If you happen to have been following me on twitter lately, then you already know that I have been immersed in the world of new music via the portal that is the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. CabFest 2010 was an extraordinary affair: 12 visiting composers including John Adams, Philip Glass, Kevin Puts, Jennifer Higdon, and Mark Anthony Turnage. Not bad company for a new music festival! It was a privilege and a treat to collaborate with the composers, and it was extraordinary to have so many of them in attendance. The biggest treat of this festival, however, was, as always, getting to play with this great orchestra under the expert guidance of Marin Alsop; it is a very rare thing to find an orchestra that matches up to what you always hoped playing in an orchestra would be like.
The festival lasts just two weeks, but reflecting on it now (as I “767-it” back to Miami) it seems that it runs for much longer; it’s like a Cabrillo time warp that makes the beginning of the festival seem even more distant than the days and weeks leading up to the festival. It’s a strange sensation. It definitely seems like long ago that Jennifer Higdon and Mark Anthony Turnage first turned up at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium for the first rehearsals of their pieces.
Given that distance in time (and the fact that a long-winded prose about the festival would read like the equivalent to “My Summer Vacation” and would be just as gripping now as it was when you were in 2nd grade) I have decided to go classic-blog-style and make a series of lists outlining the various peaks and valleys of our “Festival in the Fog”. Here goes:
Since this website is centered around trumpet, why not have the first lists feature things relevant to Gabriel’s instrument. If you are not a trumpet player then… well… Sorry.
Top Chop-Burner Pieces of CabFest 2010
Drowned Out by Mark Anthony Turnage
Symphony No. 3 by Michael Hersch
Concerto for Cello and Orchestra by Philip Glass
Summary: Starting with the trumpet-pig-head-list, this list shows the pieces that make you rub your cheeks, blow raspberries, and doubt the very reason you ever picked up this blasted mess of tubes (not to mention cursing under your breath at the composer). Turnage’s Drowned Out was one of the most physically intimidating pieces I’ve ever seen. I think I spent a whole concert’s worth of chops on one small section of the 1st movement alone. Proceed with care (i.e. run like hell) If you see this piece show up on your stand. Actually, that isn’t quite true. I really did enjoy this playing this piece when all was said and done. It was a bit daunting in the practice room however.
I’m not sure if the Michael Hersch was harder on the face, or more demanding technically. Either way, it was the hands down hardest trumpet part of the festival. Bravo to Micah Wilkinson for a fantastic job on the 2nd trumpet part. As for the Philip Glass: it’s like the Caruso 6 notes, only much longer, higher, and more interesting rhythmically. This piece will want to make you pack along a face-masseuse if you take it on tour; and to make matters worse, the rest of the orchestra will stare at you in confusion if you tell them it is physically demanding.
Favorite Trumpet Solos/Moments of CabFest 2010
City Noir by John Adams (solo)
Having Mark Inouye down from the San Francisco Symphony to play second trumpet on City Noir.
Chicago Remains by Mark Anthony Turnage (off-stage solo)
On A Wire by Jennifer Higdon (trumpet “trios”)
Symphony No.3 by Michael Hersch (impossible trumpet writing)
Summary: John Adams has now, IMHO, written the top two trumpet solos in the entire literature. My favorite remains the stunningly beautiful and moving solo in Doctor Atomic, but the City Noir solo is a close second. Now all that remains is to get him to write us a trumpet concerto. I mentioned this to him after the concert last Saturday and he seemed to have his interest piqued a bit. Hopefully there will be some way to get this great composer to write a piece for our instrument. The trumpet deserves it, it really does.
Having Mark Inouye (Principal Trumpet in the San Francisco Symphony) down to play second trumpet on City Noir was a real treat. It was like old home week for us, playing in a section together again. I think we managed to rock the house pretty well, if I do say so myself.
The solo in the Turnage Chicago Remains is truly haunting and is surprisingly written in the 3rd trumpet part. This solo is not really a solo per se, as it is played in a unison trio with soprano sax and clarinet. Whether you call it a trio or a solo, it’s still very demanding, with wide leaps in all directions and soaring up to a high D (concert) at the end. But it really is a beautiful line and it is a joy to play in spite of its difficulty. The only other entry on the list that needs explaining is the Hersch. I included it here because it is simply very rewarding to pull off something that you were pretty sure was impossible when you were learning it. Also, in spite of its fast and rangy flourishes that are nearly impossible to play (much less sing) excerpts from this part kept spinning around in my head, making me look like a total idiot walking around Santa Cruz trying to hum them.
Okay, hopefully making lists about the top trumpet moments of the festival will pacify my inner geek for the moment. I will keep assimilating ideas for further lists that aren’t focused on the trumpet, so there is more to come. If you were at the festival and want to suggest a list, or entries on a list, please send me an email or simply comment below.
I am sitting here listening to the music of my friend, Michael Ward-Bergeman on his MySpace page. It is fantastic music, but cranking it on the living room speakers would have less than ideal consequences considering it is almost midnight as I write this (I have a whole house full of people that need to stay asleep while I indulge myself in the hyper-accordion). So what am I doing? I’m cranking the music on my headphones!
I love headphones. And by headphones I don’t mean the cheap little earbuds that come with your iPod (and no, not the old ones that came with your Walkman that have all the foam falling off the earpiece either. If you don’t know what a Walkman is, then don’t talk to me). I am talking about really good quality headphones; the kind that put you right into the middle of the music you are listening to, immersing you in the sound. My personal favorites are a pair of Sennheiser’s that I bought in London while on tour (Think airplane seat. Think demolished plug on old headphones). I paid a lot of money for them, but then again, I have had them for (gulp) 10 years. I think it has been worth it!
Anyway, the point is, there is really nothing like experiencing music played through a really good set of headphones. It is your own private concert in the best stereo you will ever hear. There is something about retreating to your own space and immersing yourself in the music you are hearing and that only you are hearing: your own audio world to observe and explore. Good music needs focus to be fully appreciated. It shouldn’t be relegated to some background soundtrack for dishes and laundry. Listening on headphones provides that. It provides you the opportunity to absorb music on a level it deserves. So grab your ‘phones, put on some fantastic music, close your eyes, and disappear for a while. You will be glad you did.
Plus, it doesn’t wake the baby. And at this particular point in my life, that is a pretty important thing.
This morning I had coffee with Peter Maxwell Davies. Well, not the real Maxwell Davies, but with his music. Specifically, I had coffee with a brash 19 year old version of him who had the gall (thankfully) to write a compact hard driving Sonata that pushed the bounds of what is possible on the instrument, and has since become a staple of the solo trumpet repertoire.
Lately I have been giving a lot of thought to creating an effective recital program that will feature music from my yet to be released solo CD (exciting news on that coming very soon) while also including some of the high points of the trumpet repertoire. And whenever I think of programming pieces from the trumpet and piano rep, I quickly turn to that brash Sonata by the young Maxwell Davies, the piece he considers to be his opus 1. If you ask me, this piece makes a pretty impressive opus 1! Ironically, as much I have always liked this piece, I have never performed it. I guess there’s no time like the present…
My coffee time this morning was spent with the first movement, and in looking over the piano score I was struck by how unusual (yet critical) some of his choices are. For example, the piece has no time signature, but it is barred. Why? It would be no problem to notate time signatures throughout the piece. Perhaps this is my 21st century eyes looking at it, but why not notate the changing time signatures? The opening bars for instance would be: 4/4 (8/8), 2/4 (4/8), 9/16, 7/16, 2/8, 2/4 (4/8) etc. Perhaps when this was written it was not common practice to use time signatures like 7/16 and 9/16, or perhaps Maxwell Davies found a certain charm in the ambiguity created by omitting them. If the latter was the case, I’m not sure it worked, because I think the only way to actually count it is to break it down into some kind of meter, which means that the soloist then will have to simply supply the meters himself. Besides, it’s not like it can actually be ambiguous. After all, 9/16 is 9/16. It can only be what it is.
Another interesting aspect of the first movement is that he has chosen to have the 8th note get the beat, but he makes no notation to indicate that. He simply marks Allegro moderato at the top with no further indication. If you have never seen the score, it can be quite disarming at first sight. The page full of 16ths with no meter looks more like a black and white Jackson Pollock painting than you might like to admit — the complexity takes a while to process. If he had chosen, however, to have the quarter note to get the beat, then some of those above mentioned “meters” would not have seemed so daunting (if he was even concerned about that at all) and the piece would have had a distinctly friendlier appearance. The opening of the piece would then be rewritten to look like this: Bar 1 becomes two 4/4 bars of one whole note each, Bar 2 = 4/4 with a half note and half rest, bar 3 = 2/4, bar 4 = 9/8, bar 5 = 7/8 and so on… Now don’t get me wrong, I love the decision to give the 8th note the beat and have the 16th be the driving pulse for the piece; it just feels right. But I find this kind of decision making by composers — as they translate the music in their heads to the music on the page — a really fascinating process.
This piece would have a very different look and feel if notated differently. And I think the choice made by the composer to choose a specific notation has a noticeable impact on the way it sounds, even in cases like this where the actual content would be unaltered (all the notes and proportions would remain the same). Why, you may ask? The reason lies in the perception of the piece by the soloist. For instance, 16ths are faster than 8ths, more frantic, more motion and turbulence; 8ths are slower and less frantic, more stable. Of course, I have experienced many 8th note passages with a chip on their shoulder and a point to prove, bearing the turbulence of the world on their shoulders, but even in those cases, when the 16ths join in, that character gets heightened. If Maxwell Davies had chosen to notate the piece with the quarter getting the beat and the 8th notes providing the pulse, then this movement would have looked less frantic, less hair-raising, and it would have sounded that way in performance too. And if you know this movement, then you would understand that that would simply not do. Perhaps that is the rational for the missing meters as well. Maybe he wants to cause the soloist that feeling of disorientation leading to panic, an effort to bring out the frenzied, edgy nature of the movement, and indeed, the piece. Or alternatively, perhaps he wanted to create a sense of freedom on the part of the soloist, a feeling that we are no longer bound by earthly meters, but are free to roam the rhythmic heavens at a whim, in spite of the fact that we remain bound and tied to our rhythmic structure — like one of those hot air balloons at big tourist areas, ascending into the sky while remaining firmly fixed to the ground with a large offending rope or wire. It would be nice to ask him. Maybe a cup of coffee with the actual man, and not just his music, is in order.
But for now, while this exploration of musical notation and interpretation is a fascinating one, I’m afraid further discussion will have to wait. You see, my coffee is done, and I actually have to go and learn how to play this thing! For some reason, it is required that I know how to buzz my lips into a tiny metal cup in order to perform this piece. Go figure…
Given all this discussion, I think it is only appropriate that I include an audio example from the sonata. I have attached a clip of the opening of this movement performed by the inimitable Håkan Hardenberger with Roland Pontinen on piano. This recording is from his CD The Virtuoso Trumpet. If you don’t own this recording, check it out. It’s extraordinary. Perhaps now you will enjoy a morning coffee with Mr. Davies as well.
I was doing some research on H.K. Gruber’s Aerial tonight. Specifically, I was looking into the cowhorn required in the piece — how one might acquire said cow horn and what might be involved in actually playing such a thing — when I came across this Wiki page. There isn’t much information here, but I did find one absolute nugget of a sentence. Just there, at the end of the Wiki article, the very last sentence sums up something I have been trying to tell people for 20 years.
The bigger the cowhorn is, the easier it is to play.
Throughout the evolution of brass instruments, some things have never changed.
As you can see, I have just re-posted the article Dueling with Pinchas: Building Strength for the Brandenburg and Beyond. A few people have written me about this article, so here it is, back by popular demand. Let me know if there are any other articles any of you are looking for. Hopefully I will have time soon to go through all of them and make sure they are all transferred. Enjoy!
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I was doing some research on H.K. Gruber’s Aerial tonight. Specifically, I was looking into the cowhorn required in the piece — how one might acquire said cow horn and what might be involved in actually playing such a thing — when I came across this 