The serpent, an extinct musical instrument, was important to the development of contemporary low brass. Its characteristics, performance problems, and literature give insight into its development as well as reasons for its ultimate demise and replacement with technically more advanced instruments.

The popularity of the miscellaneous wind bands in Italian society through the centuries, and the prominent use of the trumpet within these ensembles and as a solo instrument, become evident in the examination of the development of the banda sul palco (the band on stage) in Italian opera. Gioachino Rossini was the first to use the banda sul palco (stage band) with any regularity. Giovanni Paisiello, Giuseppe Gazzaniga, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart must be considered earlier contributors to the growing movement of using instrumental ensembles on stage.

The purpose was to investigate attitudes of successful full-time performing classical singer-actors toward career concerns of the music profession. Five research problems were formulated to: (1) describe attitudes toward control of work conditions; (2) describe attitudes toward entrapment; (3) describe attitudes toward dependency; (4) report attitudes concerning current practices of training the solo singer; and (5) identify commonalities among the subjects regarding demographic, the attitudes described in problems one through four, and demeanor during the interviews.

The process of the organization of the orchestra began with the rise of opera; considered on a broad scale this process divides itself into two periods, the first terminated by the deaths of Bach and Handel (1600-1759) and the second beginning with the complete change of orchestral sound evident in the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart during the second half of the eighteenth century. It is the first of these two periods that witnessed the composers of art music exploiting the natural trumpet, an instrument long associated with court, camp, and field, to the extent that they developed a vast repertoire of trumpet music characterized by its virtuosic technical requirements.