A good part of my weekend was spent baking, oddly enough. Cooking midterm, if you’ll believe it. Trust me, I understand if you don’t

Anyway, I was able to get a good amount done, mostly today. I was able to…

• Do a bit of work on famitracker (Friends theme! Hopefully it’ll be done by Friday-ish maybe). I hope to also animate a basic 8 bit screen and stuff. That fun jazz.
• Work on a game for OneGameaMonth. The theme this month is music, and I have quite the creative idea.
• French Horn a bit. Gotta jazz.
• Not work on my art… I was looking for my tablet all weekend; only found it like an hour ago, and I was already very into working on the new game.
• I also did some personal stuff like go to a party, but… I’m sure all of you hardly care about that. Although perhaps does raise my happiness a bit, which is, in fact, a goal.
• And lastly I worked on programming just a little bit. I’ve decided that to truly cross that one off the list, I need to make a game/program to be sorta proud of out of the language of my choice. So yeah. That’s fun.

So yes, this is it. Not horribly exciting, but hopefully I’ll have a thing or two to show in a day or two. I hope to have my game finished by the 15th or 16th, so that’s only in two weeks or so.

The woodwind quintet (or wind quintet) has a very unique sound.  Brass and strings have a very homogenous sound within their respective sections.  There are certainly tonal differences between a trumpet and tuba, for instance, but but they both undoubtedly belong to the brass family.  However, on the woodwind side, a flute sounds very different from a clarinet, which sounds very different from an oboe, and so forth.  This provides some intriguing tone colors throughout the group.

So, combine an unusual-sounding group with one of my favorite composers, Sir Malcolm Arnold, and you get a crazy fun piece.  Composed in 1943, it consists of three movements, each one paying homage to a different sea shanty.  First up is  “What Should We Do With a Drunken Sailor?”  This is probably the most familiar tune of the three pieces.  The second movement is “Boney Was a Warrior”, followed by “Johnny Come Down to Hilo” for the third movement.

On to the piece!

Movement I – Allegro con brio (“fast, with spirit”, 0:00-2:21)
I think everyone’s heard this tune sometime in their life (everyone sing along with me! ♪♫♪)

What should we do with a drunken sailor
What should we do with a drunken sailor
What should we do with a drunken sailor
Early in the morning

Then the ditty goes on to explain all the things that can be done to this sailor.  Rather entertaining, and I’m willing to bet there have been many… unique… verses added to this throughout the years.

Malcolm Arnold loves to play around with melodies, taking bits and pieces and manipulating them so they’re not always recognizable.  We get a few instances of hearing the complete theme in this movement, such as in the flute at the beginning, but he interjects a lot of other material as well.  Sometimes you hear just the first few repeated notes of the tune (“what should we do with a”, 0:14), sometimes you hear snippets of “early in the morning” (0:58, bassoon, then clarinet).  Now and then it’s just the rhythm of the theme that links it all together (0:32).

He uses a lot of downward arpeggios in the movement as well, which I consider to be a motif in the piece. Arpeggios are basically chords that are played one note at a time, instead of all at once.  The first one happens at 0:18 in the clarinet.  While we’re here, listen to the horn’s accented notes underneath the clarinet arpeggio.  Does it sound a bit different? More nasal?  He’s using a technique called “stopped” horn.  A French hornist plays with his right hand slightly in the instrument’s bell. When he “stops” the horn, he inserts his hand further into the bell, which manipulates the tone quality of the instrument. You can hear more of this around 0:47.

At 0:24, he introduces a new motif, an up and down motion in the flute, clarinet and bassoon.  It sounds a bit like the waves of the sea (or perhaps the the uneasiness of the drunk sailor’s legs?).  He breaks it up with a rhythmic nod to the melody (0:32) and the arpeggio motif (0:35).  The waves get more agitated at 0:48 in the clarinet and bassoon, accompanied by some intentionally nasty sounding notes from the rest of the group.  Things settle down a bit as the piece transitions into new territory.  During this transition, the horn displays another technique: muting.  Muting uses a conical piece of material, usually made out of wood and cardboard, sometimes metal, that gets inserted into the bell.  The result is a less strident tone than is produced from stopping, but it still has an edge to it.  While you’re listening to the horn, try to identify when it plays a bit of the melody at 1:07 and 1:10.  It should sound like the “-en sail-or” part of the tune.

I love the section at 1:15 – to me it sounds very “sailors roughing it on the seas”, though I don’t know that I can explain exactly why that is.  Then there’s the deliciously brash clarinet line at 1:23 that leads into some great dissonance with the flute and oboe, with the horn “falls” answering to that.  Things do quiet down with a few steps leading into…

a tango?  I’m entertained by the thought of a boozy sailor trying to dance with someone.  Or something.  The bassoon plays the familiar tango bass line, with the flute, clarinet and horn playing smooth, repeated notes (the “what shall we do with a” part of the main tune).  The oboe adds some comments, followed by a lyrical flute line.  The tango doesn’t last for long, though, and we’re back to the quick pace of the initial melody.  I love the clash that happens when the tune reaches “morn-ing”!  We finish up the melody with more arpeggios and a closing statement from the group.

Movement II – Allegretto semplice (“moderately fast, simply”, 2:24-3:59)

Boney was a warrior,Way, hay, yah,
Oh Boney was a warrior,
John Francois

This is the most straightforward movement out of the three.  It begins with a lovely muted horn solo, with only long, sustained tones from some of the other instruments as accompaniment.  Listen for the flute melody right after the horn’s line, she’s playing in the lower register of the flute.  We haven’t really heard that yet in any of the pieces I’ve talked about.  I love the sound of those lower notes on flute.  We don’t always get to hear them, but they can be very effective.

Each instrument gets a chance at the melody in this movement.  While the accompaniment is mostly long notes, every now and then there’s some movement.  The bassoon has a nice descending line into its turn at the tune (2:53), and the flute answers with a descending countermelody of her own (2:58).  At 3:10, Arnold changes the character of the descending line a bit with the clarinet and bassoon playing the notes shorter, not as smooth and long as previous iterations.

After a grand pause at 3:36, the piece ends as it started with the muted horn solo.  What’s interesting is he kind of leaves the horn hanging – the other instruments have dropped out at this point.  It’s the sort of ending that makes the audience wonder, “Is there more?”

Movement III – Allegro vivace (“quite fast”, 4:02-6:47)

Never seen the like since I been born
A great big sailor with his sea boots on
Johnny come down to Hilo, poor old man
Wake her, shake her
Wake that gal with the blue dress on
Johnny come down to Hilo, poor old man

Hold on to your hats!  Arnold really plays around with the tune in this one.  He interrupts it frequently, having one instrument start the line with another jumping in to finish.  The most extreme example (and my favorite) begins with the oboe at 4:26 – the melody hits all the instruments just one to three notes at a time.  Played well, and in time, the listener can still hear the line of the melody, despite the difference in instruments.  Timing is crucial for that one!

He goes on to create a neat cascading effect from the flute down to the bassoon starting at 4:33 with each instrument starting the melody, though the flute is the only one to get through a complete phrase.  The music plays around a bit with short, rhythmic chords before the flute, oboe and clarinet unite in the “Johnny come down to Hilo” phrase.  The bassoon and horn lead us downward into the next section.

The bassoon and horn get into a groovy little accompaniment, but settle into a fast waltz with the clarinet as the flute and oboe arrive in a tipsy duet (the songs are about sailors, after all!)  Listen closely starting at 5:14 – after a descending line by the bassoon and horn, they go into a 5/8 pattern (remember 5/8 from Armenian Dances?) It doesn’t last long, but it’s there.  The clarinet and oboe get in on it with some wonderfully clashing notes before we get a clearer shot of the tune starting with flute and clarinet.  That doesn’t last long, either, before we get into another waltzy section.

We get into such a fun part at 5:44!  The bassoon, horn and clarinet set up a great rhythm, then the flute just takes off in a neat reworking of the melody.  There’s a great smear of sound from everyone else as they join in the festivities, with the horn whooping it up throughout.  After the party, the piece settles back into “normal”, though Arnold continues to play around with the tune and rhythms and gives us another cascade at 6:20.  This is followed by a dissonant “horn call” type of line with the clarinet and oboe.  He finally settles us down with a descending line into a hold, then a pause.  We finish with a fun little ending that’s very characteristic of Malcolm Arnold.

Now that we’re back on dry land, I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction to both the wind quintet and Malcolm Arnold!  I’ll probably be doing a “Bonus Features” post sometime soon, as I came across some fun videos while researching this post.

After the fMRI post, a kind reader sent me a link to the video below (thanks, Thiago!). Pretty amazing for many reasons. The amount of x-ray radiation these brass players were blasted with is kind of crazy.

Even if they didn’t know the dangers, I salute their sacrifice. I found myself especially watching the tongue position as players went higher, and the movement of the tongue while double and triple tonguing. Tone and accuracy leaves something to be desired.

Probably all the really excellent players told the researcher, “You want me to absorb a massive dose of radiation? Are you kidding? No way!”  But if they asked me, I’d probably ask something like: “Will getting a massive dose of radiation give me super-powers? I’m in!”

————————————————————–

Related articles

• Handheld X-Ray Devices Coming Soon (secretsofthefed.com)

We consider ourselves fortunate to make music and work together not only in the same ensemble, but the same section.  Each person in the band has a different story to tell.  This is how we met and successfully auditioned for the West Point Band, a group we are thrilled to be a part of and a place we are happy to come to work.

We have made a great team musically, personally, and professionally since the day we met at the Eastern Music Festival in North Carolina.  We grew together through our undergraduate at Florida State and graduate studies at Southern Methodist University, studying with the same teachers and playing in the same ensembles. We fondly look back on those times and are thankful to share the same educational and professional experiences. Some of those include summers with the National Repertory Orchestra and subbing with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Nicole was also a fellow at Tanglewood and performed with the New World Symphony Orchestra prior to her audition with the West Point Band.

Nick always knew about the premiere military bands because his father was a horn player in the United States Army Band, “Pershing’s Own”, in Washington D.C. for 32 years. Deep down he always wanted to go into the family business and winning a position with an organization like the West Point Band was a realistic long-term goal he realized in October 2005.

Nick completed graduate studies and reported to West Point in August of 2006. Nicole moved to New York after finishing her degree and we married in 2008. She freelanced and took orchestra and military band auditions before winning a position with the Concert Band in May of 2009. When Nick learned she was interested in auditioning, he recused himself from the entire process, leaving the outcome of the audition to Nicole’s prowess as a musician and the skilled ears of his colleagues on the audition panel.

Having intensively studied with the same teachers at the same schools, we know each other’s tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses, which helps us, our section, and the unit be more efficient. This is critical when our operational tempo as an ensemble and as a unit is so fast-paced.

We model our approach to playing and working together after our teacher and mentor, Greg Hustis, who is the epitome of the consummate professional. He was and still is a great role model on and off the stage. This is something we strive to emulate every day, which has worked very well since we started dating ten years ago!

As it has been throughout our relationship, we enjoy regular opportunities to practice at home and rehearse excerpts and duets. We often give each other honest and constructive feedback and enjoy being able to share similar work experiences.

The band schedule is both predictable and unpredictable. While this can be challenging for anybody, this is compounded by the fact that we are new parents. We rely on wonderful childcare providers in New Windsor during the normal duty day. As professionals who offer musical and ceremonial support outside of the regular days and hours of the work-week, we often rely on teaming up with Staff Sergeants Joe and Mikki Skinner for those occasions since our daughters attend the same daycare and get along so well. We also share the unique challenges of being a dual military couple in the West Point Band.

For more intensive occasions, such as the annual Army-Navy trip, we heavily lean on family. Since all our family live on the east coast, finding grandparents or aunts and uncles to watch our daughter is never a problem.

We are thankful for the help and support of our friends and family. We love spending our free time with them, traveling, and exercising. We had personal bests at another Army Ten-Miler this fall as part of the West Point Band Team. We strongly feel keeping up with physical fitness and a clean diet are instrumental to our performances as musicians and our overall well-being.

We consider it a privilege to be members of the West Point Band, a fantastic organization that is the sum of its parts. We love the opportunities to grow as we feed off energies from each other and the collective creative collaboration of our friends and colleagues. This inspires us to stay honest with our musicianship and keeps us current in an art form and a world that is always changing. The Academy and the Army often place new demands on us as musicians and professionals and we approach everything with an open mind and a can-do attitude.

Words by Sgt. 1st Class Nicholas Caluori and Staff Sgt. Nicole Caluori

Percussion instruments produce sounds when they are hit, woodwind instruments produce sounds when the player uses only air (either blown through a hole, across a hole, or causing vibrations between a reed and a mouthpiece), and brass instruments produce beautiful music when the player’s lips vibrate within the confines of a mouthpiece.

As I showed in my post “How do you make a sound?”, the horn mouthpiece is teeny tiny. In fact, I’ll insert the picture again:

The tuba mouthpiece on the far left has the most room in it for the lips to vibrate (at the aperture), and the room gets increasingly smaller as you move farther to the right, until you get to the horn mouthpiece, which has the unlucky combination of not only having the smallest space for the lips to vibrate in, but also being attached to one of the longest brass instruments (in fact the longest, with the exception of the tuba), resulting in a 4+ octave range wherein the embouchure stays mostly the same.

The reason people say that the horn is the hardest instrument to play is because of this combination. To be a good horn player, it is absolutely essential that one has a good ear, meaning that one can imagine (“hear”) the pitch to be played before it’s played, and adjust one’s embouchure accordingly. For example, if one was to start on a low C one octave below middle C, the embouchure would be much more loose and wide set than the high C an octave above middle C, which would be more “comfortable” (less comfortable, and more normal, to be correct). If a person aimlessly pokes around at pitches without any sense of what notes to hit or where those notes are or what they sound like, that person is most likely to sound like a beginner and thoroughly embarrass himself.

Another, related topic on the concept of brass instruments is the difference between cylindrical brass and conical brass instruments. Trombones and trumpets are both cylindrical brass instruments, whereas tubas, euphoniums/baritones, horns, and cornets are conical. If you know anything about these instruments, then you will immediately understand how to associate these terms. The cylindrical brass instruments tend to produce the brighter, louder sounds that one expects from, say, jazz band groups. The reason their sounds are so bright and clear (brassy is probably a better word than bright, since it’s possible to have a dark sound on a trombone or a trumpet, but the gist is pretty much the same) is because the width of the tubing as it winds around stays relatively the same until it gets to the very end and flares out. Let’s take a look at a trumpet, for example.

If you look at the width of the tubing right at the mouthpiece, and then the width of the tubing right before the bell flare, you will notice that it remains about the same diameter the whole way through, with only a gradual increase in width until the very end. Now let’s turn our attention to a cornet, a very similar instrument.

Now it is very easy to see that the width of the tubing gradually increase throughout the entire length of the horn, but most especially along the “home stretch” of the tubing. This gradual increase, as seen on the other conical brass instruments, produces a naturally darker, more round tone that more easily blends into an orchestra or wind ensemble setting. The names conical and cylindrical come merely from the fact that the tubing on cylindrical instruments is more like a cylinder than the tubing on the conical instruments, which experience such a growth of their tubing that they really do resemble a cone in some ways.

So, the reason the horn is different from the other brass instruments is because, although it has mostly the same range as the trombone and the euphonium, it is a conical bore instrument, and thus sounds different. It is also different in that is has a massive range (4+ octaves!), which, although other instruments have a large range, is really unprecedented in the music world. The horn is different yet again because of the fact that it isn’t traditionally used for jazz, but it plays an extremely important role in wind band and orchestra literature; the horn is one of the best instruments one can play because of the vast opportunities that await, especially if one has a knack for it, the patience to learn it, and is willing to work hard to achieve some really spectacular goals.

These questions asked by Karthik Nataraj and his father, after some thought. I was pleased to answer them, since I always am caught off guard by people who don’t know as much about music as I do, and I need to remember that sometimes, other people have lives.

Many thanks to Jeffrey Agrell, from whom I first saw this post. Click here to visit his blog.

Enjoy!

7 Minuets in Heaven

The end of year parties at band camp were always crazy.

The flutes were behind the bar serving champagne while the French horn tried to chat up as many girls as he could.

The tam-tams flirted with the tom-toms while the euphoniums got caught talking to the snare drum.

The bassoons were acting like buffoons while the glockenspiels told dirty, German jokes.

The bass drum spent the whole night making sure the cymbals didn’t clash while the trumpets played Miles and smoked cigarettes and looked cool.

Everyone clapped when the tambourines arrived.

And the cellos just smooched in the closet.

———————————————————————————————————

Some Friday Fictioneers for you with the prompt coming from Rochelle Wisoff-Fields.

If you enjoy the writing here head on over to TheIstanbulletin.com - The blog I co-write about living and working in Turkey (It’s mostly about eating though)

The amazing Norman Wisdom

That says it all to me… (Oliver Hardy)

Now, don’t go shooting the messenger…

Byron Fulcher as Grock rehearsing Berio Sequenza V for London Sinfonietta prom – photo by Pip Eastop

Straight back into the dressing room floor: the seat cushion TILL EULENSPIEGEL concert for children from 4 years - photo Bayerische Staatsopera

Charles Chaplin

Click Here for a World Record Clown & Trumpet Story

Laurel & Hardy

]]> http://aintbaroque.com/2013/01/04/your-band-director-has-no-interest-in-you-marching-to-a-different-drummer/ Fri, 04 Jan 2013 13:29:09 +0000 Jenn http://aintbaroque.com/2013/01/04/your-band-director-has-no-interest-in-you-marching-to-a-different-drummer/

But I wouldn’t know, because it’s so hard to get the wheels on the cello.

1. I worked on a game for this website right here. It sucked. Not horribly, but it needs better explanations and graphics. It still has 30 playable levels, and meh music, which isn’t bad for really only 6-8 hours of work. I got lazy this jam. Hence, I’ll spend the rest of January improving it, making my game for this month.
2. I’m trying to do a “don’t break the chain” where each day I work on art for at least 15 minutes, and I’m trying to set up a system of I work on art for the entirety of me watching one episode of Friends which I’m watching for… Kind of familial reasons.
3. Not much progress with the URL. I had an attempt, but it failed pretty miserably. But yes.
4. Not much progress on the French Horn either.
5. As I dabble in art, I get closer to this. Really the art one is a prerequisite to this, so… Yeah.
6. The majority of my webseries will be shot in the summer, as opposed to the dead of winter, so right now I’m just playing around with plot stuff in my head.
7. My novel, too, will probably be more of a summer thing, where I can work on it all at once as opposed to small increments.
8. I have a pea plant, that I got a few weeks back, but it appears to be dying. Need to do some research.
9. Getting something published is more of a “Wait for the opportunity” thing.
10. Blogging is what I’m doing now.
11. I’ve obtained 1984, which seems like a good read, so I’ll be trying to read that soon enough.
12. No real progress for famitracker.
13. I’ve been toying around with java a lot lately, and can now write basic functions. I also bought a C# book, but I’ll look into that when I’m more comfortable with java.
14. I think I’ll attempt a Sollux cosplay. It just… Seems like something that’d work. Ordering the shirt off of Topacto, or whatever it’s called, make the horns out of clay from scratch, and 3D glasses, or maybe even real lenses, for the… Glasses.
15. I need to get better at things before I can collaborate.
16. No online friends either.
17. Doing clay will probably happen after I get better at drawing and such.
18. No online profit (a bit of a streak of sucking right here)
19. I bought Jurassic Park recently, so it looks like I’ll try to review that in the near future, perhaps on the upcoming weekend.
20. I suppose I’ll try keeping a dream journal, in order to improve my dream recall, and see if there are reoccurring things in my dreams that allow me to identify them… Cliche lucid stuff; google it.
21. As for taking a picture every day, I guess I’ll do that right after this.
22. No piano plans yet.
23. Chinese Mandarin I also have no plans for, but considering I have a test Friday, I’d best start looking at some of that stuff.
24. School grades, uh… Yeah I think it’s all at B+s to As right now; might wanna up that a bit, but you don’t care about that, do you?
25. Um… Not much happier yet. But it’s been one day.

So yes. I’ll continue to work. As if I’d stop on one day. I’ll be updating various other pages today, so… Yes.

Dennis Brain, formal portrait.

The video above is an audio sample of the horn samples from “Eastwest Hollywood Brass Gold Edition”. You can get the whole set on DVD for $549 on Amazon.com. This video is only of the horn(s); the whole set also has trumpets, trombone, and tuba. I have no idea how easy/hard it is to use these samples in electronic music composition, but my first thought in hearing this (just now, for the first time): as synths and samplers have been displacing live instruments for years, I was always convinced that they will never replace horns with electronic simulacrums; the fake versions always sound terrible, very fake (some instruments are easier to fake than others). But after hearing this, I have to admit: they’re getting closer. A lot closer.

Any horn player who listens very carefully or long can tell that these are samples, not live. But you might not get it in a quick, cursory listen to a piece done by an expert at using these samples. Scary. The reason these are so much better than before (I’m guessing) is that these samples have all kinds of different articulations, dynamics, extended techniques, and so on, so that a clever electronic composer could fool most listeners most (and probably all) of the time, especially if the sounds were embedded in an orchestral texture. Composers for horn, if you want to hear a version of your newly composed piece for horn ensemble (e.g.) that is pretty close to how it will really sound and you have $549 burning a hole in your pocket and you have time to learn how to use samples, Eastwest has something for you.

Anybody out there have experience with these or other samples like this?

(Photo credit: Andy.Schultz)

Heidi Wick – Applying Natural Horn Technique to Modern Valved Horn Performance Practice, DMA Ohio State University, 2001, 88 p.

Click below, to view:

If you’d like to watch it in HIGH DEFINITION QUALITY, click on the “GEAR” icon (this will appear in the black bar once you hit the PLAY button) and then, click on 720p.

Don’t forget to turn up your speakers, fix a cup of cocoa, put your feet up to…

Enjoy the Creativity!

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Eileen

♥ My sincerest thanks to the talented Production Staff at THEM FEELINGS MULTIMEDIA for creating our video each & every year, simply to support a small business! ♥