originally a brief musical formula played on trumpets, horns, or similar “natural” instruments, sometimes accompanied by percussion, for signal purposes in battles, hunts, and court ceremonies. The term is of obscure derivation.

Although literary sources of great antiquity contain descriptions of military and ceremonial fanfares, the earliest surviving musical examples appear in French hunting treatises of the 14th century; the limitations of the hunting horns of this period kept the form to a rather rudimentary level. By 1600, however, fanfares, as compiled by the Saxon trumpeters Magnus Thomsen and Hendrich Lübeck, court musicians for King Christian IV of Denmark, were exhibiting many characteristics commonly associated with the genre in modern times: incisive rhythms, repeated notes, the use of a single triad (chord built of thirds, as c-e-g).

Imitations of fanfares occur in a great variety of music. The caccia (a 14th-century Italian genre featuring two voices in strict melodic imitation) Tosto che l'alba by Ghirardello da Firenze contains a fanfarelike vocal flourish immediately after the phrase suo corno sonava (“sounded his horn”). The Gloria ad modum tubae (Gloria in the Manner of a Trumpet) by the Burgundian Guillaume Dufay (c. 1400–74) features two texted canonic voices (i.e., one imitating the other in consistent fashion) above a pair of untexted lower voices that alternate in short, stereotyped fanfare motives. Similar examples are found in musical depictions of military events by such 16th-century composers as Clément Janequin, Girolamo Frescobaldi, and William Byrd. In the 18th century the French repertoire of sonneries (hunting fanfares) inspired numerous instrumental compositions. During the Romantic era fanfares were often used in opera (Ludwig van Beethoven's Fidelio, Georges Bizet's Carmen, and Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde). Examples by 20th-century American composers include the "Fanfare for the Common Man" (1942) by Aaron Copland and Three Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman (1987–91) by Joan Tower. A fanfare commonly known as "Ruffles and Flourishes" is generally sounded before the march Hail to the Chief to announce the arrival of the president of the United States.