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Different strains (recording review)
No full textReview of recordings of 'Music in 12 parts' by Philip Glass (Nonesuch 7559-79324-2); 'Proverb,' 'Nagoya Marimbas' and 'City Life' by Steve Reich (Nonesuch 7559-79430-2); 'El Dorado' by John Adams (Nonesuch 7559-79359-2)
Playing, learning and teaching brass
No full textThe earliest methods of instruction on brass instruments were probably based on imitation; signals and simple ensemble pieces were probably learned by rote. The first documented brotherhood of musicians was the Nicolai-Zechbrüder which was chartered in 1288 in Vienna and functioned until 1782. Five trumpets formed a fraternity in Lucca, also in 1288. The Confrérie de Saint-Julien was founded in 1321 and lasted until 1773. By 1330, musicians' brotherhoods expanded, and thirty-one such organisations met in Tournai to discuss common issues. Not until the written records and apprenticeship indentures of the guilds and Stadtpfeifer become available is there tangible evidence of how instruction actually took place. Members of church or civic ensembles and court musicians are seldom seen in pictures with printed music in front of them. This suggests that the music they were playing was memorised. Keith Polk has described ‘the existence of a tightly interwoven network of contacts which would have connected players and repertory in Glogau, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ferrara, and Florence, and, for that matter with Brussels, Mechelen and Antwerp’. How did they learn their craft? The possession of a highly developed memory and a talent for improvisation, in addition to the timeless prerequisite of a keen ear, were essential to success as a musician in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
Manuscript and printed instruction material survives from the Renaissance. The idiom that brass players followed can be deduced from the works of such writers as Ganassi, Ortiz, Maffei, Dalla Casa, Bassano, Conforti, Bovicelli and Virgiliano. A concise study of the manuals of these writers by Howard Mayor Brown, Embellishing Sixteenth-Century Musky is a good starting point for modern players of early brass instruments, as it provides an overview of sixteenth-century practices. In the seventeenth century, Rognoni continued the discussion of technique and used the model of the human voice as the ideal for wind players to imitate
Victorian bands and their dissemination in the colonies
No full textFrom the late 1840s, amateur brass bands and professional military bands became widespread in Europe and America due to the sudden availability of low-priced valve instruments. Band music also became an important feature of colonial life. Towards the end of the century, the indigenous populations of colonized countries started playing brass instruments, often with the encouragement or teaching of colonizers. The resulting cultural assimilation in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific is discussed
Review of 'Records of English court music: volumes VIII (1485-1714), and IX (index)' by Andrew Ashbee
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'Sackbut': the early trombone
Get PDFOn 20 November 1906, Francis Galpin, the Anglican cleric and pioneering organologist, delivered a paper to members of The Musical Association in London. His paper, ‘The Sackbut: Its Evolution and History’, was one of the great contributions to musicology. In it Galpin explained the story of the exotic-sounding ‘sackbut’. His narrative was clear, straightforward and based on the systematic evaluation of diverse primary-source evidence. Before that evening, it was believed by some, even perhaps by some members of his distinguished audience, that the sackbut was an instrument of deep antiquity, and that its citation in the Book of Daniel (‘That at what time you hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut…’) was no less than a literal testimony of musical practice at the time when the Old Testament was written. The unarguable truth that Galpin placed before them was that ‘sackbut’ was no more than a word by which one of the most familiar musical instruments – the trombone – was once known. Furthermore, he showed that it could be dated no earlier than the fifteenth century, and that a comparison of an early example (Galpin owned an instrument made in Nuremberg in the sixteenth century) with a modern trombone revealed, on the face of it, more similarities than differences.
In the twentieth century, research has improved our knowledge of the early trombone and the way in which its idiom and repertory changed over the years. We know more now than Galpin knew at that time. It is not just that we have more information about instruments, their players, their music and the cultural contexts into which music fitted and to which it conformed. We now also have evidence drawn from sophisticated musical experiments by performers on period instruments
Brass bands and other vernacular brass traditions
No full textVirtually every major involvement of the lower social orders with brass instruments in western cultures dates from the nineteenth century. There are exceptions of course; Moravian trombonists were not professional players, and there are instances of horn and trumpet calls being sounded by enlisted military musicians. However, the engagement of masses of ordinary working people with brass instruments, both as players and listeners, starts between 1830 and 1850.
The idea that the brass players who populated Europe from the Middle Ages – alta band players, waits, Stadtpfeifer, court or church musicians, state trumpeters or whatever else they were called – were connected to, or had a causal relationship with, the amateurs who bought valve instruments in the nineteenth century is spurious. To deny the compelling reality that widespread amateur brass playing was new in the nineteenth century, a feature of modernity, is to misunderstand one of the most remarkable sociological shifts to have occurred in the history of music. Almost anyone who, in say 1820, possessed a sophisticated skill on an artmusic instrument and did not make a living at it was, virtually by definition, an aristocrat or a member of the wealthy bourgeoisie. Yet, within a single generation, such skills were commonplace among amateur brass band players across Europe and America. It was a moment of vast importance; it led to changes in the idiom of many brass instruments, and it was one of the ways in which sophisticated music making can genuinely be said to have contributed to social emancipation
