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A fanfare (or fanfarade or flourish) is a short musical flourish which is typically played by trumpets (including fanfare trumpets), French horns or other brass instruments, often accompanied by percussion.[1] It is a "brief improvised introduction to an instrumental performance".[2] A fanfare has also been defined in The Golden Encyclopedia of Music as "a musical announcement played on brass instruments before the arrival of an important person", such as heralding the entrance of a monarch[3] (the term honors music for such announcements does not have the specific connotations of instrument or style that fanfare does). Historically, fanfares were usually played by trumpet players, as the trumpet was associated with royalty.[4]Bugles are also mentioned.[5] The melody notes of fanfare are often based around the major triad, often using "[h]eroic dotted rhythms".[4]
By extension, the term may also designate a short, prominent passage for brass instruments in an orchestral composition. Fanfares are widely used in opera orchestral parts, notably in Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser and Lohengrin and Beethoven's Fidelio. In Fidelio, the dramatic use of the fanfare is heightened by having the trumpet player perform offstage, which creates a muted effect.
Etymology
The word has been traced to a 15th-century Spanish root, fanfa ("vaunting"). Though the word may be onomatopoeic, it is also possible that it is derived from the Arabic word fanfáre ("trumpets"). The word is first found in 1546 in French, and in English in 1605, but it was not until the 19th century that it acquired its present meaning of a brief ceremonial flourish for brass.[1] Indeed, an alternative term for the fanfare is "flourish", as in the ruffles and flourishes played by military bands in the US to announce the arrival of the president, a general, or other high-ranking dignitary.[6] "In the England of Shakespeare's time", fanfares "were often known as flourishes and sometimes as 'tuckets' " (a word related to toccata).[4]
History
In French usage, fanfare also may refer to a hunting signal (given either on "starting" a stag, or after the kill when the hounds are given their share of the animal). In both France and Italy, fanfare was the name given in the 19th century to a military or civilian brass band.[1] In French, this usage continues to the present, and distinguishes the all-brass band from bands of mixed brass and woodwind, which is called Harmonie.[7] The same applies in Belgium and the Netherlands, where competitions for fanfares are held to this day, well separate from other wind ensembles such as brass bands and harmonies.[8] Fanfares have been imitated in art music as early as the 14th century. Examples in opera include a fanfare for the governor's arrival in Beethoven's Fidelio, act 2. In the 20th century, well-known composed fanfares include Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man (1942), for brass and percussion, and Igor Stravinsky's Fanfare for a New Theatre (1964), for two trumpets.[9][6]
Copland's Fanfare is one of a series of 18 commissioned by Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra conductor Eugene Goossens in 1942–43, each to open a concert. Each was to salute an aspect of the war effort; the U.S. had entered World War II the previous year. The only one of these fanfares to become well known is Copland's; the others are rarely if ever performed or recorded. The set, with the date of the concert at which each was performed, is:[10]
↑ Lloyd 1968, 172: "FANFARE: a musical announcement played on brass instruments before the arrival of an important person. Originally a fanfare heralded the entrance of a king into his great hall or into the royal box at the theater. Fanfares were also played on state occasions, such as coronations.".
Tarr, Edward H. 2001. "Fanfare". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
The cornet is a brass instrument similar to the trumpet but distinguished from it by its conical bore, more compact shape, and mellower tone quality. The most common cornet is a transposing instrument in B♭. There is also a soprano cornet in E♭ and cornets in A and C. All are unrelated to the Renaissance and early Baroque cornett.
The flugelhorn, also spelled fluegelhorn, flugel horn, or flügelhorn, is a brass instrument that resembles the trumpet and cornet but has a wider, more conical bore. Like trumpets and cornets, most flugelhorns are pitched in B♭, though some are in C. It is a type of valved bugle, developed in Germany in the early 19th century from a traditional English valveless bugle. The first version of a valved bugle was sold by Heinrich Stölzel in Berlin in 1828. The valved bugle provided Adolphe Sax with the inspiration for his B♭ soprano (contralto) saxhorns, on which the modern-day flugelhorn is modelled.
The trombone is a musical instrument in the brass family. As with all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player's vibrating lips cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate. Nearly all trombones use a telescoping slide mechanism to alter the pitch instead of the valves used by other brass instruments. The valve trombone is an exception, using three valves similar to those on a trumpet, and the superbone has valves and a slide.
The trumpet is a brass instrument commonly used in classical and jazz ensembles. The trumpet group ranges from the piccolo trumpet—with the highest register in the brass family—to the bass trumpet, pitched one octave below the standard B♭ or C trumpet.
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, most often for orchestra. Although the term has had many meanings from its origins in the ancient Greek era, by the late 18th century the word had taken on the meaning common today: a work usually consisting of multiple distinct sections or movements, often four, with the first movement in sonata form. Symphonies are almost always scored for an orchestra consisting of a string section, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments which altogether number about 30 to 100 musicians. Symphonies are notated in a musical score, which contains all the instrument parts. Orchestral musicians play from parts which contain just the notated music for their own instrument. Some symphonies also contain vocal parts.
The word lituus originally meant a curved augural staff, or a curved war-trumpet in the ancient Latin language. This Latin word continued in use through the 18th century as an alternative to the vernacular names of various musical instruments.
The bugle is a simple signaling brass instrument with a wide conical bore. It normally has no valves or other pitch-altering devices, and is thus limited to its natural harmonic notes, and pitch is controlled entirely by varying the air and embouchure.
A horn section is a group of musicians playing horns. In an orchestra or concert band, it refers to the musicians who play the "French" horn, and in a British-style brass band it is the tenor horn players. In many popular music genres, the term is applied loosely to any group of woodwind or brass instruments, or a combination of woodwinds and brass.
Fanfare for the Common Man is a musical work by the American composer Aaron Copland. It was written in 1942 for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under conductor Eugene Goossens and was inspired in part by a speech made earlier that year by then American Vice President Henry A. Wallace, in which Wallace proclaimed the dawning of the "Century of the Common Man".
Gordon Percival Septimus Jacob CBE was an English composer and teacher. He was a professor at the Royal College of Music in London from 1924 until his retirement in 1966, and published four books and many articles about music. As a composer he was prolific: the list of his works totals more than 700, mostly compositions of his own, but a substantial minority of orchestrations and arrangements of other composers' works. Those whose music he orchestrated range from William Byrd to Edward Elgar to Noël Coward.
A natural trumpet is a valveless brass instrument that is able to play the notes of the harmonic series.
Sir Eugene Aynsley Goossens was an English conductor and composer.
The post horn is a valveless cylindrical brass instrument with a cupped mouthpiece. The instrument was used to signal the arrival or departure of a post rider or mail coach. It was used by postilions of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Clarion is a name for a high-pitched trumpet used in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is also a name for a 4' organ reed stop that produces a high-pitched or clarion-like sound on a pipe organ in the clarion trumpet's range of notes.
Hand-stopping is a technique by which a natural horn or a natural trumpet can be made to produce notes outside of its normal harmonic series. By inserting the hand, cupped, into the bell, the player can reduce the pitch of a note by a semitone or more. This, combined with the use of crooks changing the key of the instrument, allowed composers to write fully chromatic music for the horn and almost fully chromatic music for the trumpet before the invention of piston and valve horns and trumpets in the early 19th Century. A stopped note is called gestopft in German and bouché in French.
A fanfare is a flourish of music for brass instruments.
An offstage instrument or choir part in classical music is a sound effect used in orchestral and opera which is created by having one or more instrumentalists from a symphony orchestra or opera orchestra play a note, melody, or rhythm from behind the stage, or having a choir of singers sing a melody from behind the stage.
A fanfare band, fanfare corps, fanfare battery, fanfare team, horn and drum corps, bugle band, drum and bugle corps, or trumpet and drum band is a military or civilian musical ensemble composed of percussion instruments, bugles, natural horns and natural trumpets. Fanfare bands are the descendants of the old medieval trumpet and drum teams that sounded fanfares on important occasions and are related to drum and bugle corps internationally.
A fanfare orchestra is a type of brass band consisting of the entire saxophone family, trumpets, trombones, euphoniums, baritone horns, flugelhorns and alto/tenor- or F-horns, as well as percussion. They are seldom seen outside of Europe, with a high concentration of these bands in Belgium and the Netherlands, many of them civil bands with a few Dutch bands also serving the Armed forces of the Netherlands and its veterans.
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