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.

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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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