Welcome

Ralph Bryant

I began trumpet at age ten and the instrument so caught my passion that by the time I became sixteen, played my first professional engagements with Bill Bay's Big Band. Robert Weatherly, then Solo Trumpet with the St. Louis Symphony was my first professional teacher, and without his encouragement, what happened later would have been impossible. Age eighteen, upon a convincing telephone conversation from a good danish friend, my father consented to subsidize a year in Europe: seven months at the International Peoples College in Elsinor, Denmark, trumpet with Knud Rasmussen of the Danish Radio Orchestra. Then I was off to Berlin fo study trumpet with Hans-Gerhard Jensch, professor at the then City Conservatory. Upon my return to the USA, spent four years at Washington University, St. Louis, Mo. where I received a B.A. in Music and German Studies. Called up for military service, landed in the Special Band of the Military Academy, West Point, New York. Quitting the military, I obtained a Fulbright Scholarship for Musicological/Organological Studies at the University of Munich, Germany, and studied privately with Professor Rolf Quinque, Munich Philharmonic. Auditions followed and in April 1971, was appointed Associate Solo Trumpet of what has now become known as the Orchestra of the Zurich Opera, Zurich Switzerland.

I began turning these Mutes for my colleagues in the mid 1970's. At that time Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Jean-Pierre Ponnelle were collaborating on a production of "The Magic Flute" at the Opera in Zürich, Switzerland. Harnoncourt wanted the "marcia" at the beginning of the second act to have precisely the sound, which Mozart specified. In time numerous colleagues wanted to have a mute for themselves, and I have been making them ever since.