It looks like any other band practice as a handful of teen-agers mill around the Centennial High School music room with trumpets, taking cues from instructor Frank Owens.

But this is no run-of-the-mill brass-section rehearsal. The young musicians are playing replicas of 17th-century trumpets, making the group the only known school ensemble in the country to play them. Made without the valves of modern trumpets, the old-fashioned instruments date to the 1300s and were played as recently as the early 1800s.

"The fact that these high school musicians are doing this is pretty amazing," said Owens, a music instructor at Centennial Lane Elementary School, also in Ellicott City. "These kids, they're excellent players."

Long interested in historical instruments, Owens formed the Centennial High School Natural Trumpet Ensemble -- four trumpet players and one drummer -- last year. He got the idea from fellow trumpet player Dave Baum, who performs with Owens in the Natural Trumpet Ensemble at Towson University.

Baum, a physics teacher at Goucher College, offered to make the instruments by hand, combining manipulated metal with discarded trumpet bells and securing the contraption with a block of wood and red cord. Though top-flight replicas sell for about $2,000, Baum made a set for about $100 each, Owens said.

"The instrument has been around so long and it's gone through so many changes in the last several hundred years," Owens said of the trumpet. "I knew there were some very competent players [at Centennial]. We thought that would be an interesting idea to try this with high school kids."

Jeff Nussbaum, president of the Historic Brass Society in New York City, said the group is "extremely unusual."

"We have about 800 members internationally in the U.S. and Europe. I don't know all the members, but I think it would be a minuscule number who are into this," Nussbaum said. "For high school kids, it's an extremely unusual occurrence."

Owens knew he would have to assemble a group of skilled musicians to perform with the old-fashioned horns. Without valves to press, the trumpet players of old had to shoot for the notes mentally, an often imprecise method that leaves less room for error.

"The player has to pick out the notes that are available on the instrument," Owens said. "The player then has to look at the piece of music and hear the notes in their heads as they play it, and adjust lip tension and air speed. That gets increasingly more difficult as other people are playing harmonies around you."

On a recent Thursday, trumpet players Dan Queen, Dana Coelho, Scott Paulis, Bill Horst and drummer David Jayanathan practiced in Centennial's band room, playing the 1640 piece "Three Bavarian Processionals." Their golden horns resemble small trombones, without the slides. Even for these accomplished players, hitting the right notes is a challenge.

Owens likened the old trumpets to a stick-shift car as opposed to an automatic.

"It's like you get a whole new perspective of how hard it was to play before" valves were invented, said Queen, a sophomore.

"You have to support the notes more to hit the right note," said Paulis, a senior. "It's neat. It's a challenge to play without valves."

Queen and Paulis said learning how to play the replicas has improved their modern trumpet playing.

"It improves their aural skills. It improves their articulation and their range," Owens said. "They go back to playing their modern instrument and they've got the valves to help them secure the notes. And it's easier."

Besides improving a player's technique, learning how to play the "natural" trumpets gives students an appreciation for an instrument that dates to biblical times, but hasn't changed much in the past century, Owens said.

"Anytime you can give a trumpet player of any age a historical perspective of where their instrument came from, it's a good thing," he said.

Pub Date: 3/18/99