Review

Karlheinz Weber
Her Majesty the Trombone! A Journey of Discovery:

Arranged by Daniel C. Villanueva


Würzburg, , Germany
Publisher: crescendo brass
Date of Publication: 2012

Primary Genre: Study Material - book

Karlheinz Weber, former principal trombonist of the Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne and a member of the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra from 1968-1994, has taught trombone at the Westfälische Landeskirchenmusikschule since 1973. His book Her Majesty the Trombone! has been translated into English from the original German, Ihre Majestät die Posaune! Eine Entdeckungsreise (crescendo brass, 2009, now in a third edition, 2011), with support from the International Trombone Association. While a new book about the trombone ought to be greeted with enthusiasm, there is, unfortunately, no way around the fact that Her Majesty the Trombone! is one of the most poorly researched, poorly written, poorly edited, and poorly translated books on the trombone to have ever appeared in print.

The book begins with nearly forty pages of linguistic gymnastics whereby Weber takes Martin Luther’s use of the word “Posaune” for the Hebrew word “shofar” in his translation of the Bible into German (1534) to prove that the trombone – what Weber oddly calls the “slideless trombone” – has actually been around since antiquity. This introduction leaves the reader’s head spinning, and the author’s assertion that the trombone as we know it today sprang up sui generis and did not evolve from forms of early trumpets is nothing short of astonishing. 

The English translation by Daniel C. Villanueva presents additional problems. German is a tricky language and context often determines meaning. Mistranslations abound: “tief” is rendered as “deep” rather than “low”; “Mensur” is translated as “diapason” rather than “bore”; “Stiefel,” the “stocking” at the end of the inner slide of the trombone, is rendered as “boot”; “Halsdurchmesser” or the “throat” of a mouthpiece becomes “neck.” The text would have greatly benefitted from editing by a trombone scholar whose native language was English and who could have worked with the author and translator to craft prose that would have been clear and meaningful to trombonists. Instead, what we have is a book with a “literal” feel to the text that reads clumsily and is difficult to understand. We are subjected to phrases like, “the accumulation affect” (page 157), which seems to refer to – although it is not at all clear – the air pressure that backs up in certain registers as a result of cup volume and throat bore, and, “ideal accumulated thrust bearer” (also page 157), whose meaning is incomprehensible. While the translation is flawed, it cannot be blamed for all of the textual confusion. Weber’s original German is reasonably accurately translated in sentences that strain one’s ability to make any sense of them at all, such as this from page 156, “A lip-sparing embouchure is furthered by an appropriately rounded rim.” And (page 154), “Through continued variation of the lip tension under simultaneous ‘snorting through’ of breath, the player can arbitrarily change the concrete note pitch according to his given or inculcated capabilities.”

Despite his good intentions, Weber repeats many myths about the trombone. For instance (page 149), he perpetuates the fiction that Mozart called for soprano trombone in his Mass in c minor, a misreading of Mozart’s score perpetuated by Hans Kunitz in his Posaune (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1959) and since thoroughly discredited. Also repeated is the familiar “fact” (again, page 149) that the first use of trombone glissando in orchestral music came in Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande of 1902/03. As we know, Alexander Glazunov called for trombone glissandi in The Sea from 1889, Rimsky-Korsakov used them in his Mlada of 1889/90, and Elgar in The Dream of Gerontious (1900). In a remarkable claim (page 70), Weber cites a piece by Mozart – Die sieben Worte Jesu am Kreuz – that allegedly has a solo for obligato trombone. This would truly be an astonishing discovery on Weber’s part except for the fact that Mozart never wrote such a piece; with no source cited, it is impossible to discern where Weber got this misinformation. Weber refers to the English flatt trumpet as “flat trumpet” (page 40), and he is unaware that the ancient Roman bucina was not a long, over-the-shoulder instrument (page 11), but rather that instrument was the cornu, the bucina being a short instrument made of animal horn. Like many writers, Weber unfortunately trusted the secondary sources (sixth century) who quoted Vegetius (late fourth century) and did not take into account the change of meaning of the instrument names between the Roman military scholar’s time and their own. And so on it goes, page after page after page.

Confusion on the author’s part about the shofar, cornu and bucina is only one of a host of problems caused by the fact that the book’s bibliography contains virtually nothing written in the last 20+ years (only 15 of the 160 works cited date from 1990 or later). Absent are any references to scholarship from the Historic Brass Society Journal (published annually since 1989), or Trevor Herbert’s seminal The Trombone (Yale University Press, 2006). A reading of Renato Meucci’s, “Roman Military Instruments and the Lituus” (Galpin Society Journal, 1989) would have cleared up confusion about the bucina, and Howard Weiner’s, “The Soprano Trombone Hoax” (Historic Brass Society Journal, 2001) sheds important light on Kunitz’s unreliability as a trombone scholar, especially when it comes to the soprano trombone. Likewise, a look at Jeremy Montagu’s Musical Instruments of the Bible (Scarecrow Press, 2002) would have spared readers the opening problems regarding the shofar and Luther’s use of the word Posaune. But if one writes a book that relies on scholarship that is mostly rooted in sources that are from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – and virtually nothing of importance in English – it is no surprise that it is full of outdated and inaccurate assertions that have been known to be false for many years.

Yet nuggets of good information are to be found. The biographies of influential 19th and early 20th century trombonists including Belcke, Queisser, Müller, Weschke, Hansen and Reiche give us a rich mine of information about these players although this section, too, must be carefully filtered for errors. Robert Schumann, for instance, could not have praised Müller’s work as a member of the Gewandhaus Orchestra (page 84) since Müller was born in 1849 and Schumann died in 1856. The list (Appendix 2.3) of bass trumpet and trombone players in the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra is also of interest. 

With the trombone benefitting in recent years from an explosion of high-quality research, it is unfortunate that Her Majesty the Trombone! did not receive the kind of editing that would have helped it be a more useful resource. Readers must be cautioned to test every sentence against the lens of contemporary research. Regrettably, once this book is widely circulated, we will see its faulty assertions quoted in papers, dissertations and books about the trombone for years to come. As it is, what we now have before us is a deeply flawed book about our instrument that hurts our understanding and does little to advance the legacy of “Her Majesty The Trombone.” Alas.

-Douglas Yeo
Arizona State University