Elias Gottlob Haussmann, Portrait of Gottfried Reiche, Bach’s trumpeter in Leipzig, painted between 1726 and 1727. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
On the evening of 11 January 1967 BBC2 broadcasts an episode of Masterworks: the English Chamber Orchestra plays, in Guildford Cathedral, Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto, the one in F major, and the part everyone is waiting for is played by David Mason on a small trumpet, shiny and short, that looks like a toy. In front of the television is Paul McCartney. For weeks the Beatles have been working on Penny Lane, the song about the Liverpool neighborhood with the barber, the banker without a raincoat and the fireman polishing his engine. One thing is still missing, the sound that will make it shine.
Six days later, on Tuesday 17 January, Mason walks into Studio Two at Abbey Road at seven in the evening. He has brought nine trumpets. Years later he would say that he did not even know who the Beatles were: for him it was an engagement like any other. They proceed by trial and elimination, until the small B-flat trumpet is left, an octave above the ordinary instrument. No one has written a part. McCartney sings the phrases he has in his head, George Martin writes them down by hand, Mason tries them. It takes three hours. Then, with the tape rolling, two takes layered over the backing already recorded, on notes that Mason remembered as terribly high and tiring. It ends at half past midnight. The fee is 27 pounds and 10 shillings (about a thousand euros in today’s money: in April of that year an English manual worker earned on average a little over 20 pounds a week, in London almost 22, so it was a full week’s pay and then some).
What the Beatles’ audience did not know is that the instrument came from Bach twice. The first time, that evening on television. The second, older, in its very birth. Brandenburg No. 2, dedicated in 1721 to Margrave Christian Ludwig, gives the trumpet an extremely high part, conceived for a Baroque clarino without valves and for a lineage of virtuosos that by the end of the eighteenth century had already disappeared. To play it again, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Belgian maker Victor-Charles Mahillon developed a high trumpet with valves, built expressly for the high parts of Bach and Handel. The small trumpet is, in short, a tool born to solve a problem of early music, and in the 1960s it was becoming common currency precisely in Baroque orchestras like the one McCartney saw on TV.
Pop appropriated it with a collector’s gesture: take a precise, recognizable color and move it to another room. In the solo of Penny Lane there is not a single bar of Bach. There is the timbre, that metallic light of a court festivity, and there is the writing in the super-high register, which to an ear trained on rock sounded like something never heard. For years it has been repeated that the tape had been sped up to obtain those notes. Mason always denied it: he could still play them on his instrument, along with the record. He went back to Abbey Road other times, for A Day in the Life, Magical Mystery Tour and All You Need Is Love, and for the rest of his life, he who had spent decades in orchestras remained the man of the Penny Lane trumpet.
On 13 February 1967 in the United States and on the 17th in Great Britain the single comes out with Strawberry Fields Forever on the other side. In America it reaches number one. But a first version, with a few extra bars of trumpet at the end, had already been sent to American radio stations. On 25 January, remixing, the Beatles had removed that ending, and the few promotional copies that preserve it have become among the most sought-after records for collectors. Mason’s last word in Penny Lane, for those who bought the record in a shop, has never been heard.