Tuning Slide #5.26- What You May Not Know

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Look, man, all I am is a trumpet player.

— Miles Davis

What you may never have known about the trumpet.

I needed a break from all that serious, professional stuff I’ve been writing about here. So I went digging for trumpet history and trivia. I found it at a couple different sites including 20 Facts about the Trumpet You Should Know and Top 10 Little Known Facts about the Trumpet. I did some editing and came up with these 12:

◆ The trumpet has been around since 1500 BC
The first metal trumpets were made around 1500 BC. Before that, silver and bronze trumpets (or trumpet-like instruments) existed and have been found all over the world, including places like Asia, Scandinavia, and South America. In fact, archeologists found bronze and silver trumpets in King Tut’s grave.

◆ Trumpets contain more than 6 feet of tubing!
Trombones, by the way, have 9 feet of tubing and tubas have between 12 and 16 feet of tubing. Originally, many primitive trumpets were made of wood or even conch shells.

◆ The longest trumpet fanfare line consisted of 91 trumpeters
Ninety-one trumpeters, all in military uniform, played the Wedding Fanfare in England during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. They could be heard all across the city.

◆ The oldest playable trumpet is over 3,000 years old
In 1922, archaeologist Howard Carter discovered a pair of trumpets from King Tut’s tomb. The trumpets are engraved with depictions of Egyptian gods and were made with silver and copper. In 1939, the trumpets were played live and broadcasted through BBC radio.

◆ There is a trumpet-playing robot!
In 2005, Toyota debuted a trumpet-playing robot – and it sounds better than you’d expect! There is also a robot that can play drums and violin.

◆ Trumpets are part of the aerophone family
Aerophones are a type of instrument that uses airflow to vibrate the instrument in order to make a sound. Aerophones are some of the most complex instruments and include trumpets, french horns, oboes, flutes, and other wind instruments.

◆ The trumpet’s cylindrical bore is what gives it its unique and vibrant sound
Essentially, this means that the diameter of the tubing stays the same width throughout its entirety until you get to the bell flare.

◆ A trumpet can play 45 different notes [or many more]
A trumpet might only have three valves, but it can play an impressive range of notes. A B-flat trumpet can play from F#3 to F#6, not counting pedal tones. Did Maynard go higher than that? Of course. According to Yamaha:

But there are ways to produce even higher notes. It’s actually not a question of the highest note that a trumpet can physically produce, but a matter of the highest note that can be played. In fact, performances by skilled musicians often extend up to two octaves higher than the instrument’s “highest” note.

◆ Trumpets are more than “just” musical instruments.
Trumpets are known for being used in bands and orchestras, but they also have a military component. Armies dating back to medieval times have used the trumpet as a signal device because of its loud, rich tone that can be heard over long distances.

◆ They have not always had valves.
The early precursors to the trumpet, cornetto and natural trumpet, didn’t have valves or keys.

◆ They are not the same as cornets or flugelhorns
Unlike the trumpet, cornets and flugelhorns have conical bores. The tubing diameter of these instruments gradually gets larger towards the end of the instrument.

◆ Famous people who (you might not know) played the trumpet
Richard Gere (Actor)
James Wood (Actor)
Steven Tyler (Aerosmith)
Samuel L Jackson (Actor)
Paul McCartney (The Beatles!)
Jayne Mansfield (Actress)
Clint Eastwood (well Flugelhorn anyway!)

Well, to expand my horizons after that, I looked for trivial facts about music and found some at Best Life online in 40 Facts About Music:

These include:
✓ In 2016, Mozart Sold More CDs than Beyoncé
✓ Finland Has the Most Metal Bands Per Capita
✓ The British Navy Uses Britney Spears Songs to Scare Off Pirates (Culture clash)
✓ Barry Manilow Didn't Write "I Write the Songs"
✓ Loud Music Causes You to Drink More in Less Time
✓ Cows Produce More Milk When Listening to Slow Music
✓ Heavy Metal and Classical Music Fans Have Similar Personality Traits (Creative, at ease with themselves, and introverted)
✓ Monaco's Army is Smaller Than Its Military Orchestra
✓ Prince Played 27 Instruments on His Debut Album

And a few from Music Radar just to round things out:
✓ In 1996, Ringo Starr appeared in a Japanese advertisement for apple sauce, which is what "Ringo" means in Japanese.
✓ Pete Townshend has smashed more than 90 guitars in his Who career, including at least 23 Fender Stratocasters, 12 Gibson Les Pauls, and 21 Gibson SGs.

And in case you think I have abandoned the trumpet altogether, a final trivia:

✓ The oldest artist to top the UK singles chart was Louis Armstrong (aged 66 years and 10 months) in 1968 with What A Wonderful World.

“So what?” you ask.
“Why not? I respond.

Here's why?

Trivia questions are very good for your memory. Trivia keeps us smart and engaged. Just like your body benefits from exercise, so does the brain. ... Trivia is great because you are trying to recall information from inside your brain that you don't use a lot.
— Being Better Humans

See you next week.

Bet You Didn't Know All This (Me Either)

I was checking out the song "Ring of Fire" and discovered a bunch of uses for the phrase over there on Wikipedia. My kindness led me to want to share it with you. (There are 28 including the first on mentioned.)

Ring of Fire (disambiguation)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Ring of Fire is a series of oceanic trenches and volcanoes around the Pacific Ocean.

It can also refer to:

Films, radio, and TV

• Ring of Fire (1961 film), a 1961 crime drama directed by Andrew L. Stone
• Ring of Fire (1991 film), an IMAX documentary about the Pacific Ring of Fire
• Ring of Fire (2013 film), a biographical television film about June Carter Cash and Johnny Cash
• Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey, 1970s documentary film about Indonesia
• Ring of Fire (radio program), a syndicated American talk show
• "Ring of Fire" (Knight Rider episode), 1983
• "Ring of Fire" (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode), 1993

Literature

• Ring of Fire (series), a series of alternate history books by Eric Flint and other authors
• Ring of Fire (anthology), a series of short story collections as a part of the above series. (Ring of Fire II, Ring of Fire III)
• Ring of Fire (Buffy comic), a paperback collection of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer comics
• Ring of Fire, one of the Three Rings of Elvenkind in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth
• Ring of Fire (novel), an Italian young adult fantasy by Pierdomenico Baccalario

Music

• Ring of Fire (band), American heavy metal group
• Ring of Fire (Mark Boals album)
• Ring of Fire (musical), a musical theater production on the life of Johnny Cash
• "Ring of Fire" (song), by June Carter, first performed by her sister, Anita Carter and later covered by Johnny Cash
• Ring of Fire: The Best of Johnny Cash, an album by Johnny Cash
• "Ring of Fire" (Duane Eddy song), a 1961 song by Duane Eddy from the movie Ring of Fire
• "Ring of Fire", a song by The 3rd and the Mortal on their 1994 EP, Sorrow

Natural science

• Ring of Fire, a sunflower variety
• Northern Ontario Ring of Fire, a geographic formation and mining exploration area in Canada
• In atmospheric sciences, thunderstorms that form on the periphery of a high-pressure ridge in summer and can include derechoes

Other uses

• Ring of Fire (game), a drinking game
• Ring of Fire (ride), an amusement ride
• Ring of Fire Studios, a visual effects, animation, and digital post production studio
• "The Ring of Fire", a nickname of Westpac Stadium, a sports arena in New Zealand
• "The Ring of Fire", a nickname of the lighting system of the Dubai International Cricket Stadium, a sports arena in the United Arab Emirates

Brain Teaser

A brain teaser was on the Trivia Board at my local Caribou Coffee Shop the other day.

You may always chase me, but you are always about 3 miles away.
What am I?

No, I didn't figure it out in the moment I pondered.

Yep- the answer was the sunset.

Who Would Have Thought?

Itasca.

The lake that is the headwaters of the Mississippi.

I always assumed that it was a native name.

Wrong. Very wrong.

Believe it or not is comes from a Latin phrase:

Veritas caput.

Let me show you that again:

ver-ITAS CA-put.

Yep. It's a fake name.

Here's the entry from Wikipedia:

The Ojibwe name for "Lake Itasca" was Omashkoozo-zaaga'igan (Elk Lake); this was changed by Henry Schoolcraft to "Itasca", coined from a combination of the Latin words veritas ("truth") and caput ("head") though it is sometimes misinterpreted as "true head." It is one of several examples of pseudo-Indian place names created by Schoolcraft.

I am crushed.

A Random Fact Randomly Found

This is completely out of this world- and dates back 50+ years. From Wikipedia:

The Shannon number, named after Claude Shannon, is an estimated lower bound on the game-tree complexity of chess. Shannon calculated it as an aside in his 1950 paper "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess".

How complex is chess? What are the number of possible variations, iterations and whatever -ations you can think of? Back to Wikipedia. Shannon calculated that:

there will be 10¹²⁰ (10 to the 120th power) variations to be calculated from the initial position. ... Victor Allis extimated it as 10¹²³(10 to the 123rd power).

In case you don't understand the incredible size of that number, the number of atoms in the observable universe is estimated at (only) between 4×10⁷⁹ and 10⁸¹

Staggering. No wonder I had such a hard time winning.

Wikipedia Link.

Say What?

Walked into one of my local coffee shops the other day and looked up at their trivia question.

• What is the sleeve around hot coffee cups called?

Well, one of the options was the obvious

• sleeve.

Sometimes they have a super easy answer like that; you know, who's buried in Grant's Tomb-kind of thing. Not this time.

One of the other answers was an odd sounding one:

• zarf.

Yep. That was the answer. I thought sure it was a made-up word that someone decided for some odd reason or another.

So I Googled it and was truly enlightened. Here, from good, old Wikipedia:

Although coffee was probably discovered in Ethiopia, it was in Turkey at around the thirteenth century that it became popular as a beverage. As with the serving of tea in China and Japan, the serving of coffee in Turkey was a complex, ritualized process. It was served in small cups without handles (known as fincan), which were placed in holders known as zarf (from the Arabic word ظرف ẓarf, meaning container, envelope) to protect the cup and also the fingers of the drinker from the hot liquid. Cups were typically made of porcelain, but also of glass and wood. However, because it was the holder that was more visible, it was typically more heavily ornamented.

I should have known better than to wonder where a word came from. It's always interesting when you discover a truly ancient word still around and being mentioned in a local coffee shop.



By the way, one fun bit was that on the first Wikipedia page I went to (Coffee cup sleeve) had a picture from my favorite coffee shop chain, Minnesota's own Caribou Coffee!

Trivial Trivia

Yes, perhaps even more trivial than your average trivia. Thanks to Live Science I know seven things about moths that I didn't know before. At least not in as much depth.  The one I found most intriguing for its sheer scientific triviality was this one:

A male moth can smell a female more than 7 miles away.

Though they lack noses, moths are expert sniffers. They detect odor molecules using their antennae instead of through nostrils. Male giant silkworm moths have elaborate, feather-shaped antennae with hairlike scent receptors that allow them to detect a single molecule of a female moth's sex hormone from 7 miles (11 kilometers) away.

When I shared this with my wife she was quite underwhelmed. "Yeah. So?"

Well I thought it amazingly intriguing.

For A Saturday Morning

A Twitter posting from Mental Floss that made me laugh:

In 2009, Iowa's Department of Elder Affairs changed its name to the Department on Aging, or DOA.

Obsessive-Compulsive?

Well, maybe it is a little OCD but I seem to have this thing about noting patterns and streaks. So I don't want to miss this one. Sunday, August 14, 2005 was the last day I missed a post. We had been traveling, arrived in Tampa late and the motel's WiFi was down. In other words, I have now gone 4 solid years of at least one post a day.

That and my debit card will get be a cup of coffee at my local Caribou.

Now That Makes Sense

I no longer remember what I was taught when young about Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) and why he did what he did with all those apple seeds etc. Maybe I thought he was some kind of proto-environmentalist. In truth he may have been kind of a kook. A couple years ago Mental Floss Blog had a post of four things you didn't know about Appleseed-Chapman and linked to it again last week. So with apple season really getting underway in the Upper Midwest I thought I would link to it as well.


Link

And to no one's surprise the reason for all those seeds on the American frontier: Hard Apple Cider.

Sunday Morning Coffee

Straight Dope Chicago on Friday started a two part series on coffee. In this first one they review the rudiments of coffee- and make no mistake- coffee is interesting.

Three basic things they learned:

• Coffee is complicated
• Coffee is best drunk black
• Coffee is easy to mess up.

Overall, good coffee has unsuspected subtleties.

I think I'll stop and get a Caribou on my way to church this morning.

Wow!

This was good to know- we actually do have more time than we used to.....

One second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. However, Earth’s rotation isn’t perfectly reliable. Tidal friction from the sun and moon slows our planet and increases the length of a day by 3 milli­seconds per century.

This means that in the time of the dinosaurs, the day was just 23 hours long.
--Best Article Every Day

Thanksgiving Trivia - the Last

• Which of the following were considered acceptable table manners at the First Thanksgiving? A. To spit on the ground B. To throw bones into the hearth C. To eat with your hands D. All of the above

Correct answer: D All of the above

• Which drink was brought along in the Mayflower? A. Wine B. Beer C. Piña Coladas D. Soda

Correct answer: B Beer

• In 1621, which of the following foods was probably not served? A. Pumpkin pie B. Yams C. Vegetables D. Corn

Correct answer: A Pumpkin pie (they did not have ovens yet to bake pies)

• Approximately how many feathers does a mature turkey have? A. 500 B. 1,000 C. 3,500 D. 4,000

Correct answer: C 3,500 feathers

--Source

Thanksgiving Trivia

According to popular legend, where did the male “tom” turkey get its name?
A. The popular Tom and Jerry Show.
B. Benjamin Franklin named it after Thomas Jefferson when he would not allow it to be the national bird.
C. A tom cat. Wild turkeys were just like wild cats back then. They would roam around and get into fights all the time.
--Link

Yes, the answer is B. Good old Franklin had a way of trying to make people feel inferior- although I doubt that TJ let it get to him. Anyway- aren't we glad the Bald Eagle won out?

I Didn't Know That

We're in the week before- Thanksgiving that is- when any turkey worth its weight in feathers knows to hide. And much to my enlightenment and enjoyment Mental Floss Blog posted 8 Turkey Tales. The first one surprised the stuffing out of me.

1. Butterball turkeys have been a holiday tradition for the past 50 years. While the name “Butterball” implies that the bird is injected with butter (which it is not), it actually refers to a specific breed of turkey. Butterball turkeys have all-white feathers (birds with colored feathers often have dark spots on their meat, which is not aesthetically pleasing) and have extra-broad breasts. Butterball turkeys are also the best-selling brand in the U.K. at Christmas, since the British obviously don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.

I guess I have one more thing to add to my list of trivia I wish I had known earlier.

Getting Ready for Thursday

No, Virginia, the cranberry capital is not Massachusetts. They only project a probable record crop of 1.9 million barrels this year. (Source)

The winner is Wisconsin where the 2nd largest crop in history was projected at more than double Massachusetts. Expect 3.85 million barrels from the bogs of the Badger State- and hold the cheese. (Source)

Friday Fun Fact

An interesting fact...

In case you're wondering, the most densely populated block group is one in New York County, New York -- 3,240 people in 0.0097 square miles, for about 330,000 per square mile. The least dense is in the North Slope Borough of Alaska -- 3 people in 3,246 square miles, or one per 1,082 square miles. The Manhattan block group I mention here is 360 million times more dense than the Alaska one; population densities vary over a huge range.

from here via Daily Dish.

Yecch!

Mental Floss Blog had 6 Things You Probably Don't Know About Oil posted the other day. Along with the fact that petroleum means "rock oil" in Latin was this absolutely disgusting piece of information.

The oil used on screen in There Will Be Blood was actually created using the same industrial material used by McDonald’s to thicken their milkshakes.

No tagline needed.

Nevermore...

With all the fuss about Brett Favre and the Packers, I had to find a good football trivia fact. So I went to The Fact Generator at Mental Floss and kept hitting it until one came up. (Kind of like dropping quarter after quarter into a slot machine until you hit it big.) So, here it is, both football and literary....

The NFL’s Baltimore Ravens were named for Baltimore native Edgar Allan Poe, author of “The Raven.”

Things You Learn on Jeopardy

When is a rat a fish?

When it is a capibara, a South American rodent that in a special dispensation was named a fish so it could be eaten during Lent. Well, it probably wasn't named a fish, they were just given permission to eat it during Lent. In either case, this a capibara by any other name issue occurred in the 16th Century. It is, by the way, considered the largest living rodent.

Link to Wikipedia

I think the animal in this picture might be a capibara. I don't remember for sure but it sounds like what I was told. Wikipedia does say they are gentle and will allow people to hand-feed them. The one in the picture was a pet of the young man who lived in the wilds of Costa Rica's east coast.