Word: trumpeter
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...every trumpeter well knows, to sustain a note of clarity, volume and high pitch through 53 inches of drawn-brass tubing requires the lung power of a bull moose and the finesse of a brindled gnu. What few trumpeters know is that while tootling they approximate the effects of "a formidable Valsalva maneuver," i.e., a hard nose-blow with nostrils and mouth blocked. To find out just how formidable the effects are, London's Dr. E. P. Sharpey-Schafer and California Musician Maurice Faulkner last summer sat down in London. Faulkner huffed his way through several trumpet passages, including...
...Trumpet shall be heard on high...
Then there is that voice. It is not trained (he does not read music), and Belafonte subjects it to growls, yelps and shouts that appall the opera stars who come to hear him. The voice can become gutty as a trumpet, musky with melancholy, or high and tremulous as a flute. It may take on the high, clipped inflection of the West Indies, the open-throated drawl of the bayou country, the softly rounded burr of the Scotch borderland...
...failed to be stirring largely because Laurence Harvey as Henry, given some of Shakespeare's best writing for trumpet, could not make the climaxes. (When asked if Harvey had a cold, someone who ought to know said, "No, he's a film actor.") And his clipped, fastidious diction sounds like a mannerism picked up from overindulgence in Restoration comedy...
Oddly, the two most familiar of Dr. Speert's great names are among the earliest and latest: Gabriele Falloppio (circa 1523-62), who vividly described the oviduct as uteri tuba, or trumpet of the uterus, and George Nicholas Papanicolaou, 75, whose technique for detecting early cancer by smearing vaginal secretions on glass slides for microscopic study of cells has become, since 1943, standard procedure in thousands of doctors' offices...