Paxman Musical Instruments Ltd is a British manufacturer of horns. Paxman is the instrument of choice of a number of leading British players, including Michael Thompson. Paxman was established at the turn of the twentieth century by Harry Paxman, but did not start production of horns until 1945, when no more than twelve instruments a year were made.
Robert Paxman was honoured with an Order of the British Empire for his services to music. 1950 saw the arrival in England of Richard Merewether, a professional horn player whose career had started with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. As his career in England progressed, he found himself specialising more and more in the high register of the instrument. He had been working on ideas of horn design for a number of years and had researched areas of physics which he thought to be fundamental to the successful design and manufacture of such instruments. He approached Robert Paxman with these ideas, and persuaded him to build horns in f-alto and F/f-alto.
These instruments were so successful that Merewether and Paxman continued their association and went on to develop a range of over 50 models.
Paxman are also notable for having repaired Dennis Brain's Alexander horn, damaged in his fatal car crash.
History
In 1919, Harry, Bertram and William Paxman together started a company supplying brass, woodwind and percussion instruments from an address in Southwark, South London. Over the following one hundred years, that company would come to specialise in the supply and manufacture of the horns which are today a mainstay of the global horn playing community.
In 1944 Paxman restructured and moved to Gerrard Street. Harry acquired the services of three retired craftsmen, some instrument assembly started and in March 1945, Harry's eldest son, Robert joined the company as an apprentice. His innovative designs were first introduced in 1959, and over a number of years the whole product range was revised and expanded, to include for the first-time, horns in Bb/f-alto, and triple horns in F/Bb/f-alto.
In 1961 Harry retired and the management team of Bob Paxman, Fred Leach, Ted Adams, Jim Paxman and Dick Merewether became directors. The company name changed from Paxman Brothers to Paxman Musical Instruments Limited and in 1972 moved to a larger site in Long Acre and acquired a small factory unit in Kent.
Around this time, Paxman introduced a number of important changes to their instruments, including the dual-bore system for full double horns and double descant horns along with triple-bore for triple horns.
In 1993 Robert Paxman was awarded the MBE by Her Majesty the Queen in recognition of fifty years’ service to the Musical Instrument Industry and in 1996, he retired, with Chris Huning becoming managing director. Since then the line has grown to include ¾ size single horns in F and Bb, a compensating double similar to the old Paxman Studenti and the detachable bell Series 4 and Series 5. This ensures that there is a high quality, well designed and affordable horn for every player at every stage of their development.
Having outgrown the Union Street premises, the company is now located at 197 Long Lane, SE1. Paxman horns are still built to the principles established during the early years of the company and whilst modern technology is used where appropriate to ensure that Paxman instruments are amongst the best engineered in the world today, the professional models are still assembled by hand in the workshop at the new premises, not far from where it all started 100 years ago.
Historical timeline
1919 – Founding of Paxman Bros Ltd by Henry C, William & Bertram Paxman
“Grove Music”
“The Brass Bulletin 108”, Jeremy Mathez 1999
1920 -1925 - Paxman Bros Ltd listed at 16 Southwark Street SE1 and 26 Borough High Street SE1
This article incorporates textby Paxman Musical Instruments available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.The text and its release have been received by the Wikimedia Volunteer Response Team; for more information, see the talk page.
Related Research Articles
A brass instrument is a musical instrument that produces sound by sympathetic vibration of air in a tubular resonator in sympathy with the vibration of the player's lips. Brass instruments are also called labrosones or labrophones, from Latin and Greek elements meaning 'lip' and 'sound'.
The French horn is a brass instrument made of tubing wrapped into a coil with a flared bell. The double horn in F/B♭ is the horn most often used by players in professional orchestras and bands, although the descant and triple horn have become increasingly popular. A musician who plays a horn is known as a horn player or hornist.
The saxophone is a type of single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed on a mouthpiece vibrates to produce a sound wave inside the instrument's body. The pitch is controlled by opening and closing holes in the body to change the effective length of the tube. The holes are closed by leather pads attached to keys operated by the player. Saxophones are made in various sizes and are almost always treated as transposing instruments. A person who plays the saxophone is called a saxophonist or saxist.
The saxhorn is a family of valved brass instruments that have conical bores and deep cup-shaped mouthpieces. The saxhorn family was developed by Adolphe Sax, who is also known for creating the saxophone family. The sound of the saxhorn has a characteristic mellow tone quality and blends well with other brass.
The tenor horn is a brass instrument in the saxhorn family and is usually pitched in E♭. It has a bore that is mostly conical, like the flugelhorn and euphonium, and normally uses a deep, cornet-like mouthpiece.
The mellophone is a brass instrument used in marching bands and drum and bugle corps in place of French horns. It is a middle-voiced instrument, typically pitched in the key of F, though models in E♭, D, C, and G have also historically existed. It has a conical bore, like that of the euphonium and flugelhorn. It can also be used to play French horn parts in concert bands and orchestras.
The contrabass clarinet (also pedal clarinet, after the pedals of pipe organs) and contra-alto clarinet are the two largest members of the clarinet family that are in common usage. Modern contrabass clarinets are transposing instruments pitched in B♭, sounding two octaves lower than the common B♭ soprano clarinet and one octave below the bass clarinet. Some contrabass clarinet models have extra keys to extend the range down to low written E♭3, D3 or C3. This gives a tessitura written range, notated in treble clef, of C3 – F6, which sounds B♭0 – E♭4. Some early instruments were pitched in C; Arnold Schoenberg's Fünf Orchesterstücke specifies a contrabass clarinet in A, but there is no evidence such an instrument has ever existed.
C. G. Conn Ltd., Conn Instruments or commonly just Conn, is a former American manufacturer of musical instruments incorporated in 1915. It bought the production facilities owned by Charles Gerard Conn, a major figure in early manufacture of brasswinds and saxophones in the USA. Its early business was based primarily on brass instruments, which were manufactured in Elkhart, Indiana. During the 1950s the bulk of its sales revenue shifted to electric organs. In 1969 the company was sold in bankruptcy to the Crowell-Collier-MacMillan publishing company. Conn was divested of its Elkhart production facilities in 1970, leaving remaining production in satellite facilities and contractor sources.
A pit orchestra is a type of orchestra that accompanies performers in musicals, operas, ballets, and other shows involving music. The term was also used for orchestras accompanying silent movies when more than a piano was used. In performances of operas and ballets, the pit orchestra is typically similar in size to a symphony orchestra, though it may contain smaller string and brass sections, depending upon the piece. Such orchestras may vary in size from approximately 30 musicians to as many as 90–100 musicians. However, because of financial, spatial, and volume concerns, current musical theatre pit orchestras are considerably smaller.
Buffet Crampon SAS is a French manufacturer of wind instruments based in Mantes-la-Ville, Yvelines department. The company is the world market leader in the production of clarinets of the Boehm system. Its subsidiary, Buffet Crampon Deutschland GmbH, founded in 2010 and based in Markneukirchen, Vogtland, Sachsen, is the world market leader in the manufacture of brass instruments. To manufacture and sell its products, the BC Group employed around 1000 people worldwide at the beginning of 2021, 470 of them as employees of BC Germany alone. The management of the group has been in the hands of Jérôme Perrod since 2014.
Marching brass instruments are brass instruments specially designed to be played while moving. Most instruments do not have a marching version - only the following have marching versions:
Paxman was a major British brand of diesel engines. Ownership has changed on a number of occasions since the company's formation in 1865, and the brand is now part of MAN Energy Solutions. At its peak, the Paxman works covered 23 acres (9.3 ha) and employed over 2,000 people. Early Paxman diesel engines carried the name Paxman Ricardo.
One Blackfriars is a mixed-use development at No. 1 Blackfriars Road in Bankside, London. It is informally known as The Vase or The Boomerang due to its shape.
The Boston Musical Instrument Company was an American manufacturer of brass band instruments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries located in Boston, Massachusetts.
Michael Rath Trombones is a British manufacturer of retail and custom hand-made trombones. Rath offers artist-quality and student instruments in its line of tenor, bass, contrabass and alto trombones. Rath Trombones was founded in 1996 by instrument technician Michael Rath, and is Britain's only trombone manufacturer. Rath's 12 craftspeople create as many as 500 trombones per year, exporting instruments through 25 distributors in North and South America, Japan, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan.
A horn is any of a family of musical instruments made of a tube, usually made of metal and often curved in various ways, with one narrow end into which the musician blows, and a wide end from which sound emerges. In horns, unlike some other brass instruments such as the trumpet, the bore gradually increases in width through most of its length—that is to say, it is conical rather than cylindrical. In jazz and popular-music contexts, the word may be used loosely to refer to any wind instrument, and a section of brass or woodwind instruments, or a mixture of the two, is called a horn section in these contexts.
The German horn is a brass instrument made of tubing wrapped into a coil with a flared bell, and in bands and orchestras is the most widely used of three types of horn, the other two being the French horn and the Vienna horn. Its use among professional players has become so universal that it is only in France and Vienna that any other kind of horn is used today. A musician who plays the German horn is called a horn player. The word "German" is used only to distinguish this instrument from the now-rare French and Viennese instruments. Although the expression "French horn" is still used colloquially in English for any orchestral horn, since the 1930s professional musicians and scholars have generally avoided this term in favour of just "horn". Vienna horns today are played only in Vienna, and are made only by Austrian firms. German horns, by contrast, are not all made by German manufacturers, nor are all French-style instruments made in France.
Blackfriars Crown Court was a Crown Court centre which dealt with criminal cases at 1–15 Pocock Street, London SE1. It is located in Southwark a short distance from Blackfriars Road, from which it takes its name.
Leitner & Kraus is a German clarinet manufacturer based in Neustadt an der Aisch, Bavaria.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
