As a birthday treat...
<autobiographical-note>
(72nd if you must know, and not quite yet, but the Proms season didn't extend to the actual day)
</autobiographical-note>
...I was taken to Chineke!'s prom last week. The main work was Beethoven's Fourth Smphony (which, as so often, seemed unfamiliar until they got to the bit that everyone knows), but the most striking piece in the rest of the programme was Haydn's trumpet concerto in E flat, with the young soloist Aaron Azunda Akugbo – an old hand as a Proms peformer, as he was a member of the National Youth Orchestra at the age of 15 and played 3 Proms with them. He had also played in 2 Proms with the Chineke! ortchestra. This was his first Prom, though, as a soloist.
He was amazing, as was the music – though for reasons that I was only dimly aware of...
<autobiographical-note>
I say 'dimly' because bits of the history of music technology have filtered through to me.
<tangent>
The ensemble my son played in when he was a clarinetist once played Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks, and MrsK said it was a shame there wasn't a clarinet part; but I knew there couldn't have been, unless Handel had a flux capacitor and a de Lorean in his garage.
</tangent>
My superficial knowledge of the development of valves in brass instruments
dates back to the time when I worked with Barry Tuckwell on his contribution to the Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides....
<out-of-print>
The picture on the right is taken from an Amazon ad for a used copy; the series was not a money-spinner, and I'm surprised that some of them seem to be available new. Not The Horn though.
</out-of-print>
... But I hadn't taken the step from the horn to the trumpet, and realized that when Haydn wrote his concerto in 1796 it must have caused quite a stir.
</autobiographical-note>
An La Phil web-page says:
In the early 18th century, composers wrote fabulous, florid trumpet parts in the extreme high register of the instrument ...
<HD-addition>
It was only in the extreme high register that – on a trumpet without valves – notes get close-enough together to make a tune without huge leaps. A stand-in MD I once sang with, who plays trumpet in Chaconne Brass had written his degree dissertation on the life expectancy of Baroque and Classical brass players.
<irrelevant-anecdote>
He recounted a story of the strange looks he got on public transport when he wiled [sic!] away the time practising flutter-tonguing.
<irrelevant-anecdote>
</HD-addition>
...(indeed, Bach’s trumpet parts remain a tremendous challenge even on the modern trumpet), but by Haydn’s day this art of “clarino” playing was largely confined to royal courts and monasteries. The orchestral trumpeter of the Classical period cultivated about ten notes — the notes of a major chord at the bottom and half of a major scale at the top. The parts they played were simple, if not dull, consisting of fanfare figures and notes thrown in for added emphasis and volume.
It is remarkable, in retrospect, how little dissatisfaction there was with this state of affairs, not only in the 18th century, but in the 19th, when many composers (Brahms among them) continued to write parts tailored to the natural trumpet long after the natural trumpet had disappeared. It was accepted that the trumpet had only ten notes, just as it was accepted that the timpani had only two, and no one expected either instrument to be melodic, just as no one expected flutes to be loud.
Still, there were attempts to make the trumpet a true chromatic instrument in the later 18th century. Some innovators took a page from the woodwind book and put holes in the instrument to change the pitch, opening and closing them with keys. The best-known advocate of the keyed trumpet was Anton Weidinger, trumpeter of the Imperial Court Orchestra in Vienna, who commissioned Haydn’s Concerto (and a few others, including one by Hummel) in 1796, and played it for the first time in public in 1800, having evidently spent the intervening years refining his keyed-trumpet technique.
Haydn responded to the capability of the instrument like a gleeful child with a new toy. At the outset he indulges in a little teasing, letting the trumpet join the orchestra in the opening tutti for a few notes, all of them playable on the natural trumpet. Only with the first solo entrance does he break new ground, with the trumpet running up the scale from its written middle C, playing notes not possible on the natural trumpet. From then on the trumpet sings, slides around chromatically, skips and jumps, and every now and then plays a fanfare figure, as if Haydn wants to remind us that this new-fangled thing really is a trumpet.
A programme note quotes H. C. Robbins (prolific author on all kinds of music):
We must remind our readers once again of the astonishment with which musicians in 1796 heard a trumpet playing in A flat major [ed: sic, although the concerto is in E flat. A flat has one more flat than E flat, so perhaps Haydn was making a point: 'All that, and this!'] and in diatonic notes; the effect must have been so incredible as to suggest some kind of Satanic prestidigitation.
<wince>
Well I didn't write it. You can see his point though.
</wince>
And it wasn't just musicians who would have noticed.
They would have been able to articulate the reasons for the strangeness of the sounds, but anyone at the time used to hearing orchestral trumpet playing would have known there was
something going on.
But the seed-bed needs attention. I've more to say, but that must wait.
b
Update: 2023.09.05.12:25 – A few typo fixes ("wile" wasn't a typo though ...
<apologia>
Elsewhere (more than once, but it was a while ago so new readers won't have seen it) I wrote:
That's 'wile', as in 'beguile', cp other pairs like ward/guard, warranty/guarantee and so on. There's a strong move towards 'while away', and most people prefer the h spelling (which has the mnemonic advantage of referring to time). Far be it from me to say it's wrong; it's not. I'm just saying that when I omit 'the' h I mean to.
And it was in red, which shows how important I thought it at the time.
</apologia>
...) and a closing quote about the history of that concerto.
That same LA Phil page goes on:
For a number of reasons, the keyed trumpet never became an orchestral instrument, though a similar instrument was, for a short time, a mainstay of military bands.... Instruments with valves were invented a few years after Haydn’s death in 1809, but did not start to make headway into orchestras for nearly a generation, by which time they had already replaced key-bugles in bands. Valve trumpets did not become standard in orchestras until about 1840. Thus there was a gap of decades between the composition of Haydn’s Concerto and a time when someone other than Weidinger could play it...
<inline-ps>
Hang on; if Weidinger was the only one who could play it, and if his first public perfomance was in 1800, then Robbins's dates are a bit out; it wasn't heard in 1796 (except by fellow performers, which saves Robbins's blushes – I wish I handn't started this; carry on please)
</inline-ps>
... and in that interval the whole idea of a trumpet concerto, so common in the Baroque era, was now beyond the pale. The Haydn Concerto lay forgotten until the 20th century, gaining a place in the concert repertory only in the 1930s.
Update: 2023.09.07.15:15 – Added <inline-ps />
Update: 2023.09.07.16:05 – Added PPS
PPS
When I started going to concerts in the late 1960s I was reminded of my music teacher's...
<autobiographical-note>
In the days when teachers were allowed to write what they thought in school reports – rather than cutting and pasting from a bank of politically-correct platitudes – he wrote of me
C+ Has ability but is disinclined to use it musically
Perhaps I was just disinclined to use it while Mr Byrne was around.
</autobiographical-note>
... stern warnings not to clap between movements.
This is a feature of concert-going etiquette that seems to have developed during the twentieth century (Bach and Mozart and Beethoven's audiences had no such reticence; they clapped (and chatted) when they pleased.) Jazz audiences today even doing it during performances, after a solo.
But in the '60s the etiquette was mostly observed; this necessitated a certain amount of preparation before a concert: were there three or four movements? And people who had not done this prep could be looked down on.
<shortcuts-for-the-unprepared>
- at the end of a movement, listen; if only a few people are clapping, then don't
- watch the conductor: if they turn to face the audience, clap away
</shortcuts-for-the-unprepared>
Transgressions have been steadily increasing over the past 60-70 years though. I can remember when there was only a handful of rogue clappers, but at last Friday's concert my usual ready reckoner for those who had skimped on their prep (see 1, above) didn't work: an estimated half of the audience were claporrheic. Maybe it's a generational thing: Baby Boomers remember what their music teachers told them; but as the Grim Reaper does his stuff we are steadily outnumbered. And by the turn of the century – if live music has survived that long – clapping at every opportunity may be the way.
