Early in the 19th century, trombones were unwelcome additions to the symphony orchestra. Critics regularly complained that they were too loud. That is, in symphony orchestras. I have never seen similar complaints in reviews of concerts by promenade orchestras, which appealed to a lower social class.

Earlier, I wrote about an 1838 engraving titled “The Enraged Neighbor,” which shows a trombonist disturbing the neighborhood at 2:30 in the morning.

In 1861, Dwight’s Journal of Music reprinted an article from an unidentified London paper that began

Nabich, the celebrated trombonist, is now in Paris, as his neighbors, wherever he is living, will pretty soon learn to their sorrow. When he was in London he lived in Newman Street, where his memory will be forever embalmed in the curses of the inhabitants at his furious blasts when practising to retain his mastery over that dolorous instrument of torture. – Vol. 18, no. 22 (March 2, 1861): 388

But before long, the most respected composers regularly included three trombone parts in their orchestral works. In the US, the wind band became America’s most common and respected musical organization. Surely the trombone no longer drew such bitter complaints and utter contempt. Right?

Using brass to ridicule the temperance movement?

Well, no. While looking for something else in an old binder, I came across the following unsigned article from the July 28, 1880 issue of the New York Times.

“Habit” in the title means addiction. The article makes a couple of reference to “ardent spirits,” and I suppose the author uses the fatal progression that ends in trombone playing to make fun of the temperance movement.

But musically, I find it fascinating that as late as 1880, someone singled out the cornet and trombone for scorn, but not the venerable and aristocratic trumpet and horn. I suppose the upstart saxhorns and tubas escaped the satirist’s ire because they had not become as popular as the cornet and trombone. He could have hardly considered them more respectable—or quieter.

In transcribing the article, I have added some headings and shortened paragraphs to make the web page more attractive.

THE BRASS INSTRUMENT HABIT

It is generally conceded that the use of brass musical instruments has greatly increased in this country during the last ten years.[1] Few persons, however, have any accurate idea of the appalling progress which this terrible vice has made.

There is probably not a village in the whole country without its habitual and shameless player on the cornet, while the number of those who are addicted to brass instruments, either openly and to an extent which they call “moderate,” or secretly and to a ruinous excess, is estimated by trustworthy statisticians to amount to fully 3 percent of our entire adult population.

In comparison with these figures the prevalence of drunkenness becomes insignificant and opium-eating hardly deserves notice.

An unfortunate effect of the Civil War

To the demoralization caused by the civil war is doubtless due much of this giant evil. In the camp and the field men were brought in familiar contact with the bugle, the cornet, the trombone, and the serpent.[2]

The natural horror which a pure-minded man feels in witnessing the abuse of brass instruments vanished by degrees. The ears of our soldiers became calloused, and from listening with indifference to the abuse of brass by others, it was an easy step for them to adopt the habit themselves.

The bugler brought his bugle home with him, and as he blew it in his house and on the street, his evil example contaminated the young and thoughtless.

Then the long years of business depression, of bankruptcy and poverty with followed the war led many to drown their miseries in brass. The ruined merchant or the mechanic without employment lost heart, and tried to forget his wretchedness by dulling his senses with the cornet or the trombone.

Lastly, we must notice the pernicious influence of those unhappy men Levy, Arbuckle,[3] and similar offenders who have been made to minister to a depraved taste for brass, and have made this vice popular and even fashionable.

Brass is not all bad, just mostly

It is not necessary to take the extreme ground held by certain fanatics, that the use of brass instruments is in all circumstances wrong. Like ardent spirits, brass has its uses, and a brass instrument may be played in such a way and at such a time as to render it not only harmless, but beneficial.

As to the use of brass instruments by the wretched class of beings commonly called by the degrading name of amateurs, there can, however, be no difference of opinion. They work far greater injury than the coarse and maddening accordeon and banjo. These latter are used only by the lowest class of the community, but the cornet invades our happiest homes, and the trombone counts among its victims the noblest and best men in the Nation.

In this case, as in the kindred vice in intemperance in the use of ardent spirits, the course of the victim is steadily downward. Many a man has fancied that he could safely blow a few notes on the regulation bugle. The horrible thirst for brass, however, once formed, constantly increases. Before very long the bugle is laid aside, and the fiery cornet takes its place.

At first the cornet amateur indulges in his depraved passion at home, and in the secrecy of closed doors and windows, but sooner or later he casts off shame, and is soon on his front plaza or heard at his front window opening practicing the “Mabel Waltz.”

In many cases he finds the cornet in its turn too tame to satisfy his unholy thirst, and he takes the destroying trombone to his lips. There are scores of confirmed trombone players lively to-day who began their downward career with the comparatively harmless bugle or with a “moderate” indulgence on the cornet.

The social harm of the brass habit

There are thousands of homes in this land made wretched because the husband or the son is a slave to the baleful fascinations of brass. Many a wife has been driven to the terrible alternative of divorce or the stove-lid, and any a fond mother has had her gray hairs brought down in madness to the grave by the cornet-playing of those who should have been the support and defense of the household.

The ravages of brass instrument playing are not confined to the person and home of the players. In country villages a single cornet often depopulates an entire neighborhood, and destroys the value of real estate.

There is a suburban town not many miles from this City which affords a melancholy proof of this assertion. Three years ago a man, the father of a family, occupying a house in the most beautiful part of the town, suddenly fell victim to the cornet habit. Within the following years seventeen homes in the immediate neighborhood were abandoned by their tenants, and could neither be rented nor sold; five persons living within hearing distance of the cornet became hopelessly insane, and the very dogs, realizing the hopelessness of barking in competition with the brass, wasted away and perished miserably.

The miserable man who has caused this ruin still survives and pursues his shameful course, and the law is powerless to protect or avenge his victims.

The most loathsome feature of this devastating vice is its tendency to corrupt young persons and even children of tender years. The boy who is too young to dream of drinking ardent spirits is not too young to blow the cornet. There are even men who take a diabolical pleasure in pressing the instrument to childish lips, and others who actually make it their profession to teach the revolting art of playing the cornet and trombone to boys of 8 and 10 years of age.

What must be the future of that country be where the very children are thus instructed in vice?

“When I hear the accordeon, I tremble for my country,” said Jefferson. To what a frightful extent would that venerable man quake, were he now living, to see the gigantic proportions to which the brass habit has attained.

It’s time to act

The time has come when good men should everywhere join in an organized effort to stem the tide of brass which threatens to overwhelm our beloved land.

We must demand a strict license law regulating the sale of brass instruments, and a “civil damages” act making the vendor of brass instruments and the amateur player thereon liable, jointly and severally, for all the damages to property and persons which may result from the use of any variety of brass instruments.

Persons found guilty of playing the cornet should be punished with fine and imprisonment, and it should be made lawful for ant magistrate to commit a confirmed and notorious trombone-player to the lunatic asylum, and to appoint a Receiver and Administrator of his property.

Books, tracts, and lectures on the evils of brass instruments should be employed to develop a healthy public sentiment, and the young should be induced to join societies pledged to total abstinence from brass in every form.

But there must be no delay. The evil must be met by legal methods now, or we must be prepared to see the shops of instrument-dealers mobbed by maddened women, and cornet and trombone players shot by infuriated men, whose wrongs have mastered and slain their patience and their law-abiding instincts.

[1] In fact, bands by the 1880s included woodwind instruments. Most bands of the 1840s and 1850s were all brass.

[2] Ophecleide, maybe, but I don’t ever remember seeing reference to the serpent in any American band.

[3] Jules Levy and Matthew Arbuckle, the two finest cornet soloists of their generation, both played in Patrick Gilmore’s band. “Unhappy” may at least apply to Levy. He was vain, insecure, and insufferable.