William Vacchiano, who died Monday at 93, was principal trumpeter of the New York Philharmonic for 31 years and perhaps the most renowned trumpet teacher of his time.

Celebrated for his tone and technique, Vacchiano was in constant demand.

“I used to have a police escort from Liederkranz Hall to Carnegie Hall on Sunday afternoons,” he once said. “I had to be in so many places that I had people who made their living just getting my instruments from one hall to the next and having cabs ready for me.”

He was barely exaggerating. It is widely accepted that Vacchiano never missed a performance in his 38 years at the Philharmonic (the first seven starting in 1935, before he was named principal). And he is widely credited with being one of the first to use a variety of trumpets, usually four, pitched in different keys to fit the demands of the music.

Vacchiano taught at schools around New York, but made his home at Juilliard, where he was on the faculty for 67 years. Among his students were dozens of first-rank musicians, including Ger ard Schwarz, Wynton Marsalis, as well as both the current and former principals of the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Other pupils were principals in symphony orchestras in Bavaria, Boston, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Dallas, and points west.

He plausibly claimed to be the only trumpeter ever to audition for both the Philharmonic and the Met orchestras on the same day. As he told the story, the Met’s personnel manager, Simone Mantia, asked him to play only one passage, a series of six high notes from the finale of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.” He was offered the position on the spot, signed a contract, and went to the Philharmonic audition. Arturo Toscanini, music director of the Philharmonic, asked him to play a soft section from the conclusion of Debussy’s “La Mer,” then asked him to leave for a few minutes and return to play the same section, then repeated the process once more. At the end of the nerve-wracking session, Toscanini offered Vacchiano, age 23, the job. When he called Mantia to tell him the news, Mantia said, “Go with the Philharmonic; it’s a better job. And God bless you.”

Vacchiano grew up in Portland, Maine, where he spoke Neapolitan Italian to his immigrant parents and his first music teacher, who started him with the instrumentless solfeggio technique at age 8.

He told two stories about how he began to play trumpet. The first involved a misunderstanding with his father, who told him to select a clarinetto. When the boy came home instead with a cornetto, a trumpet-like cornet, his mother remarked, “What’s the difference? He’s not going to be a professor.”

The other story, even more whimsical, involved his bicycle crashing into a boy with a baritone horn, and an explanatory trip to the boy’s music teacher who used the apology as an excuse to sign Vacchiano up for trumpet lessons.

Vacchiano was a notorious storyteller, but it is certain that he excelled from an early age. By the time he was 20, he was enrolled at Juilliard (then the Institute of Musical Art) and playing solo trumpet with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra. He studied with the noted trumpeter Max Schlossberg, and from 1935 on, played alongside him at the Philharmonic.

Asked by biographer Brian Shook how it felt to be in the nation’s premier orchestra at 23, Vacchiano said, “Toscanini and [conductor Bruno] Walter were two of the greatest in my experience, but my greatest thrill was to play for a year with my old teacher.”

Vacchiano concurrently took up a teaching position at Juilliard. He also had long-term teaching positions at Mannes and the Manhattan School of Music, and estimated that over the decades he had 2,000 students. In addition to the good students – which he estimated at one in 10 – were the rest. “Everybody has a ceiling,” he explained in a 1988 interview for the Stork Custom Mouthpieces in-house newsletter. “But you don’t tell them that. They’ll just go to someone else. So you help them as much as you can.”

Never falsely modest about his talent, he said his goal in teaching was to “reproduce myself, you might say, and create great artists.”

Known to some as “Mr. Embouchure,” Vacchiano specialized in designing custom mouthpieces, which he claimed could often clear up players’ problems. He made the discovery with the help of Albert Stagliano, first horn with the NBC Symphony, who helped him saw his mouthpiece in half in 1940. “Overnight I became a great player,” Vacchiano said.

A line of his design is still produced by Stork Custom Mouthpieces, and he also co-invented the Alessi-Vacchiano straight mute. He produced a series of method books, and transcribed a series of Bach concertos for two trumpets.

During World War II, Vacchiano volunteered for a program financed by New York society wives to train trumpet players for the Army. “Army officials, having learned where the boys received their training, have flooded the committee with requests for more such expert trumpeters,” reported the New York Times.

Vacchiano appeared on any number of Philharmonic recordings, and was fond of recounting unique achievements. He once recorded Stravinsky’s “Petrouchka” twice in the same day, in the morning with the Philharmonic, and then again in the evening with a freelance group for Leopold Stokowski. He also recorded with Leonard Bernstein, including one legendary session in which the orchestra put to wax both the Neilsen Symphony No. 6 and the Shostakovich Concerto for Piano, Trumpet, and Strings.

In the Stork interview, Vacchiano left a clue to his extraordinary longevity, both as teacher and performer. “When I feel bad I go down to the studio in my house, I pick up my horn, and I’m in seventh heaven. That’s what music should be like.”

William Vacchiano
Born May 23, 1912, in Portland, Maine; died September 19 at Cabrini Medical Center in Manhattan; survived by his daughter, Jo Ann, and four grandchildren.