2005

Roland John Jackson, expert on performance practice and longtime editor of the Performance Practice Review, mentions the color and sonority contributed by alto trombone: “As the [nineteenth] century wore on the alto began to drop away and the tenor and bass became fused into a single instrument. This, however, robbed the trombone section of something of its distinctive color and sonority; the absence of an alto trombone, for instance, takes away from the effectiveness of the entrance of the three trombones in the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony” (Jackson 410).