So I’m sitting here at my desk, trying to do some work, listening to Bartok’s String Quartet No. 5 on the computer CD player, when suddenly some EXTREMELY loud brassy music comes wafting up the 9 floors from the street below.
I go down to grab a smoke and see what’s going on, and some civic group is sponsoring live music at 6th Avenue and 50th Street. There’s a brass quintet, plus a drummer (!), playing “Making Whoopee” out there.
Why do brass quintets do this shit? Does it have something to do with the “hilarious comical potential” of the trombone and the tuba? You never see woodwind quintets wearing funny hats, with the oboe player mugging for the crowd. String quartets are extremely dignified.
There’s loads of “serious” music for brass groups (I’ve played lots of it), but, even in concert venues, they always seem to be playing John Williams stff and “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “I’m a Little Teapot.”
Maybe you see it as crap, Ike, but maybe it’s just … fun? Anytime people are enjoying a live performance I think it’s a plus for the general musical literacy level. Even if it’s, as you say, wearing funny hats, [and] mugging for the crowd. For the serious music lover, I guess this might be offensive. But why rain all over others’ good time?
You might be appalled, but a small city near here annually hosts The Great American Brass Band Festival. (web site here) I didn’t go this year but it’s a lot of family fun.
Have you ever seen Canadian Brass in concert. They’re great!
Once when I saw them, one of them was explaining how concerts used to be played, with the musicians distributed throughout the audience. As he talked, his fellow Brassers did just that, taking seats throughout the audience. The tuba player sat right behind me and handed me his music to hold. As he approached the end of the second page, I turned the sheet to pages 3 and 4. After the song, he leaned forward and thanked me, professing his good luck that he sat behind someone who could read music.
Okay, sorry if I came off like a snob. Sure, it’s fun to do stuff outside the stuffy repertoire. And all live music is a good thing. (Ohmigod, what are they playing out there now? “Spinning Wheel?” Jesus, take me now.) So how come the Kronos String Quartet doesn’t dress up in overalls and straw hats and do hoedowns?
Before you go blasting him, realize he was not registering his distaste for this type of music, but was asking why brass bands are much more likely to do comedic performances.
Hell, DAVE, far be it from me to offend those cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
I used to work for a music-publishing company…professionals just refer to the thing as a “horn.” But that’s tough to do on a day-to-day basis, because the man in the street calls everything from a piccolo to a sousaphone a horn. So you call it an “F horn,” meaning a “horn in F.” Like a Bb trumpet, or an Eb alto saxophone, or a CC tuba.
There’s nothing French about an F horn. The Brits gave it that nickname because they thought it looked like a French hunting horn. See here:
I thought it was called an F Horn because it was so hard to play, the musicians took to calling it that.
Actually, being a (truncated) classically trained musician (who just happens to kill rodents for a living), I was only yankin’ yer chain.
Yes, the Dave-Guy has a checkered past. No one can truly know him. Is he an editor? A musician? Pest Tech by day, avenger of evil by night. Roaches fear me, chicks dig me.
Seriously, the Canadian Brass is in partways to blame for this attitude. They’ve done so many “fun” concerts that in the eye of the concertbeholder, that’s what brass quintets are supposed to do, clown around and wear funny shoes and hats and play the garden hose and etc.
Nobody wants to pay good money to see you sit around and play, say, “Contrapunctus” when you can do “Tiger Rag” in toe shoes instead.
Brass quintets are a fairly new deal anyway; string and wind ensembles have a much longer history and a better rep. The new guys are always having to scramble for respectability and gigs.
your humble TubaDiva
who, for the record, despises “Tubby the Tuba”
but will happily “Beer Barrel Polka.”
That’s a possibility, Eve. At least it covers the humorous tuba part. What the hell IS the standard instrumentation for a German beer-swilling band? If I close my eyes and try to picture the Leiderkranz Melody Boys, coming at you live from the stage of Adolph’s Haus of Sauerbraten, I get…clarinet, accordion, tuba (in the bass role)…and that’s about it. Maybe trumpet?
DAVE: What instrument(s) did you study? Wow, I can’t believe the whole Saturday night passed and we never got on the subject of music!
No, wait, I remember…SaxFace started to talk about jazz, and manhattan stood up and clanged her head between two garbage can lids, like in “Top Cat.”
Ike, I was classically trained on the piano from the age of 5 to about…oh, 16 or 17. My teacher told me I was ready to start studying Chopin Etudes (the upper echelon of the pianist’s repertoire), and he scared the poo out of me. I realized I was being groomed to be a concert pianist, and I feared and loathed performing (plus I simply couldn’t imagine myself practicing 6 - 8 hours a day – all those arpeggios! GAACK!)
So I bolted and decided I wanted to study acting, which I did, except by the time I finished my performance degree in acting, I discovered I loved to write.
That led to acquiring a degree in journalism (hence the KiddieLit editing job).
Along the way, I studied percussion in high school, still playing the tymps for my church musical ensemble every Sunday. Playing tymps along with good ol’ Baptist-type hymns rocks!
I’ve studied voice, too, and am considered a fair baritone. Off and on I’ve sung in Barbershop ensembles, and ten years or so ago the quartet I was in won the novice quartet award at our regional SPEBSQSA competition. I’ve arranged barbershop music as well.
Alas, all fallen by the wayside. But I have a piano now, and I’m thinking of dusting off my Scott Joplin and cuttin’ a rag, to coin a punny phrase.
Next NYC Dopefest, we’ll discuss music, I promise. Beethoven. Definitely Beethoven.
Remind me to tell you sometime about the “Ave Maria Polka”. Probably more MPSIMS material, but hilarious. I know what you mean, though, it’s tough even finding the good music for bass tuba.
DAVE: Cool! Next NYC doperfest, we’re havin’ it at a piano bar. I’ll get the pianist drunk and you can take over the ivories.
I hope you’re still playing, now that you’ve got a piano in the house. Hate to see talents going to waste (guilty look at the saxophone in the corner, untouched for weeks, and the flute, untouched for months). Have you ever read Thomas Bernhard’s THE LOSER? It’s a nifty literary novel about a concert pianist in training who meets a young Glenn Gould, and decides to go insane instead.
TubaD: To keep this on track, what exactly IS the provenance of the modern brass quintet? I know most of the repetoire I played was in transcription. The string quartet goes back hundreds of years…and how new is the woodwind quintet? I’ve heard transcriptions of operatic material performed by oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons in twos, and I know Mozart hated the sound of the flute, so when did the flute come into it?
So we should start our own SDMB brass choir. With Chronos, we have three tubas, so we could ditch all those shrill, grandstanding treble-clef players.
I remember a brass quintet vinyl recording I had back when I was a teenager…the best thing on the album was one cut when the trumpets laid out, and the three lower voices played alone. Nice and mellow.
As he approached the end of the second page, I turned the sheet to pages 3 and 4. After the song, he leaned forward and thanked me, professing his good luck that he sat behind someone who could read music. 