It begins with a low, barely audible rumble. The double basses, contrabassoon and pipe organ of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra groan out a sustained double C.
Then Esteban Batallán, principal trumpet of the CSO, raises his 1955 Vincent Bach “Mount Vernon” C Trumpet, serial number 13959, to his lips and plays three of the most famous notes in classical music: middle C, then a fifth higher, G, then the next higher C, completing the octave.
The “nature motif” of Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30,” which Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey” branded into the public mind.
The rest of the orchestra joins in, the timpani pounding underneath, and away they go. When Strauss’s “tone poem” ends, about 24 minutes later, and the full house at Orchestra Hall erupts into applause, it is Batallán whom guest conductor Jakub Hrůša points to before anyone else, for the honor of taking the first bow.
When he is not playing, Batallán occasionally shakes his trumpet — getting out the spit — “I like my trumpet very very clean,” he said later — and gazes down at it, quizzically, touching parts of it. A trumpet has four slides — small adjustable sections of tubing. “For the audience, it’s imperceptible,” said Batallán. “For me, I’m really sensitive with intonation, so I keep myself fine tuning all the time.”
Batallán has had a trumpet in his hands so long — since age 6 — that his pinkies curl involuntarily when he tries to hold his fingers straight. This particular instrument was played for a quarter-century before he was born, by Adolph “Bud” Herseth, the CSO’s principal trumpeter for 53 years.
“It’s a very famous trumpet,” said Mark Dulin, artist representative for Conn Selmer, the country’s largest manufacturer of brass instruments. “It has a really great sound. But that trumpet is from 1955. It’s worn out. The valves have been redone five times.”
The violin played later that evening is nearly 300 years old. Trumpets can’t last nearly that long, because of the stress of valves being pressed, rust caused by saliva coursing through the tubing, even a musician’s sweat, which will peel the finish off a horn. Batallán’s trumpet was in a batch of 11 crafted by Vincent Bach, the master trumpet maker, at his prime in 1955.
“These trumpets have been studied for a long time,” said John Hagstrom, CSO second trumpet. “Just like Stradivarius violins, they’re reverse-engineered, trying to find out: what makes them so great?”
In search of sound
“Everyone has tried in some shape or form to replicate these instruments,” said Michael Sachs, principal trumpet of the Cleveland Orchestra. “While some have come close, nobody has been able to replicate that sound.”
Other trumpet companies, such as Yamaha, have tried. Now Conn Selmer is giving it a go, consulting Batallán, Hagstrom, Sachs and others. They see the marketing opportunity here.
“These are great instruments, but there are just a few of them,” said Hagstrom. “Everybody would like them, but they don’t exist. There would be a great business advantage if you could build them again. They are striving to do that.”
Is the quality of an instrument really that important?
“It’s the difference between a racing bike and a three-speed Schwinn,” said Hagstrom, who owns hundreds of trumpets and plays about a dozen regularly. “Lots of trumpets play well but are not good compliments to the texture of an orchestra. A great instrument is a thing of beauty, an extension of you, of your voice. That’s really intoxicating.
“In the broadest sense, the trumpet is beautiful. It represents someone’s thoughtful solution to a struggle that is harder than it looks — a carefully balanced piece of tubing that makes possible your musical envisioning.”
Six of the 11 1955 Bach trumpets were purchased by the CSO. Herseth took one for himself.
“Supposedly the best of all six horns,” said Batallán, who bristled slightly when it is suggested that Conn Selmer is trying to reproduce the 6-horn set. “They’re trying to replicate mine.”
That might not be possible.
“You cannot clone anything,” said Jeff Christiana, director of marketing at Conn Selmer. “Every trumpet plays differently.”
5 feet of tubing, 120 parts, 490 steps = one trumpet
We are standing 114 miles east of Symphony Center, in the clangorous 150,000-square- foot Vincent Bach factory, where Conn Selmer makes brass instruments for two very different clientele: schoolchildren and professional musicians.
Either way, a trumpet starts with sheets of brass and coils of wire — 120 parts in all, which undergo 490 separate procedures to become a trumpet that can play Strauss. The student trumpets are built in batches; the professional instruments, one at a time.
Perhaps the best way to think of a trumpet is as a piece of flared tubing, nearly 5 feet long, bent into coils to save space. Metal trumpets go back to ancient Egypt — they were found in King Tut’s tomb — and for most of the past 3,000 years, trumpets were what we consider bugles, with the musicians forming different notes by buzzing their lips against a mouthpiece.
In the 1820s, valves were added, and in the late 19th century, the trumpets used today came on the scene.
Construction of a Bach trumpet today starts with the three valves set into a “valve box” and welded together with their requisite tubing — the box being the first of several forms used to hold the trumpet components in place so they can be attached at exactly the right angles.
“This is the heart of the trumpet,” Christiana said.
Five continuous hours of forming, hammering, welding, grinding, smoothing, polishing, the process unfolding over the better part of a week as racks of partly-completed instruments move through the factory.
The bell is formed by taking a sheet of brass and vacuum-forming it into a splayed flower shape, the seam welded with an oxygen torch, then spun on a lathe as a wooden pole is pressed against the spinning bell.
A mallet of grenadilla wood is used to pound the bell, prompting one of the in-jokes so prevalent among professional musicians.
“That’s the only proper use of that wood,” said Christiana, secure in the knowledge that no clarinetists are around to be offended — grenadilla is used to make clarinets.
Bending the tubes is a challenge, because they don’t want the metal to crimp. So the tubes are filled with very cold liquid soap, which helps the tubes maintain their diameter while still bending.
Musicians always fiddle with the trumpet
An irony of the trumpet is for all the care and precision that go into constructing each one, as soon as the instrument is in the hands of a professional musician, he — trumpet players have traditionally been men, though, as with so much regarding gender roles, that is changing — begins to fiddle with it.
Cleveland’s Sachs, like Batallan one of the top trumpet players in the world, places an extra ring at the bottom of his third piston.
“The sound had a little too much of the treble, a little too much brilliance that cut through the orchestra,” Sachs said. “I wanted a warmer tone, more broadness and depth.” (Vincent Bach meant for his trumpets to sound like “lightning in a dark sky,” so musicians who are trying to blend into an orchestra often try to moderate their tone).
Sachs points out the tiniest adjustments — whether the screw on the spit valve is fully tightened, for instance — will affect the sound of the horn in noticeable fashions. Some performers will jam a cork between the tubing. Pros call these hacks “voodoo.”
Conn Selmer’s goal to reproduce Batallán’s trumpet might run into trouble because his instrument has perhaps the most unusual voodoo of all.
Traffic accident had silver lining
It’s a long story — to talk to a classical musician is a deep dive into complicated instrument history, complete with full serial numbers — that begins with CSO’s legendary principal trumpet Bud Herseth getting into a car accident on his way home to Oak Park in 1952.
He hit his mouth on the steering wheel, loosening some teeth. A potential disaster for a trumpeter. His younger brother, a dentist, shored the teeth up with silver bracing. The silver bracing eventually was later removed from Herseth’s mouth and flattened into two patches affixed to the bottom of his trumpet bell, with help from Vincent Bach.
“They worked together,” Batallán said. “It has some additional patches in certain places that no other horn in the world has. Those two pieces are the two patches I have on my bell. He wanted to protect the bell and added some weight. Some extra material makes the sound warmer and more centered.”
Batallán won’t let the patches be photographed. Conn Selmer is doing the best it can.
“We did some blind tests of bells,” said Dulin, who recently drove a prototype to Cleveland so Sachs could try out the latest concept on stage at Severance Hall.
“It was way too much” — too loud, too bright,” Dulin said. “But soon we’ll be making this C Trumpet, and people will be very happy once we start doing it.”
Will they succeed in reproducing the instrument Batallán plays at Orchestra Hall? He lets out a long sigh.
“There are some things that cannot be duplicated,” Batallán said. “But getting close to 90, 95%? Yes. Absolutely.”
Coming Monday: Marching band is alive and well, as the next generation of musicians takes up the trumpet at Morgan Park High School.
