Former Principal of the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, educationalist and international trumpet soloist, John Wallace CBE, reviews Howard Snell’s book, The Trumpet, and discovers that it is still the go to ‘Book of Revelation’ some 20 years after its first edition.

When this book first appeared in 1997, it had no real direct competition: in 2016, almost 20 years later, it is a disappointment, though a testament to its conceptual brilliance, that Howard Snell’s book is still out there on its

own. Although tutors like Gerard Presencer’s excellent A Modern Approach to Playing the Trumpet can be seen as complementary, The Trumpet is still the only book in the universe of the trumpet that one can recommend
to the aspiring student as comprehensively covering a complete understanding of the subject area. Although the target audience of the

book is the aspiring professional trumpet player, the book is also indispensable to the cornettist and there is enough generic advice for the book to inhabit a prominent place in any brass players’ field of attention. Indeed, the author has also written The Art of Practice, the target audience being any student performer of any instrument.

My own experience of both books is that they are inspirational and transformational. In common sense, no-nonsense language they spell out the facts of life as they currently exist to anyone aspiring to improve their capacity to make music, at whatever level they presently find themselves.

The book is structured and designed as a reference toolkit for the player’s own personal journey to enlightenment. It is a vademecum designed to dip in and out of when the practicing student (of any age) needs technical and musical support and advice. The cross-referencing may be found to be a little awkward at first, with the necessity of needing to search out page numbers from the chapter listing at the top of the book.

I wondered at an early stage of reading whether an index would be useful, but ended up satisfied that the present structure is best for this sort of inter-related content. The geography of the book soon becomes familiar
and perseverance pays dividends. I would recommend an initial complete read through - although written in a conversational style that flows and reads like a sparkling mountain stream, some of the ideas are quite radical and opposed to common wisdoms, customs and practices, and need time to absorb. Taking anything up to a week on this will pay untold personal dividends.

In some ways this is a ‘Book of Revelations’. Particularly amazing revelations are the prioritising of the tongue over the embouchure (which resonates with the Russian School of teaching, as recorded in former Bolshoi trumpeter, Vladimir Pushkarev’s Tongue Aperture Method) and the prioritising of visualisation, vocalisation and auralisation over ‘mouthpiece-on-chops’ contact hours. The book reinforces, at every turn, the importance of thinking over blind faith, of order over chaos and of mind over matter.

I have no criticisms of any substance whatsoever. This is a book that is uncompromising in the opinions expressed, but the opinions are consistent and amount to a credo of living, in which making music is the essential primary stimulus. As a radical opinion-former in any discipline and a ‘shaker out’ of outmoded mythologies about playing pedagogy, Howard Snell is one of the most trustworthy and reliable around.

The straight-through reader may, at first, find some of the repetition and cross-referencing mildly distracting, but the student player will find this repetition beneficial to the inculcation of good habit and the cross- referencing beneficial to the joined-up concept of a holistic playing and performing technique.

In conclusion, I first encountered this book in 1997; it prolonged my own playing career by five years, and
through revision, review and reprinting, it just gets better and better due to Howard Snell’s ever-expanding wisdom and insightfulness. Certain pages, like p.165, are a template for my ongoing daily practice as my own trumpet playing forms the spine of my continuing daily existence. This is essential reading for any trumpeter, cornettist or indeed any player serious about the art of playing brass.

Buy this book here.

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