If someone wanted to find me in Santa Cruz, they could do worse than to go to Lulu Carpenter’s and look behind any latte they see. Yes, I am back here again this morning after a fun, but grueling night of rehearsing, enjoying another beautiful latte, and doing research. Research, you may ask? Yes, research. And at the moment, the research isn’t going particularly well. You see, I am trying to describe the opening of last night’s rehearsal, lest you confuse the Cabrillo Festival with, well… with pretty much anything, really.

I arrived at the hall early to take another look at the music and to get set up. When I arrived they were doing a sound check for the first piece on the rehearsal, Moments of Bliss by Brett Dean. They were setting levels for the MIDI track, which includes a huge variety of sounds, including something akin to a jet engine blasting away with intermittent spoken phrases interspersed throughout. I look to my right and see that there is a large spinning wheel that looks a bit like a giant dartboard that fell out of a carnival arcade, complete with a big blue flashing light on top — this is apparently the “Wheel of Fortune”, but I’m not sure of the significance of that just yet. From there I look to the front of the stage and I see Concertmaster Yumi Hwang-Williams standing there holding a 5 string electric violin. Nice.

Once the piece starts, however, unique goes to bizarre. Towards the beginning of the piece is a nice harmon mute trumpet solo marked “smoky” (hmm… As Marin Alsop pointed out to me, perhaps “smokie” would have been a better choice). The solo is a pretty straightforward, jazz influenced, harmon mute solo, nothing too bizarre there. But in this solo, there are a couple of small breaks between solo statements (approx. a bar of rest each). Now, I had been envisioning a certain kind of music in these breaks, and the actual music that is in these breaks isn’t far from what I had imagined. What got my attention, though, was when members of the orchestra suddenly grabbed 3 foot long plastic hoses and began spinning them over their head! You know the ones, they are made of ridged plastic and make a pitched “whooo… whoooo… whooo” as you spin them. The faster you spin them, the higher the pitch. So there I am, trying to play a beautiful trumpet solo, and every time I stop playing my colleagues grab plastic hoses and spin them around over their heads. Somehow, I’m not sure that my musical expressivity is really coming across…

And this is where the research comes in. What are those plastic tubes called? I Googled everything I could think of and I even sent a text question to KGB (the text answer service), all to no avail. All I got from them was “everyday there are a few questions that we can’t answer and unfortunately yours was one of them.” Craig: 1 KGB:0. Great. I am winning a game I don’t even want to win!

So the Cabrillo Festival is underway again, my face already feels abused, and I am back at Lulu Carpenter’s ruminating over a latte.

It’s all good.

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I have arrived in Santa Cruz and headed straight to my favorite coffee house, Lulu Carpenter’s: latte art, free Wifi, great ambience… What’s not to love!

The festival is now just a few hours from the first full orchestra rehearsal, just enough time to have an amazing latte, look at a couple of things in my music before rehearsal, and grab a quick dinner. It turns out that the Brett Dean Moments of Bliss is first on the rehearsal tonight, and I’m not so sure my part is entirely ready for public consumption.

As I sit, ticking off the minutes until the festival officially begins, I can’t help but wonder what exactly lies in wait. I sit on the precipice of a musical adventure, peering down into the ravine, waiting to jump in, unsure what exactly I am going to be immersing myself in, but totally confident it will be an interesting and enjoyable journey. Right now, though, I am just going to sit back, dangle my feet over the edge, and enjoy my latte. It’s good to be back at Lulu Carpenter’s.

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If I were to choose any trumpet concerto to sit and listen to, just for the sake of enjoyment, I believe I would choose Desolation Wilderness, the piece that has been occupying real estate on my music stand for quite some time now. The reason I would sit and listen to it isn’t because of that, however. There are plenty of concertos that I have spent a ton of time learning that will never see the light of day on a playlist of mine. This concerto by Joby Talbot offers us trumpet players something that is sorely lacking from our repertoire: a beautiful concerto that is exciting, challenging, and flashy, while giving the trumpet player that rare chance to really sing a truly heartfelt line. Simply put, it is finely crafted and dynamic music, with a soul.

I suppose it is a good sign that I feel this way as I work to get the piece ready for it’s U.S. Premier. This is one concerto that should definitely become a staple of our repertoire. I know it will of mine.

Oh yeah, and one more thing, unlike many trumpet concertos, it doesn’t have a crappy 3rd movement. Rejoice!

Joby Talbot

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The Cabrillo Festival (which is discussed in more detail in the post, New Trends for New Music) starts in one week, which means I am in the throes of final preparation right now. This year, as every year, I am wondering how I am going to get everything learned in time, especially with a difficult concerto added to the mix. Playing new music is always demanding; composers don’t always have what I would call a perfect grasp on how to write effectively for the trumpet. A couple of composers this year suffer from one of my personal pet peeves — I call it the D Trumpet Disorder. This condition leads to parts like this:

A classic example of DTD

I can see it now, the composer sitting guiltily at his desk, wanting to stretch the range of the trumpet to include that high E, held by the knowledge that it really is not a reasonable thing to write. “I know,” he thinks excitedly, “I’ll write it for D trumpet! It will still have a big sound, but it will be easy to play!” With the guilt now gone, the composer hurriedly transposes the part into D, and voila! problem solved. Right? Not so fast…

The D trumpet is not a panacea for all that ails our beast of an instrument. That high concert E is still a concert E, no matter if it is played on a Bb, C, D, or Eb trumpet. In fact, for me personally, I’d rather play the high E on my C trumpet than on a D. Hakan Hardenberger mentioned something similar when he told me that he plays the Maxwell Davies Sonata on C trumpet (rather than on D trumpet as indicated in the part). He said that he just doesn’t see any reason to use D. I tend to agree, though the piece is not exactly easy no matter what you play it on. On D trumpets I have tried, the upper register gets a bit tight and tends to be even harder to play above concert D than my C trumpet. I do find that playing on one of the small instruments (G or piccolo) does make it noticeably easier, but it is still certainly no walk in the park. Now don’t get me wrong, I love my D trumpet, and I find many great uses for it, especially in the orchestra; I just don’t tend to use it for extreme high register parts.

You may be curious as to what exactly has driven me to write this article. After all, it’s really not that big of a deal. If the composer has written for D trumpet, then you can still transpose it to piccolo, which is what I almost always do without a fuss. This time, though, the part continues past what is indicated in the image above. It goes a few lines, and then changes key — to Db major — and then it continues for a full page after that. Now, this transposition wouldn’t be too bad, except for the fact that the part is loaded with accidentals. So now, I am doing mental acrobatics while playing outrageously high trumpet parts at the end of an intense festival, at the end of a long concert — a concert which, it just so happens, occurs twice on the last day day. Now that makes me cranky.

You see, if the composer had simply left the part in C, then I could choose for myself what kind of wuss-out tool would be best for the job, and then I could quietly go to said tool when the going gets rough, glady accepting the compliments afterward for nailing the screaming high trumpet part. Of course, the composer too, would then have to suffer the indignity of anyone who is familiar with the normal range for the trumpet looking at the score and saying, “What the hell was this idiot thinking here?” Most composers don’t really like to take the chance of such a thing, so the D Trumpet Disorder bails them out. Meanwhile, I am left to pick way through the minefield. Sometimes life just isn’t fair.

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Each of the past two summers I have been playing the two week new music immersion that is the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. The festival is located in Santa Cruz, California, and it offers a unique musical opportunity to simultaneously expose and be exposed to some of the best new music being written today. Every year the festival brings in the leading composers of our time and they collaborate with music director Marin Alsop and the orchestra to create concerts that focus solely on new music; there is no old musical warhorse being trotted around these grounds. If you want to hear Tchaik 5, or Beethoven 5, or Pictures at an Exhibition, you’ll have to find a different festival.

This year, I am especially excited about the festival because I am performing the U.S. Premier of Desolation Wilderness, a trumpet concerto written by the British composer, Joby Talbot. The concerto was written in 2006 for Alison Balsom and it features driving minimalist-style rhythms, soaring melodic lines, and lightning fast technical passages reminiscent of the great violin concertos; it is a welcome addition to the trumpet repertoire to be sure. If you don’t know Joby’s music, you should definitely check it out. He has done some extraordinary work. You can learn more about him by visiting www.jobytalbot.com.

Joby’s music is a perfect example of new music that bucks the trend of being difficult to listen to and academic. Indeed, my experiences the past couple of summers at the Cabrillo Festival have introduced me to a wide range of composers who write music that is strikingly beautiful and quite easy to listen to, while maintaining important aspects like originality, finely crafted orchestration, and a well organized formal structure. This new direction for modern music is exciting and necessary for the survival of classical music as an art form. Over the last 50-100 years the vast majority of composers have ignored their audiences and written music that most of the population would not choose to listen to. Artistically speaking, I have no problem with that. I truly believe a composer should write the music he/she most believes in, regardless of what people think. The problem comes when we want to be able to make a living writing or performing this type of music. For that, we need to be able to make money, and to make money we need the audience to care about our work; it’s that simple. If classical music is going to continue into the future as a living, thriving art form — and not as just an old museum relic — it will need to have new music that audiences care about, that people are excited to hear. New music is the music of our age; it needs to be the main attraction, and the main attraction has to be good!

For two short weeks in Santa Cruz that is exactly what is on offer, and I am happy to be a part of it. To see what is going on at the festival this year simply visit: www.cabrillomusic.org

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