David Staff, who has died aged 68 of a heart condition, inhabited a niche so specific it barely registers on the map of professional music — and yet, within that niche, he was indispensable. He was a cornetto player and period trumpeter, a founder member in 1982 of His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts, a long-serving principal trumpet in Frans Brüggen's Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, and, in his later decades, one of the very few people on earth who could build from flat sheets of brass the valveless natural trumpet that Bach and Handel wrote for. The natural trumpet is not a simplified instrument. It is a demanding one — a tube without valves that extracts its full chromatic range from the physics of overtones alone, in the hands of a player skilled enough to coax them. Bach's Second Brandenburg Concerto, BWV 1047, written for it, remains one of the most technically brutal tests in the standard repertoire. Staff performed and recorded it on numerous occasions. Those who heard him describe his high-register playing as sublime, his approach vocal, his understanding of period style and symbolism exceptionally refined. That combination — the craftsman who could also play the thing he made — is rarer than it sounds. He came to instrument-making through mentorship, as the craft demands. After meeting the natural trumpet maker Frank Tomes in the late 1980s, Staff eventually became his apprentice in 2009, establishing his own workshop near Coddenham in Suffolk. The process was entirely hand-led: shaping and soldering tubes, drawing them by hand, hammering and swaging the flared bell sections into shape. When Tomes died, Staff took over the business, working alongside Graham Nicholson, and in turn trained his own apprentice and hand engraver over eleven years — who will now continue the workshop. The lineage is intact. Born in Ipswich, the son of a paint factory worker and a bank clerk, Staff attended Stowmarket school, took his A-levels at Colchester Institute, and went on to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he studied under Bernard Brown. For most of his subsequent career he taught at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, from the early 1980s until 2010, before spending around five years at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. From 1993 to 2012, he led the annual early brass course alongside Sue Addison at Dartington International Summer School in Devon. The institutional reach of that teaching — hundreds of students over three decades — is the kind of generativity that never makes headlines. Outside music, Staff volunteered as a guide at the RSPB's Minsmere nature reserve on the Suffolk coast, where colleagues knew him for his style, charisma, and exceptional knowledge of the natural world. He was also a mushroomer, a fisherman, a storyteller, a wildlife photographer, and an enthusiast of real ale — not so much a list of hobbies as a portrait of someone who met the world with consistent curiosity. He is survived by his daughter, Rebecca, and his sister, Mary.
