Brass Scholarship in Review: Proceedings of the Historic Brass Society Conference, Cité de la Musique, Paris, 1999

Les journées de cuivres anciens (Early Brass Days), the Historic Brass Society conference at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, attracted performers, scholars, educators, and students of early brass from various parts of Europe and the United States. Brass Scholarship in Review provides a record of the scholarly side of the conference, including reports on roundtable discussions as well as individual papers from leading authorities on early brass. Articles cover a wide range of interests, from the historical to the technical, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. There are articles on such diverse topics as early hunting horn signals, trumpeters in Renaissance Parma, early recordings, trumpet acoustics, and the characteristics of metals used in early instrument manufacture. The volume is particularly rich in nineteenth-century topics, including ground-breaking work on Adolph Sax as leader of the banda of the Paris Opéra and recent discoveries relating to the Gautrot firm of instrument makers.