The New Trumpet

various artists compilation - The New Trumpet

Sonata for Trumpet & Piano (1955) by Peter Maxwell Davies

Performers: Gerard Schwarz - trumpet; Ursula Oppens - piano

Space is a Diamond (1970) by Lucia Dlugoszewski

for solo trumpet

Performer: Gerard Schwarz

Passages 13-The Fire (1970-71) by William Hellermann

for trumpet & tape

Performers: Gerard Schwarz - trumpet; Jacqueline Hellermann, Marsha Immanuel, Michael O'Brien, John P. Thomas - voices

tape realized at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center

text, "The Fire, Passages 13" is from Bending the Bow by Robert Duncan; This poem was first published in Poetry, April-May 1965.

Most of our modern instruments have antecedents reaching far back into antiquity, and the trumpet is no exception. Space does not allow discussion of whether or not the ancient Roman lituus or the much more recent cornetto or Zink are true ancestors of the modern trumpet, and it is better to limit our concentration to the simple narrow cylindrical tube of metal with a bell and a cup-shaped mouthpiece that the instrument essentially still is. This natural trumpet, without side-holes or valves, is capable of a simple overtone series; in this form, it is only in the upper partials that it becomes possible to produce the full scale. In the Baroque period a school of trumpet-playing developed using this portion of the instrument, but players equipped with sufficient lip and lung power to master this style were naturally somewhat rare. In Bach's time trumpet players were the prized athletes of the instrumental ensemble; highly-paid itinerants for the most part, they were called upon to add brilliance to ceremonial musical events. By 1750, however, with the rise of larger ensembles and the cult of the musical amateur, players capable of high, florid passage-work grew scarce, and the most common brass-writing of the Classical period was rather primitive tonic-and-dominant orchestral accentuation.

In the mid-19th century, the recently-invented valve-trumpet (actually at first a cornet) began to come into general use. This was, in practically every sense, a "new trumpet: whereas the earlier methods of varying the fundamental of the overtone series, thus the key, of the old trumpet - either to insert lengths of tubing ("crooks") into it, or to employ a slide-mechanism, like the trombone - were relatively cumbersome, the new trumpet was able, through valves, to open and close various lengths of tubing very quickly. Thus it became a totally chromatic and agile instrument throughout its practical range. The trumpet we possess today, like so many of our current orchestral instruments, is merely a refined and standardized version of the result of that incredibly active period of technological advance in instrument-building, the first half of the 19th century. To this new instrument has been added, much more recently an assortment of mutes: besides the common, centuries-old "straight" mute, the player now has as resource the Harmon mute, the plunger mute, the cup mute, the Solotone mute, the whisper mute, and other devices inserted into (or held against) the bell of the instrument for timbral variation. Many of the above were used principally in American popular music and jazz, and it is only recently, with the renascence of the trumpet virtuoso and the serious composer's growing interest in timbre as a compositional element, that the vast resources of the modern trumpet are beginning to be explored exhaustively in new music.

While not employing the various trumpet mutes, Peter Maxwell Davies' early Sonata forcefully demonstrates the advances in sheer playing technique in the last decades. With Lucia Dlugoszewski's Space is a Diamond, we enter a new sound-world. The trumpet suddenly has become a four-and-a-half-octave instrument: in its new incarnation, with the use of several mutes, unusual tonguing techniques, high, swooping glissandos, and simultaneous playing and singing through the mouthpiece, an instrument emerges capable, in the composer's words, of "gusts of delicate rain" and "violent plateaus," of "pure transparency, tenderness, nakedness, and radiance." Passages 13-The Fire, by William Hellermann, adds electronic sounds and spoken sound-modified text to the "new trumpet"; here, half-valving is prominent in the panoply of effects, but, most remarkably, the work exudes an air of great pathos, aided in this by the trumpet's quotation of a plainsong sequence (by Hermannus Contractus), Alma redemptoris Mater, near its end. Both the Dlugoszewski and Hellermann works were written especially for Gerard Schwarz. (William Bolcom from the liner notes)

Tracklisting:

Side One

1. Peter Maxwell Davies - Sonata for Trumpet & Piano: Allegro moderato {1:46}

2. Peter Maxwell Davies - Sonata for Trumpet & Piano: Lento {2:54}

3. Peter Maxwell Davies - Sonata for Trumpet & Piano: Allegro vivo {2:13}

4. Lucia Dlugoszewski - Space is a Diamond {10:28}

Side Two

1. William Hellermann - Passages 13-The Fire {25:09}

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Sonorous Explorations

various artists compilation - Sonorous Explorations

LUCIA DLUGOSZEWSKI - TENDER THEATRE FLIGHT NAGEIRE (1978)
Gerard Schwarz, Edward Carroll, Norman Smith - trumpets
Robert Routch - horn
David Langlitz - tenor trombone
David Taylor - bass trombone
Lucia Dlugoszewski - percussion
Gerard Schwarz - conductor

From the liner notes written by Dlugoszewski:

The first concern of all music in one way or another is to shatter the indifference of hearing, the callousness of sensibility, to create that moment of solution we call poetry, our rigidity dissolved when we occur reborn - in a sense, hearing for the first time. TENDER THEATRE FLIGHT NAGEIRE is actually a series of musical rituals involved somehow with the poetic roots of erotic experience. Its nakedness of spirit requires a special courage all its own, the courage of vulnerability in terms of letting out feeling, something perilously real with a fierce fragile ambience of elegance, sensitivity, and that radiance of the highest energy release in the mind we call passion. Rituals of sound involving both immediacy and Amor combine to create the musical structure.

The four words TENDER, THEATRE, FLIGHT, NAGEIRE are poetrically chosen to identify structural principles that embody the reality of this music.
TENDER: the 'imprint' of Amor, investigating possibilities of almost bottomless sensitivity, this strange proportion of the mind, a seductive loosening, so to speak.
THEATRE: immediacy in space and time, seeing the sound created as well as hearing it, feeling the sound travel strangely in space.
FLIGHT: the generic translation of 'fugue,' that element of aesthetic elusiveness that we associate with elegance, shedding the gross, heavy, oppressive in favor of the subtle, light and free. The principle of FLIGHT, musically, is a kind of perilous hanging by the ears, where everything is like a hanging bridge, vulnerable, dangerous, tender, unsupported; naked.
NAGEIRE is an oriental aesthetic principle of nondevelopment, of non-linear or 'leap' progression. It uses constant and extreme surprise. The literal translation is 'flung into.' NAGEIRE embodies the oriental aesthetic delight in the courage of the delicacy of daring constructions. It is a kinesthetically inspired system of leaping into unknown material - a braving of the known, a distance-reckless freedom of absolute movement - leaping for the flexibility of the mind.

C. CURTIS-SMITH - UNISONICS (1976)
Trent Kynaston - alto saxophone
C. Curtis-Smith - piano

From the liner notes written by Smith:

In UNISONICS, I have attempted to merge the sounds of the two instruments as one, largely through the use of unisons or the heterophonic ornamentation of a single melodic line. The concept of 'unison' in this work refers to more than the duplication of pitch; through the use of extended techniques for both instruments, the attack and timbral characteristics of the two instruments are brought closer together. Except for the fourth movement, the piano is limited throughout to the tessitura of the saxophone.
The piece is in five movements, the first and last of which are in the form of a prelude and postlude based on similar material. (The postlude is essentially a slow transformation of the more brilliant prelude.) The second movement introduces multiphonics in the saxophone (20 different ones are used during the course of the piece), and cyclical breathing. The bowing of the piano strings, using specially designed bows, is used in this movement as well as in the fourth movement. Since 1972, when I first originated the technique of bowing the piano strings, I have used this method of sound production in a variety of pieces, including FIVE SONOROUS INVENTIONS (CRI 346) and RHAPSODIES (CRI 345).
The third movement is heterophonically the most complex of the five, with the two instruments beginning in unison, and gradually diverging as the movement progresses.
The fourth movement features some extreme altissimo writing for the saxophone (a total of five different octaves of B-flat are notated!), as well as various multiphonics, counterbalanced by more extensive bowing of the piano strings. This time, however, the bowing involves only the strings in the lowest octave, the resulting high pitches being partials, sometimes as high as the 64th.
None of the piano sounds are electronically manipulated or amplified in any way. UNISONICS was written for Trent Kynaston.

C. CURTIS-SMITH - MUSIC FOR HANDBELLS (1976-7)
Handbell Choir
C.Curtis-Smith - conductor

From the liner notes written by Smith:

MUSIC FOR HANDBELLS was written in 1976-77 for a three-octave (37 pitches) set of handbells. Each of the ten handbell players is responsible for either three or four bells.
I have departed from traditional handbell notation (which resembles piano music) and have written the ten parts on as many staves, thus achieving a greater accuracy of notation, especially in terms of the duration or damping of each bell.
Each of the ten parts is assigned one or two dyads, which are, of course, combined with other dyads. These dyads are constructed around the pitch center C, with G (sometimes G major) a strong supproting sonority. The separate dyads are thought of as progressing independently with occasional collisions in musical space to form what are sometimes very consonant vertical entities. (C major, E flat major, etc.)
Since handbells produce tones of such extraordinary duration, every pitch can be thought of as forming and maintaining a separate level throughout the piece. Melodies then become an intricate series of staggered repeated notes, sometimes widely spaced, but nonetheless ultimately simply repeated notes, which by their immediate juxtaposition in musical space happen to form melodies, lines, and harmonies. Thus, the opening of the piece, the germ of this concept, is quite simply, three levels of repeated notes. After that, the complexity of the repetitions increases rapidly.
The piece is traditionally notated in terms of pitch and duration, with nothing left to chance, with the exception of three rather short sections: the opening passage, the static C-major-ish section about halfway through, and the loudest passage near the end where the bells enter in stretto one by one.

Tracklisting:

SIDE 1

1. Lucia Dlugoszewski - Tender Theatre Flight Nageire {22:03}

SIDE 2

1. C. Curtis-Smith - Unisonics {16:22}

2. C. Curtis-Smith - Music for Handbells {8:32}

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