Keyed Trumpet

The keyed trumpet is a brass instrument that makes use of keyed openings in its bore rather than extensions of the length of the bore as the means of playing all the notes of the chromatic scale. The heyday of the keyed trumpet was around the turn of the nineteenth century; its popularity waned with the emergence of the valved trumpet in the early nineteenth century and it is rarely seen in modern performances. Prior to the invention of the keyed trumpet, the prominent trumpet of the time was the natural trumpet.

The keyed trumpet has holes in the wall of the tube that are closed by keys. The experimental E♭ keyed trumpet was not confined to the natural notes, but was chromatic in all registers of the instrument. Before this, the trumpet was commonly valveless and could only play a limited range of “harmonic” notes by altering lip pressure. These harmonic notes were clustered in the high registers, so previous trumpet concertos could only play melodies at very high pitches.

There is also some discrepancy over who created the E♭ keyed trumpet, as it is claimed that “the Viennese court trumpeter, Anton Weidinger invented the keyed trumpet” though elsewhere it is insisted that although “the invention of the keyed trumpet has been ascribed to the Viennese, Anton Weidinger, who is said to have constructed it in 1801... the instrument itself is older than that, as Haydn's concerto was written five years earlier.”