A topic I haven't blogged about here that I know of is chamber music for classical guitar and brass instruments. I want to get to the Frank Campo Two Studies for Trumpet and Guitar one day.
But today the blogging theme has been music for the tuba and whether you believe me or not, there is a tiny body of music composed for tuba and guitar.
There's not a lot of literature for guitar with tuba but there is, in fact, a sonatina by Jan Truhlar for tuba and guitar. I'm not aware of anyone in the colloquial West that has recorded that work but if someone, anyone, has recorded the work I'd love to know!
There's a piece for tuba and electric guitar by Gerard Buquet
http://www.gerardbuquet.eu/index.php?id=10
There's no recording I'm aware of for that work.
There is a vimeo performance of Robin Hayward's Travel Stain, a duet for microtonal tuba and guitar! The following link has an excerpt of the performed score, the honeycomb appearance of which has a thematic point to it, since the work took inspiration from the idea of travel stains of bees tracking along honeycomb, coming home without cleaning the shoes, so to speak.
http://www.robinhayward.de/eng/comp/travel_stain.php
The work as a whole, it seems, is over here.
https://vimeo.com/34212439
There's a conversation in German that lasts about 2.25 minutes before the music starts getting performed at 2:26. I don't know German, I'm afraid, so I can't translate any of what's said for you but if you know German and are willing to comment, some synopsis of what was said is appreciated. :)
Microtonal tuba and guitar (which is unamplified!) is an interesting combination and Hayward is a tubist. Hayward developed the first fully microtonal tuba around 2009.
There's some fun use of natural harmonics you can obtain on the guitar just above and just below the third fret, which sound better on (as you'll see in the video) the lowest strings. It sounds like the sixth string is tuned to a low C earlier in the piece and the rest of the strings are in standard pitch. Interesting for me, as a guitarist, is observing how there's some kind of cloth band covering the nut. Given how close the tubist and guitarist are that might be a move to prevent the guitar from automatically resonating with whatever tones the tuba is playing. Having it up on the nut rather than the bridge could reduce sympathetic vibration on the guitar strings but leaving the strings open to sound freely when plucked to play notes in the score. Otherwise if you had a mute placed on the bridge you'd get a constant pizzicato effect.
At 4:43 Hayward plays a charmingly low, boomy D pedal tone.
One of the things you'll see and hear is the guitarist can play natural harmonics regularly and still be heard past the pedal tones of the tuba. Let's just say the tubist has to have impeccable breath control to control the dynamics for that to work.
Ah, by 10:00 I can hear the guitar is using scordatura, most likely.
And there's a speaker shown at the end of the video. Yeah, should have guessed some amplification would be needed for third fret harmonics. I admit it "kinda" feels like cheating. My own preference is that if you're going to tackle chamber music for guitar and brass you should see how far you can go without relying on amplification but ... anyway ... it's a conceptually interesting piece to me even if I would say I vastly prefer microtonality as practiced by the composer Ben Johnston. But since I wanted to blog about chamber music composed for tuba and guitar by covering these various pieces and linking where possible I have covered just about the entire range of formally composed music for tuba and guitar. Here's a link to
Microtonal composers who want to write for tuba, Robin Hayward looks and sounds like the musician and composer you'll want to get in touch with.
I ... uh ... know of a chamber sonata for tuba and guitar somebody wrote ...
This sonata for tuba and guitar was premiered on July 26, 2013 in Seattle at a guitar society event.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHsOLctT6O4
It's a two-movement work. The first movement is a variation form that states its theme and presents variations in which the tuba and guitar alternately solo. The closing variation presents a partly inverted form of the starting theme in inversion and as a chorale played entirely in natural harmonics. This is a case where you can (or should) be able to hear the chorale in harmonics above the tuba pedal points and there's no amplification for the guitar.
Neither is there any amplification for the guitar in this outdoor performance dating from later in 2013.
(the chorale starts at about 2:59 in this second video for the end of the first movement)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxcgx-QdMl4
The second movement starts about 3:35 and opens with an agitated chromatic riff. The first theme arrives with the entrance of the tuba playing a motto of E rising up to D and falling down to B flat, which is almost immediately given an imitative response from the guitar. Something that might not be too obvious about the first theme of the second and final movement is that it's basically an extended 12-bar blues. Sure, there's a neapolitan substitution where the standard IV chord should be but in terms of harmonic bearing and phrasing it's all a blues theme. You won't get to hear the blues theme presented in its most conventionally bluesy form until near the end of the development at about 6:10 in the video.
After a modulating transition Theme 2 shows up at about 4:48 and is a march. This theme and the earlier theme from the second movement both derive from the first movement theme. The second movement is fairly obviously in sonata form. The development starts at about 5:23. There's a continuing call and response dynamic between the two instruments. As noted earlier, the climax of the development is a presentation of the thematic materials that have appeared throughout the work since the start of the two-movement work as a traditional 12-bar blues. If you want to think of it in some kind of descriptive way maybe it's a Stevie Wonder meets Paul Hindemith kind of thing.
The recapitulation starts at 6:55. Theme 2 returns in the recapitulation at 7:55 and it's at this point that the guitar and tuba trade registers. Where in the exposition the tuba played in an overlapping range with the guitar's accompaniment in the recapitulation the tuba drops down to a lower register where it plays Theme 2 in the tonic key while the guitar shifts up to playing accompaniment above the tuba. At 8:32 the guitar cadenza from the end of the first movement returns and leads the way into a return of the chorale in harmonics on the guitar, now played above gently pulsing pedal tones on the tuba. The work closes with the tuba playing a low E pedal and the guitar completing an E dominant 9th chord in natural harmonics, playing G sharp on the fourth fret of the sixth string and the ascending D natural, F sharp and B natural are all taken at the seventh frets of the treble strings. The work, by the way, isn't published. But it's been filmed and can be heard online.
That, for the moment, might just cover everything written for tuba and classical guitar I'm currently aware of. There is a suite for tuba and electric guitar by Lee Aronson but classical guitarists would probably object that that's not a classical guitar and the scordatura preferring E flat might also not meet approval of classical guitar traditionalists.
So .. that's kind of the span of music for tuba and classical guitar with a few electric guitar works mentioned for good measure.
Showing posts with label tuba. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tuba. Show all posts
Sunday, December 09, 2018
Samuel Jones Tuba Concert, movement 1 video with audio
Back when I was able to attend the symphony more consistently than I have been since, oh, about the 2008 financial crunch, I remember that I could rarely remember world premieres by composers.
I sure remembered this one, though. The Samuel Jones Tuba Concerto may not be the most groundbreaking new work of the last fifteen years but it has some actual tunes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hq9Qc7FF3k
It's also one of the only world premieres given by a symphony where I actually remembered it several days later and enjoyed it enough I was willing to go hear it in concert a second time. His Trombone Concerto wasn't nearly as satisfying for my personal tastes but Jones' Tuba Concerto has stuck with me and I really enjoyed it. But the thign is I was able to remember themes days later. That is, I'm afraid, not so common an experience in a lot of contemporary classical music. Kyle Gann once blogged about how a lot of newer compositions, particularly from students, go for dramatic range-spanning gestures of virtuosic difficulty and that someone he was speaking with said the likely influence for such music was Hollywood.
http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2015/12/what-weve-come-to.html
My hunch is that the Hollywood in question is more likely the modern Hollywood in which composers all seem to rely on the same fill-in models and paradigms which leads to most soundtracks sounding more or less similar. What is probably not the Hollywood of choice would be the one Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco worked in. Yes, I'd say Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote music that sounds very Hollywood, but in the best most tuneful sort of way. If you influenced John Williams , Jerry Goldsmith and Henry Mancini you safely get to be considered classic Hollywood. If newer works were being written in that style of Hollywood it might not seem so insulting to compare student works to someone like Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who wrote some excellent music for classical guitar which, obviously, I must add!
And pertinent to Gann's comments about an anti-ism mentality in contemporary American music, I can appreciate a concern that a lack of concern for an ism or an ist school of thought can speak to a lack of musical personality or conviction. Movements tend to be things people do, whether at a social or, ahem, a more prosaic physiological level. I guess if I'd have to describe an "ism" I am committed to I've settled on calling it "fusionism", the idea being that I think composers should do work to shrink the barrier that has come to exist between popular/vernacular music and what has often been known as classical music, the proverbial low and high of music. So my heroes are composers who in some way and at some level, as I hear their work, actually did that. So my big heroes include Haydn, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Shostakovich, Duke Ellington, Stevie Wonder, Scott Joplin, Joseph Lamb, Janacek, Messiaen, Stravinsky, some Ravel, and more contemporary guitarists like Nikita Koshkin, Atanas Ourkouzounov, Dusan Bogdanovic ... and I also revere the guitar music of Toru Takemitsu. I should throw in Thelonious Monk and George Russell while I'm at it but I hope you can get the basic idea.
I actually kinda hate jazz fusion but I was into prog rock for a while and I think one of the reasons prog rock is so reviled by fans of rock and pop and also by more traditionalist advocates of what's called classical music is that it is an attempt at fusion that in many respects failed. So I would say that when I think of my goals as fusionist I'm specifically thinking of anchoring the gestural and harmonic vocabularies of American vernacular styles to emphatically 18th century syntactic scripts and norms of gestural development. So an example of what I aspire to do is to compose a fugue based on a melody from a ragtime strain. I love ragtime! Or I would want to find a way to have a second theme recapitulate in a sonata form and become a bravura set of variations on a shape note hymn played in the slide guitar style of, say, Blind Willie Johnson. That's what I mean by saying my aspirations are to what I call fusionism.
In hindsight I realize that I wrote a kind of fusionist manifesto as a guest piece for Internet Monk a few years back where I just frontloaded the manifesto with Galatians 3:28
https://internetmonk.com/archive/guest-post-wth-on-there-is-neither-art-nor-pop-neither-indie-or-mainstream
If it's something you consider to be true about flesh and blood people then how much more should it be true for the music those people make? That's what I mean when I think of myself as a fusionist.
If through Christ the Father saw to reconciling all things to Himself, and if in Christ all who are in Christ are one then, well, that's what I mean by fusionism. If people from every station, race, ethnicity and tribe are being reconciled in and through Christ and to Christ an implication of this should be reconciliation to each other. So there's neither high nor low, indie or mainstream, classical or pop. But, yes, this manifesto is formulated on explicitly religious and particularly Christian grounds. My dad was Native American and my mom's white but a common thread is some form of Christian belief.
But I'm not interested in formulating a fusionist paradigm that would require other people to have that belief. But I say all this as a way of saying that I think I get what Kyle Gann has been complaining about and I think I might even take a step further and point out that some of the most significant figures of the musical avant garde in the last century had what would today be considered explicitly traditionalist or even reactionary religious beliefs. Messiaen wrote some far out music but was as traditionalist a Catholic as they come, from what I've managed to read about him. Arvo Part is Orthodox. Frank Martin was not quite so far out but he was Swiss Reformed and wrote what could be thought of as the first "modernist" work for classical guitar.
... but I digress ...
And if I'm going to cheat a bit and just invoke a phrase from Ben Johnston's writing, I want to reach that kind of fusion of American vernacular musical gesture and 18th century chamber music developmental processes with "maximum clarity". I have too many friends who are construction workers and electricians and stay at home moms and accountants and what might broadly be thought of as middle class and working class to feel like I have any business or interest in composing music that people need a master's degree to even begin to understand. So in that sense what I like about the Samuel Jones Tuba Concerto is that it may seem a bit Hollywood but I think of it as a throwback to when Hollywood composers still wrote tunes instead of agitated ostinati.
So I wouldn't say the Samuel Jones Tuba Concerto is as charming as a Tedesco work but it's one of the more memorable big sound premieres I've heard in the last twenty years. Usually I'm more tuned into to chamber music for classical guitar and solo guitar music, so perhaps that's endorsement enough, in a way.
And on that note I figure I can close up a night of blogging about tuba music by writing a post about music for tuba and guitar.
I sure remembered this one, though. The Samuel Jones Tuba Concerto may not be the most groundbreaking new work of the last fifteen years but it has some actual tunes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hq9Qc7FF3k
It's also one of the only world premieres given by a symphony where I actually remembered it several days later and enjoyed it enough I was willing to go hear it in concert a second time. His Trombone Concerto wasn't nearly as satisfying for my personal tastes but Jones' Tuba Concerto has stuck with me and I really enjoyed it. But the thign is I was able to remember themes days later. That is, I'm afraid, not so common an experience in a lot of contemporary classical music. Kyle Gann once blogged about how a lot of newer compositions, particularly from students, go for dramatic range-spanning gestures of virtuosic difficulty and that someone he was speaking with said the likely influence for such music was Hollywood.
http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2015/12/what-weve-come-to.html
My hunch is that the Hollywood in question is more likely the modern Hollywood in which composers all seem to rely on the same fill-in models and paradigms which leads to most soundtracks sounding more or less similar. What is probably not the Hollywood of choice would be the one Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco worked in. Yes, I'd say Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote music that sounds very Hollywood, but in the best most tuneful sort of way. If you influenced John Williams , Jerry Goldsmith and Henry Mancini you safely get to be considered classic Hollywood. If newer works were being written in that style of Hollywood it might not seem so insulting to compare student works to someone like Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who wrote some excellent music for classical guitar which, obviously, I must add!
And pertinent to Gann's comments about an anti-ism mentality in contemporary American music, I can appreciate a concern that a lack of concern for an ism or an ist school of thought can speak to a lack of musical personality or conviction. Movements tend to be things people do, whether at a social or, ahem, a more prosaic physiological level. I guess if I'd have to describe an "ism" I am committed to I've settled on calling it "fusionism", the idea being that I think composers should do work to shrink the barrier that has come to exist between popular/vernacular music and what has often been known as classical music, the proverbial low and high of music. So my heroes are composers who in some way and at some level, as I hear their work, actually did that. So my big heroes include Haydn, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Shostakovich, Duke Ellington, Stevie Wonder, Scott Joplin, Joseph Lamb, Janacek, Messiaen, Stravinsky, some Ravel, and more contemporary guitarists like Nikita Koshkin, Atanas Ourkouzounov, Dusan Bogdanovic ... and I also revere the guitar music of Toru Takemitsu. I should throw in Thelonious Monk and George Russell while I'm at it but I hope you can get the basic idea.
I actually kinda hate jazz fusion but I was into prog rock for a while and I think one of the reasons prog rock is so reviled by fans of rock and pop and also by more traditionalist advocates of what's called classical music is that it is an attempt at fusion that in many respects failed. So I would say that when I think of my goals as fusionist I'm specifically thinking of anchoring the gestural and harmonic vocabularies of American vernacular styles to emphatically 18th century syntactic scripts and norms of gestural development. So an example of what I aspire to do is to compose a fugue based on a melody from a ragtime strain. I love ragtime! Or I would want to find a way to have a second theme recapitulate in a sonata form and become a bravura set of variations on a shape note hymn played in the slide guitar style of, say, Blind Willie Johnson. That's what I mean by saying my aspirations are to what I call fusionism.
In hindsight I realize that I wrote a kind of fusionist manifesto as a guest piece for Internet Monk a few years back where I just frontloaded the manifesto with Galatians 3:28
https://internetmonk.com/archive/guest-post-wth-on-there-is-neither-art-nor-pop-neither-indie-or-mainstream
Galatians 3:28
There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free man, neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus
There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free man, neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus
Colossians 1:19-20
For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His Cross; through Him, I say, whether things on heaven or things on earth.
For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His Cross; through Him, I say, whether things on heaven or things on earth.
If it's something you consider to be true about flesh and blood people then how much more should it be true for the music those people make? That's what I mean when I think of myself as a fusionist.
If through Christ the Father saw to reconciling all things to Himself, and if in Christ all who are in Christ are one then, well, that's what I mean by fusionism. If people from every station, race, ethnicity and tribe are being reconciled in and through Christ and to Christ an implication of this should be reconciliation to each other. So there's neither high nor low, indie or mainstream, classical or pop. But, yes, this manifesto is formulated on explicitly religious and particularly Christian grounds. My dad was Native American and my mom's white but a common thread is some form of Christian belief.
But I'm not interested in formulating a fusionist paradigm that would require other people to have that belief. But I say all this as a way of saying that I think I get what Kyle Gann has been complaining about and I think I might even take a step further and point out that some of the most significant figures of the musical avant garde in the last century had what would today be considered explicitly traditionalist or even reactionary religious beliefs. Messiaen wrote some far out music but was as traditionalist a Catholic as they come, from what I've managed to read about him. Arvo Part is Orthodox. Frank Martin was not quite so far out but he was Swiss Reformed and wrote what could be thought of as the first "modernist" work for classical guitar.
... but I digress ...
And if I'm going to cheat a bit and just invoke a phrase from Ben Johnston's writing, I want to reach that kind of fusion of American vernacular musical gesture and 18th century chamber music developmental processes with "maximum clarity". I have too many friends who are construction workers and electricians and stay at home moms and accountants and what might broadly be thought of as middle class and working class to feel like I have any business or interest in composing music that people need a master's degree to even begin to understand. So in that sense what I like about the Samuel Jones Tuba Concerto is that it may seem a bit Hollywood but I think of it as a throwback to when Hollywood composers still wrote tunes instead of agitated ostinati.
So I wouldn't say the Samuel Jones Tuba Concerto is as charming as a Tedesco work but it's one of the more memorable big sound premieres I've heard in the last twenty years. Usually I'm more tuned into to chamber music for classical guitar and solo guitar music, so perhaps that's endorsement enough, in a way.
And on that note I figure I can close up a night of blogging about tuba music by writing a post about music for tuba and guitar.
Penderecki: Capriccio for solo tuba video with audio and follow-along score
Now I've read Kyle Gann's blog for enough years to know he's not much for Penderecki's post-Threnody music. I actually kinda like some of the later Penderecki, though a lot of it got awfully ponderous in a neo-Romantic vein for my tastes.
That said, I think his work for solo tuba is fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-NkYMRUQvs
Maybe the challenges of writing for solo tuba forced him to think outside of his pointillistic/expressionist and neo-Romantic boxes or something but among tubists/tuba players however they prefer to be known Penderecki's work has become one of the standards of the tuba literature.
I think tonight will be a tuba themed night for blog posts.
That said, I think his work for solo tuba is fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-NkYMRUQvs
Maybe the challenges of writing for solo tuba forced him to think outside of his pointillistic/expressionist and neo-Romantic boxes or something but among tubists/tuba players however they prefer to be known Penderecki's work has become one of the standards of the tuba literature.
I think tonight will be a tuba themed night for blog posts.
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