St. Mary's Trumpet Call
musical composition

St. Mary's Trumpet Call (Polish: Hejnał mariacki; Polish pronunciation: [xɛjnaw], derived from the Hungarian expression Szűz Mária hajnala meaning "Virgin Mary's dawn") is a traditional, five-note Polish bugle call closely bound to the history and traditions of Kraków. It is played every hour on the hour, four times in succession in each of the four cardinal directions, by a trumpeter on the highest tower of the city's Saint Mary's Church. The noon performance is broadcast via radio to all of Poland and the world.
History
Origins
The real origin and author of the hejnał are unknown. The earliest written mention of it appears in civic pay records of 1392. The word hejnał comes from hajnal, the Hungarian word for "dawn". These two facts fit well with a putative origin under King Louis I "the Hungarian" (r. in Poland 1370–1382) or his daughter Jadwiga, Queen of Poland (r. 1384–1399).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “St. Mary's Trumpet Call” is musical composition. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mary's, Trumpet and Call, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “St. Mary's Trumpet Call” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.