Jake's Brass Rep!

      Matthew Barker is currently the 4th/utility trumpet with the Baltimore Symphony, as position which he's held since the 2016-2017 season. Like many other musicians, he found himself with very little to do once his orchestra closed its doors at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. The following video is a trumpet chamber piece he wrote and recorded himself, while at home during the global lockdown. Pay attention to the art style and intentional recording style being used here. A trend that began to emerge in peoples content around this time was experimental/interesting camera work, to try to be unique from the pack and get eye on their work. A cursory understanding of how to work a camera soon became a common expectation around people who recorded themselves for online content. 

      Some organizations opted in to this trend, just as the Boston Symphony did, but opted to demonstrate more practical music, such as this excerpt from Mahler's second symphony. This video shows the power of digital music making, as all of the musicians in the video are recording themselves at home, in totally different spaces. Also, seeing as they are not sound engineers, but instead orchestral musicians, they likely know very little about proper microphone placement or balance. This would require someone with a good knowledge of mixing music to balance, eventually producing a solid finished product.      All of this to say, that limits of what people thought to be possible using remote recording at this time were constantly being challenged, leading to some interesting projects such as the one below. 

      The impact that the Covid-19 pandemic had on the musical world was deep and impactful. It stopped the world to a halt and demanded that musicians be flexible and find new ways to create and share their product with patrons. Since live performing was a far cry away from meeting with social distancing standards, a new solution had to be formulated. This began a trend of people creating their own home recordings, either collaborating with others via digital file sharing, or creating their own projects.      Below is an arrangement of Bugler's Holiday, and piece written originally for 3 trumpets and orchestra by composer Leroy Anderson. It has been arranged here for 4 trumpets and is being played by the trumpet section of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 

 Brass Chamber Transcriptions     The combined forces of the Canadian Brass, Boston Symphony brass, and New York Philharmonic brass come together on this recording to play an arrangement of Beethovens 5th symphony. This piece would have never originally been conceived for brass, but this arrangement lets us see what it would be like in a brass only setting.      Polovtsian Dances is a piece written by Russian Big 5 composer Alexander Borodin. It is masterfully arranged here, and played by the brass players of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. This piece takes advantage of the more subtle and lyrical capabilities of the brass family.      Moving into our first brass quintet arrangement, we have The Canadian Brass playing Bach's very famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor. The piece was arranged by Fred Mills, long time trumpeter of the Canadian Brass. This piece requires good ensemble communication and musical cohesiveness to pull off, and is we...

 Style of Brass Quintet Pieces  Alyabiev As we discussed, this is the first brass quintet we have access to, and being written during the romantic period, the traits of that style of writing come through very clearly. The beginning opens with a slow adagio, very diatonic harmonies, and slow melodic gestures that eventually lead us to a triumphant, very brass tempo change, with more virtuosic ideas. The full potential of valved instruments are used here, with many runs in the soprano voices. We eventually leave our home key of Eb major, and go on an exploratory tonal shift into a development section. This lands us in B flat major, which quickly cadences back into our home key of Eb major. Eventually we fade out in the same Eb minor that the piece started with. Overall the style of this piece is very romantic, akin to the period it was written in, and despite this age, it still reads and sounds like a more modern classical piece for brass quintet.  Poulenc  This piece ...

 Gabrieli is famous for having written music for antiphonal brass. These piece are often grandiose in nature, and feature both the loud and soft dynamics of brass instruments. Syncopation is used often throughout to give stronger emphasis to ideas, as well as another main feature of Gabrieli's works: counterpoint. Voices often interact in a call and response fashion, which has a spectacular effect, especially when the two antiphonal groups are placed on either side of a church, creating a stereo effect.  Caludio Merula was a composer from the late renaissance period. The piece we listened to is called Canzon a 5, and is a counterpoint heavy composition for 5 voices. Much like the Gabrieli, the voices all interact in a very specific way, weaving in and out of one another for a strong counterpoint effect. This particular recording is by the English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble, and the period instruments sound totally different from their modern counterparts.  Next up, we h...