The Trombone (photo) (audio)

In the late fourteenth century, the trumpet was remodeled into an S-shaped form. This shape suggested an instrument which later came to be called the trombone. The

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trombone was usually paired with the trumpet and it soon became the popular lowest pitched instrument.

In the eighteenth century the trombone was often used for coloristic effects suggestive of menace or majesty. Mozart offers

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examples of such writing in his 'Requiem' and in his opera 'Don Giovanni'. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the trombone is used primarily as an orchestral instrument. Virtuoso passages for trombone are in Berlioz's 'Symphonie Fantastique', in Wagner's 'Der Ring des Niebelungen', and in Dimitri Shostakovich's 'Symphony No. 5'.

The trombone, like other instruments, produces sound by by blowing into a cup-shaped mouthpiece which creates vibrations in the column of air inside the instrument. Pitches are created, not by valves, but by a long U-shaped slide that the player manipulates to make a wide and an infinite number of pitches.