The flugelhorn began as a hunting signal and ended up as jazz's velvet trumpet
Play the same note on a trumpet and a flugelhorn and the second sounds rounder, almost smoky. The difference lives in the tubing: the flugelhorn widens gradually along most of its length, and that cone muffles the bright upper overtones. Its ancestor was a crescent-shaped horn used to steer a ducal hunt.
Flügel is German for wing. In early eighteenth-century Germany the officer leading one flank of an aristocratic hunt carried a large semicircular horn, the Halbmond, to signal his group. Armies adopted such horns during the Seven Years' War, and they became the bugle, an instrument limited to the six to eight notes of its natural series.
Makers spent the next decades chasing a full chromatic scale. Keyed bugles with tone holes appeared in Dublin and London around 1800 and brought agile brass melody to ordinary audiences. Then in 1828 Heinrich Stölzel, inventor of the piston valve, began selling valved bugles in Berlin. Bavarians called the new instrument the Flügelhorn and made it the lead soprano voice of their bands, a job it still holds. In Paris, Adolphe Sax borrowed the idea for his saxhorn family, and his B-flat soprano became the template for today's piston model.
Physically, the modern flugelhorn is usually pitched in B-flat with three valves, like a trumpet, so trumpeters can switch with a little adjustment of breath and lips. The valves, however, sit right behind the mouthpiece, leaving a long stretch of expanding tube before the bell, while a trumpet carries far more cylindrical pipe. The deeper, funnel-shaped mouthpiece adds to the softness. The trade-off is a slippery top register where high notes are hard to centre. Its colour is often placed midway between trumpet and French horn.
Jazz discovered it late. Joe Bishop played one with Woody Herman in 1936, Clark Terry brought it into Duke Ellington's orchestra, and Miles Davis made it famous on the Gil Evans albums Miles Ahead and Sketches of Spain. Chuck Mangione dropped the trumpet entirely and scored a hit with Feels So Good in 1977. Composers took note too: Vaughan Williams wrote a part in his Ninth Symphony, and the film Brassed Off hinges on a flugelhorn solo of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez. Yazz Ahmed went further, commissioning a quarter-tone version to explore Arabic scales on La Saboteuse.
Source: Flugelhorn
