Respectfully Horning in on the Past : Historical music: The California Gold Rush Band claims to be the first professional group to re-create the repertory since its glory days.

Photographs usually reduce three dimensions to two. But the California Gold Rush Band, which plays Thursday at Cal State Fullerton, has reversed that process, bringing to life a photograph that one of its members saw in a museum in the restored Gold Rush town of Columbia, Calif.

“Our band is actually based on many early photos. We’re a median of all the bands that we found,” says Steve Charpie, the cornet player who co-leads the band with alto horn player Les Benedict. “But we faithfully duplicate one 1870s picture of 10 brass players right down to the E-flat alto valved trombone!” Not to mention the soprano saxhorn, a.k.a. E-flat fluegelhorn.

It was Benedict who spotted the photo of the Columbia Cornet Band, which started up in 1851 (perhaps to celebrate the arrival of the first woman in town, which coincided with the band’s first documented appearance). The California Gold Rush Band was formed 140 years later, out of a passion for the music of that era. It claims to be the first group of professional musicians to recreate the repertory since its glory days.

To do so, the band again reverses a process.

Transcriptions usually reduce music for many instruments to one or two. In the days of no radio or recordings, popular brass band music was transcribed for piano for home entertainment. The Gold Rush Band has located a number of piano transcriptions but no band parts, many of which were destroyed in earthquakes and fires.

“We look at the piano music and, by applying rules of harmonic structure and reducing parts within [the instruments’] technical limitations, we turn those transcriptions back into band music,” Charpie explained.

“We might add a counter melody, because those melodies might not have been possible to play on the piano. And some of these tunes were put into an easy key for piano that’s impossible for brass instruments, so we often change keys to make them more playable for brass.”

The band members are professional studio, symphonic, commercial and chamber musicians based in Southern California (Charpie plays with the Disneyland Band) and include three CSUF alumni: B-flat cornetist Kevin Mayse, tenor hornist Scott Helberg and percussionist Jim Lorbeer.

No drummers were shown in the Columbia Cornet Band photograph, but Charpie said his research indicates that bands of that era would have included two (Charpie believes they just didn’t show up for the photo) so the Gold Rush Band follows suit.

Typical Gold Rush songs include “California Gold Diggers,” a comical number that deals with people trying and failing to find their fortunes mining; and “The Flood Mazurka,” dating to the great flood of Sacramento in 1852.

So far, songs specifically written about the Gold Rush account for only about a dozen of the 75 tunes the band plays.

“Even serious musicians know little about this genre,” Charpie said. “We have an article that says the Columbia Cornet Band presented Beethoven, Mozart and Rossini ‘with great fidelity.’ We do several Rossini pieces, because we know they were played by those bands.”

They don’t stop at Rossini. Both of the group’s current recording projects, in fact, have nothing to do with the Gold Rush. The band was sought out for a CD called “The Brass Mounted Army: Music of the Old Horse Cavalry,” released this week, and is at work on another dealing exclusively with bicycling.

“Early bicycling,” Charpie said. “They tell me there are 150 pieces all dealing with bicycling from 1880 to the turn of the century.”

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All the band’s brass instruments are antiques, more than 100 years old. Most look contemporary, but a few definitely do not. The alto trombone, for instance, doesn’t have a slide like today’s models.

The drums are replicas of 1860s instruments. Unlike today’s models, with plastic heads tightened by a metal rod and key, the replicas have calfskin heads tightened by leather strips on a rope.

“I’m very sentimental about all this,” Charpie said. “I take an antique instrument out of the case and I speculate on who first bought this instrument, and the first day it arrived by stage or rail, and how that person could never imagine . . . that we would be re-creating the exact music that he was playing. If only they could have realized what was to become of their instruments . . . .

“If a hundred years down the road somebody is playing my horn and re-creating the music I played, that would be really thrilling for me.”

* The California Gold Rush Band plays music from the Gold Rush era Thursday in Cal State Fullerton’s Performing Arts Center Recital Hall, State College Boulevard and Nutwood Avenue, Fullerton. 8 p.m. $5. A preconcert lecture starts at 7:15. (714) 773-2430.