am not sure why I recall this small-scale, secretive, me-in-isolation stuff so vividly and in so much detail, although it should not surprise me in the least because it was about this time in my career at that school that I started to feel small and secretive, balled up much of the time like a woodlouse, obviously to make it much harder for authority to reach me or master to teach me or rivalrous bully to overthrow what little personal dignity I managed to cling on to with increasing desperation. Obviously. I have at least a dozen memories of strange and apparently trivial events when I was twelve, thirteen and fourteen which involved me concealing myself in plain sight on the rugby pitch, in changing rooms, at breaktime, in the gymnasium, during classes. In the latter case, in conventional classrooms, I pursued a highly successful strategy of what felt to me like sophisticated psychological concealment, by carefully lining myself up physically with the silhouette outline of the boy seated in front of me so that my face was never clearly seen by the master at the blackboard. I’d shift a little right and then a little left and adjust and adjust again as the master moved laterally across the front of the classroom, to ensure that even if my arms and shoulders gave some account of my presence, that presence would be faceless, a mere cipher expressing no real identity to the dully scanning eye at the blackboard. As a consequence I would be much less likely to be summoned to account for the acts of the Hungarian diet of 1848 and better able to think about the girl I was pointlessly in love with or whether I really liked Pink Floyd or not. Sometimes, in subjects where it was much harder to conceal oneself because of the seating arrangements — in science labs for instance — I would take the nuclear option and bunk off altogether and sit out whole lessons in the bogs. No amount of discomfort or boredom succeeded in deflecting me from my purpose, the couple of times I actually found the courage to do it.

I am glad though that the event which I retain most saliently in memory from that period is a good one; one that signals positive intent and creativity as well as my great desire to conceal myself prominently. To be not seen, yet seen.

My task was simple, and quite glorious. I was to stand up high on the slender gallery that ran behind the stage and connected to the upper floor of the school library, out of sight of players and audience alike, there to deliver martial snorts on my trombone when cued in the text. I think there may have been a French horn doing a similar job stage left.

It’s significant too that of the small handful of older, usually sixth-form boys with whom I enjoyed perfectly agreeable, normal relations, one of the nicest was effectively the musical director of Coriolanus, and it was he who offered me the job of Distant Unseen Herald of Death. David Thompson was his name and still is. They were David’s own fanfares (with a hint of a debt to Michael Tippett) and, as fanfares go, they were quite interesting to play. No shortage of yuck-duckah-dah, of course, but more than a little invention and originality in the intervals used.

The night of the dress or tech rehearsal — I can’t remember which — Thompson and I were up there in the gallery, poised in the enclosing darkness like assassins, and he had already made the decision that if all went well this evening, he’d leave me to it up there, to come in on cue, deliver the music with the desired heat and oomph and not run off to hide in the toilets. But for this final, critical rehearsal he wanted to be on hand to ensure that all ran smoothly and that I hit my marks with precision. I retain a surprisingly vivid memory of our whispered exchanges as the moment approached for the first yuck, and then of David standing back a little just so that the light from the lamp illuminated only his face and hands, which were held up in front of his face, thumb to forefinger like two question marks facing each other. And then as the cue was reached, he made tiny count-off twitches with both hands in front of his nose… two, three, four … and ….!

I delivered my fanfares, all three or four of them, scattered as they were about the play, and as the long note of the last of them drifted away and fluttered down to the stage apron dozens of feet away, where no doubt Bill Buffery (school superstar-thesp) was eviscerating either himself or some poor treacherous sap, I turned to Thompson and, pleased with myself for not making a balls-up of his fanfares and perhaps hoping for a small outpouring of lavish praise, I whispered, “Was that all right then?”

David frowned for a moment, nodded in some abstract affirmation, and then said, quite gently but not entirely in a whisper: “Well, yes, not bad. At all. Thank you. But I wonder … uh, your fanfares were a little …um … stately. I wonder if you might find a way to make them a little more war-like, more belligerent, maybe even with a hint of anxiety. After all, there is blood going on down there and it’s only going to get worse. More and more people are going to be killed…”

“Oh, yeah. Okay. Right. I'll try to do that,” I sotto voce’d gamely in reply, while actually thinking, “How the hell am I supposed to play yuck-duckah-dah ANXIOUSLY?”

“Great, great,” he said thoughtful as ever. “And, um … Here’s the text — I’ve marked it up with the cues — um, let’s see if you can really get that sound of the fear of death into your fanfares, yes?”

And off he beetled.

God knows I tried on the two or three nights the play ran to get the sound of anxiety about death into my fanfares. But in the end, I'm sorry to say, I must insist that a yuck-duckah-dah! is a yuck-duckah-dah! is a yuck-duckah-dah!

THE TROMBONE IS surely the most beautiful of all musical instruments, when the listener is lodged a safe distance away and addressing the horn’s frontal aspect, or its muzzle if you prefer, which means that pretty much all you see is the gaping hell mouth of its big round bell (especially the bass trombone’s bell: a huge black hole into which all matter would surely be sucked, were it not that all matter in the vicinity was already hurtling in the opposite direction having taken a big fat mid-range B-flat in the slats). Physical positioning is always important in your relationship with the trombone or trombones “in the field”. Never stand behind a trombone to listen to it play or, worse, to the side. If you do find yourself so positioned, try to move. Trombones do not sound good from side-on or from the rear: something to do with the way the instrument’s beautiful, unvalved tone is then obliged to make a circuitous journey to the listening ear via neighbouring or interposing surfaces, so that all that rich tone and essential thickness is reduced to what was once expressed to me, quite without any attempt at wit, as “the sound of a cow being sick”. And as with cattle, when they are not restrained by hawsers and left to graze in a field aggressively, it is important that you always face cow-wards when crossing the field, so that the ruminating kine do not suspect that your passage across the horizon of their consciousness is somehow ulterior. Or, if the field is home to a party of frisky young trombones (“young, dumb and full of cum,” as the farmer will cheerfully advise), face up to them boldly, so that they do not suspect you of trying to outflank them. They hate that. So facing up is far and away the safest thing to do. In fact, always, always hold eye contact with a trombone, because if you let it slip for even a part of a second, the trombone will know that there is treachery in the room — and soon you will go the way of all flesh in Coriolanus.

TUBA MIRUM SPARGENS SO-O-ONUM!

“The trumpet scatters its wondrous sound among the tombs of the earth — and all shall gather before the throne!”

But not quite, Mr Wycliffe, not quite — and not so fast. We must discuss your fee. For “Tuba” is indeed Church Latin, but it actually translates, I believe, as “great trumpet” — and what is a “trombone”, both in the brass and etymologically? It is nothing but a great trumpet. A very great one, set at a lower register, without valves — and even trumpets went valveless as recently as Napoleon. Which is why Mozart originally scored the Tuba mirum from the Dies Irae of his D-minor Requiem for bass voice and trombone, or Posaune, as I believe he would have called it — and not trumpet. He wanted to hear the sound of the Human.

“Die Posaune Streuung sitzt wunderbaren Klang…“

The bass bellows the heavy syllables of the Tuba mirum, landing them in all the wildest corners of the earth with the cadenced punch of an artillery barrage. You can almost feel the graves opening to the sky in Patagonia. The solo trombone meanwhile…

The trombone does nothing of the kind. The trombone is not for once a tone cannon. Or a leveller of cities. Nor does it invoke convulsions in the gullets of bovines. There is neither massing of trombones, nor dividing of their number to indicate the abiding proximity of Hell. There is no fanfare.

There is one trombone only and it is singing, as if to lullaby a brutalised world. As the apocalyptic roar declaring the finality of the Last Trump issues from the abdomen of the great basso-father, and the mouth of Hell cranks open, its every ratchet a stab wound in the living mind, the solitary trombone sings a lyric thread that begins as a decorous arpeggio but soon thins and twists like coils of smoke about the rigid stem of the father’s imperious warning — and then parts from it, stretching away and away, away from the super-ego, from Hell’s mouth and the artillery and the Judgement of All Things to quite another place, lifting and spreading as it drifts to canopy the very air it travels in, the exalted feeling of the notes sounding less like a sackbut now than a trombone has ever sounded — to a place where there is no judgment, only rest, sleep and trees in abundance, everywhere, as deep into the forest as it is possible for the imagination to penetrate, and then across yet more sunlit glades and deeper still — the enveloping primal quiet at the end of everything, just as it was before the beginning.

The trombone in Mozart’s Requiem is not the cruel instrument of your judgment and fall, the punitive lash and the scorn of all your sex at school. It is not the sundering of self from self. It does not demand you stand before the throne for judgment by the Three-in-One, or by anyone else for that matter. And even though you are now profoundly lost in the forest, lost to your own world, it is also a song sung in defiance of death. It is the voice of your own mother, when she is kind. She has, with low cunning, enabled your escape from Hell yet again.

Mozart’s Requiem is to a significant degree not composed by Mozart, quite magnificent though it is. He died, aged thirty-five while still writing it, to a commission from a local count who was planning to do right by his prematurely deceased young wife (and possibly acquire authorial rights to the piece for himself). Mozart’s widow, for her part, insisted ever after that the great composer believed that he was writing his own Requiem to the commission of a Mysterious Stranger. Whatever the truth of it, there are many different versions of the “completed” work, the most famous being that of a contemporary called Süssmayr (and he had to be a wrong ’un with a name like that, hadn’t he?). It seems certain that the solo trombone part as it is usually presented is probably not the work of Mozart, but one of his finishers, the dying genius having only written notes by hand as to the projected nature of the passage, pursuivant to the alarum of a declaratory opening B-flat arpeggio.

It's worth noting here, I think, that the B-flat arpeggio is the very first thing you ever learn to play on the trombone, with the slide closed right up in first position. A gentle, perhaps even nervous fanfare. In fact not really a fanfare at all.

I AM SITTING in Great St Mary’s in the middle of town. I am facing the congregation, which is not really a congregation but an audience, this being not a church service but a lecture. There is however a churchy vibe governing the tone of the lecture. This is because the lecture is about church music in the early 17th century, as it was played in the great Basilicas of the day, principally San Marco in Venice, into which you could probably fit a dozen Great St Marys at least.

The lecture is being given by an ardent young man, a fellow of my hometown university, and it is being recorded for the Open University. There are film cameras present and the church is packed with people nearly all of whom, whatever their age and gender, wear dreadful glasses and have even worse hair. The nave is flooded with dull East Anglian afternoon light, illuminating a colour field of audience-generated brown viscose and beige polyester in the pews ranked before us. I have far and away the coolest hair in the building. Of course I have. I have been working on my Jimmy Page curly bob-grown-wild for a fair old while now and I am pretty pleased with it. The year is 1975. I am fifteen. I have a three-year-old Vincent Bach tenor trombone casually diagonal across my lap, which feels even better to me than a Gibson Les Paul might do on a similar but also very different occasion.

The ardent young man is not quite cleaving the air in his desire to make vivid the prevailing technical conditions which allowed, nay fertilised the great transition from Renaissance polyphony to Baroque tonal harmony, yet his passion is infectious. The brown colour field is alive with interest. The membership of Brass A Cappella, the six-piece ensemble of which I am second trombone out of three (plus French horn and two trumpets), are simmering down where they sit after delivering a smoking extract from the excellently named Samuel Scheidt’s La Battaglia suite. I have the sweat of battle on me and electricity ripping in my nervous system.

Brass A Cappella is a consort of brass of the type that proliferated all over the bigger churches of early-17^th-century Europe. Our ensemble has been at it a year or so and this is a paying gig, the first of its kind: the Open University, Great St Mary’s, a decent audience keen as mustard yet the colour of boiled steak.

The consort was put together by my dad, who loved to research stuff like this, and a work colleague of his, Peter Mott, first trumpet and musical director: we were an outfit somewhat comparable, I liked to imagine fervently, to the great Philip Jones Ensemble. My father did the musical arrangements from historical sources, Peter Mott made them come alive, valving his trumpet with one hand, while conducting the ensemble through the more complex rhythmic passages with his other hand opened flat and then curling in on itself as he articulated each down beat, until it became a soft fist crested with a coxcomb thumb. He was a lovely man. Over the past year he had spoken to me only as he would to a fellow musician, not once as to a twerpy schoolboy with a trombone. He had not once commented jokily on my barnet. And today in Great St Mary’s I feel as magnificent as I have ever felt in my paltry life. I feel like a real musician for the first time ever. There have been a couple of moments during the performance when the trombones, all three of us, have settled into brief passages of thick harmonic riffing, heavy as boulders, and I have had to blink back tears as I play, so thrilling is the feeling.

The last number’s up. It is time for the big finale, the Giovanni Gabrieli canzon with which we will almost certainly blow the roof off the building. I love this one. Peter’s left hand is already cocked in position. I raise the mouthpiece of my beautiful trombone to my face.

I am quite unaware in that moment that the clock is already ticking, counting down to another, future moment in a few months’ time, during the hot summer of 1976, when the over-developed trombone muscles on one side of my face contract suddenly overnight while I sleep, possibly in response to teeth ground in anxiety over forthcoming O levels, and gently and without waking me, the muscles lift the lefthand ramus of the lower mandible out of its seat in the temporomandibular joint and leave me fixed the following morning with a dislocated jaw.

It would take six months of gradual coercion by a large piece of orthodontic kit in my mouth for the mandible to slowly return to its proper site in my narrow, assymetrical Coleman jaw. I was told that I really shouldn’t play the trombone again, not really, not if I wanted to avoid a recurrence of the dislocation. And I never have. Not seriously.

Coming soon: those great trombone hits you missed, from Tiburtio Massaino to Prince Far I