The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Here are a few comments on the topic of musical sound that start out in relation to Brass Bands, more specifically what's happening to it currently, and very specifically referring to some letters back in July on the excellent 4barsrest.com website. It then moves on to the wider fields of music performance, including comments on some high-level silliness from sources that should have known better. The Ministry of Silly Talks indeed.
I've sliced up my comments into four, so here is....
Slice 1
A couple of letters on the 4barsrest website recently brought up the question of the current (2008) use of vibrato in brass bands, comparing present and past practice, naturally to the detriment of the present, along the lines of “Where has all the good band sound gone?” In the UK, the past is always the way to bet ! For most people the past quickly becomes ‘the good old days’. Add a couple of decades and every remembered day had a nice sunset, the drinks were always on the house, the girls were all pretty etc..
Along with James Watson, I was fingered in one of the letters as someone who had in my Desford days been responsible for that band’s apparently non-vib style (I paraphrase) resulting in a symphonic style of playing which elbowed aside the good-old vibby style that had served so well since the Garden of Eden Silver Band first struck up with ‘Temptation’.
On the first count (non-vib) I plead “Not guilty!” I cannot remember one instance of my asking players to play with less or no vibrato (unless, as very rarely instructed in the score), but I can remember making countless requests to use more vibrato or more appropriate vibrato.
Regarding the second count, which is that there was-or-is a style immemorial handed down from old Adam himself before he started on the wine, women and song, I would counsel care before confusing personal prejudices with tablets-of-stone truth. It’s always open to argue that one thing is better than another, just also worth remembering that history has gone on a lot longer, with more variety than any one of us can recall and countless more unknowns than we can dream of.
On the 4barsrest site, the topic of blowing ‘straight’ through the instrument was raised as if it was a modern and therefore undesirable phenomenon. Now the oldest band recordings I have heard sound very straight in the matter of blowing ‘straight through’ the instrument. With a couple of exceptions, the general quality of ensemble was by modern standards a shambles until we reached the Foden under Fred Mortimer days. (So was the London Symphony Orchestra’s post-WW 2 standard before it held its own revolution in the mid-fifties.) In fact, the Foden of that time sounds to me more symphonic than the current band-styles over which complaints were being aired.
Vibrato, which after all is just one optional ingredient of sound, can have many forms. In essence it is a method of modifying the airstream as it flows through the mouth, in order to colour the sound. The purpose of ‘colouring’, ‘modifying’, ‘altering sound’ … choose your own word … and endowing it with ‘character’ or ‘emotion’ … choose again … has as its purpose the expression of the chosen ‘emotion’ … yet another word that launches a thousand arguments, so insert your own once more. No sweat this writing business.
Over the years, ways of creating vibrato have evolved a good deal, not just in brass, but in woodwinds and strings also. No-one can really know why that is, whether random changes in taste just arise, or responses to changes in instrument and mouthpiece manufacture force a move from one style to another. My likeliest explanation is that a big personality player comes along and the minnows follow like (under-water) sheep. The earliest form that I remember hearing and seeing was the wobbly-chin vibrato, which, in a much more internal, much less visible form, is the one used the most today.
When I was a student, my professor George Eskdale, refused to use the word vibrato when I asked him how he did his. “I call it Sympathetic Vibration”, he said stiffly, which as a youngster I thought was just a verbal trick to avoid the dreaded word. In fact George’s vib was modern-style and very beautiful.
But then in the sixties I met, heard and talked to another legend, Jack Mackintosh. His was a very different vibrato, applied by a very different technique. And as, over the years, I heard more and more recordings by players from earlier in the twentieth century I recognized Jack’s method as not just his alone, but rather belonging to his era. It seemed to be the standard vibrato for that time, not just for cornet but for most wind instruments. As Jack described it to me himself, his method applied vibration to the airstream as it left the throat and before it reached the mouth. For the listener there was a clear difference to the modern form.
In lesser players than Jack, this vib could in truth sound like the dreaded nanny-goat vibrato, but Jack’s control was total. To hear his ringing tone and the clarity of his execution was a salutary lesson for any young player. His harmonic slurring, in which every note was very clearly present without any smearing was never to be forgotten. It was to be in the presence of perfection. I have since never heard anything like it.
Curiously enough Jack worked with and recorded with the player who, in brass banding, more than anyone established the contrary form of vibrato that was until recently regarded as standard: Harry Mortimer. This is the form of vibrato that is the subject of lamentation and regret for a lost craft. While Harry looked for the vocal quality in cornet sound, light and pretty in character, Jack retained the older, bolder, more masculine approach. I realize that these words ‘masculine’ and ‘pretty' i.e. feminine may annoy some, but times have changed.
I heard Jack and Harry duetting only once in the flesh, in a Royal Albert Hall post-National Concert, following the National at which Faireys won with Bantock’s The Frogs. When later I heard recordings of French trumpet players from the early part of the century I recognized the link to Jack’s style of vibrato. In his turn Harry’s idea of sound took over the imagination of several generations of solo cornets. But that style is now in process of being gradually replaced by something made from a different recipe.
A form of vibrato rarely to be seen or heard nowadays is the American hand-vibrato. This is applied by regular sideways motions of the right hand while in the fingering position. It works by varying the mouthpiece pressure on the lips and its effect is to minimally alter the surface of the sound, and not its quality. "As well as having a perfect modern vibrato, Harry James uses the technique sparingly for vibrato and also to start an harmonic shake." (Sorry I can't find youtube material for Jack Mackintosh or Harry Mortimer.)
The opening long note in the 2nd movement of Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto is ornamented with a shake sign, mostly thought to be a heavy vibrato. But could it mean a lip-shake or a hand-shake ?
So why did the 4barsrest ‘sound’ debate fail to ignite ? (More of that in a later slice.) At the time, the 4barsrest’s Comments Column had clogged up with a weird and tetchy quarrel about someone who had preached a religious sermon at a band contest … I do not jest. The to-and-fro was then hijacked sideways by an equally bizarre vibrato happening in the world of so-called classical music. A certain über-posh conductor was quoted as saying he was going to conduct ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ at the Last Night of the Proms without the strings using vibrato, because that was ‘authentic’. Well, I never.
Slice 2
Enter, Stage Left, our Anti-Hero, Sir Roger Norrington, to conduct ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ at the Last Night of the Proms. He announced that the strings would play it non-vibrato just as Sir Edward Elgar would have wanted. Could it have been a case of that is what Sir Edward would have expected ? Did he have a choice ? By Sir Edward’s last years the very different Hollywood sound was well launched.
Another example sits up and begs for attention: Mozart loved what today would no doubt be called the Big Fat Mannheim Strings, when he suddenly found to his delight that the Mannheim Orchestra boasted loads and loads of violinists, more than he had ever previously heard together, at one time. But I’ll bet he had imagined it ! He might even have adored Mantovani’s Singing Strings, although put to a different use no doubt … maybe an extra movement in ‘A Musical Joke’.
A few years back Sir Roger had written an article in the New York Times. “Time to Rid Orchestras of the Shakes”, sang the article’s title, the “shakes” meaning in this case, vibrato. Musicians have always used the word “shake” to mean a trill, so one has to assume that this was a feeble attempt to be rude to vibrato-ists, i.e. almost all western classical musicians except percussionists and those players who work with Sir Roger and in niche areas of pre-nineteenth century music. Read his full article at
Time to Rid Orchestras of the Shakes
Norrington’s personal call to arms in his war against vibrato turned out to be “Pure Sound” which is not exactly Henry Fifth for inspiration, more like Don Quixote. No reports have been filed of people leaving home or dying for this particular cause.
“Pure” is a silly word in the context: it’s too dainty and trails clouds of precious. If the word “sound” really needs a friend to hold its hand, try “plain”. “Plain sound” doesn’t carry too much baggage and therefore has more chance of being accurate as a description of un-modulated sound.
In order to bash the vibrato users and abusers, in his article Sir Roger laid about him with another strange bogey-word: glamour. He added a very personal and frankly wacky list of assorted modern items that he termed “glamorous”, as if glamour was something criminal. I find his list improvised and unconvincing rather than seriously thought out. There is a possible case to be made, but here, made it is not.
Any conductor of The Last Night surely has just to set himself or herself to produce an invigorating evening of the cruder kind. Our brave Prom conductor should really have drawn stumps on the 'sound' question while in this particular spotlight, kept quiet and prayed for bad light or rain, but you will have gathered that he is not the retiring type. For example, chairing the jury of ‘Maestro’, one of the direst, dumbest TV ideas ever to slither off the sea-bed, did not exactly shower clouds of artistic gold-dust upon any of the participants' brows. Pointing a cultured finger and drawing tasteful lines in the sand looks a little silly after being part of that particular mmmm-miasma. Let us all spare a thought for the really noble orchestral players who were the sole reason the wheels did not come off the show at the first and every successive bend. And in answer to your next question, “Yes”, they would not have been the highest paid performers in the series. By some distance.
Back to the Last Night: as it was, our Sir Roger looked out of sorts and not at all jolly, gave a very limp speech and was togged up in a highly inauthentic pregnancy-style outfit that looked as if it had been freshly imported from the Indian sub-continent. Sir Edward Elgar would certainly have crossed the road to avoid meeting an outfit like that.
And Did THAT TUNE, In Ancient Times … sound any different without vibrato ? It didn’t seem to matter. Even the normally gloriously ringingly shiningly sounding Bryn Terfel was unconvinced and unconvincing in his signature offerings. All in all, dots were being joined, boxes dutifully ticked, sounds delivered at the right pitches, lengths and very approximate dynamics, but isn’t it, at last, “TIME, GENTLEMEN PLEASE” for The Very Last Night Of All Proms, For Ever ?
Slice 3
And so back to Brass Bands: just what has changed in the sound, and why? Is it something internal to the players themselves and the way they have been taught, or due to external factors such as the conductors, the manufacturers? Or do we look for combinations of all of the above? And what will change in future, remembering that change is constant, ‘now’ is temporary, and becomes almost instantly ‘then’. After that, ‘then’ leaves us at an even faster speed? Why? Brain science tells us that every time we call up a memory and run it through, we change it slightly. We polish the good bits, minimize the bad bits, reshape a little, reword the script, even forget and sometimes confuse. Bake in a hot oven and serve with a cup of sweet tea.
That’s why, at this point, I thought to pose some questions and merely offer a few thoughts for the reader’s curiosity, in no specific order. I am in the curiosity business myself.
Firstly let’s take a few external factors that bear on the subject: the instruments and their add-ons.
- Manufacturers’ priority is to be able to make and market instruments and accessories that attract not just the good players, but more importantly the indifferent and poor players. There are many more of the latter than the former and the latter are more desperate for results and ready to part with their cash.
- The main results of manufacturers’ changes over the last fifty years have been a big increase in bore size and mouthpiece capacity. The Europeans have followed American brass design.
- The main musical effects of these manufacturing changes have been the darkening and thickening of brass sound, right across all brass instruments.
- There have been significant improvements in tuning and evenness of response throughout all ranges.
- Mouthpiece development now offers clearly defined ‘characteristics’ on demand, à la carte.
- Lightness of sound has been lost with the growth in bore dimensions, although I noted recently that one euphonium manufacturer was offering something like an old-fashioned narrow bore instrument. There was an air about the offer of “Oh well, if some people want to live up trees and eat leaves we’ll sell them a ladder.”
- Volume levels and impact thresholds have increased hugely. Today’s leading symphonic brass sections can match big bands in both areas.
- Modern multipurpose halls are not built for musical sound. They are just spaces doubling as sports halls, conference centers or venues for concerts of all kinds. They are constructed of the wrong materials for the diffusion of sound and are usually the wrong shape for the audition of music.
Now the internal factors: A Day in the Life of Your Ear, or The Music Wars …
- The biggest influence on Mr & Mrs AnyPerson ? Pop. Remember that almost everyone now uses the word ‘music’ to mean pop.
- Pop, muzak and ambient ‘sonics’ are everywhere. An ear that listens mainly to burger music, chewing gum music, disposable music … call it what you will … is that ear capable of judging and enjoying non-commercial music? The question is not judgemental, purely an apples-and-pears one, comparing like with like. And to describe the classical music world or the brass band world as commercial is self-evidently untrue. Even though they are very different in so many ways, they are both in general decline.
- The electronic sounds of commercial pop are mechanically produced and controlled. They offer a sound-world that is attractive to the vast majority. But is it relevant to traditionally played instruments? Does it helps or hinder judgement or enjoyment of acoustic, human-based sound? My view is that it creates indifference and even dislike.
- The regular listener to serious classical music has to listen as actively and as attentively as possible over lengthy periods of time, with intense concentration. As purely mood music, most classical music fails. Of course it uses mood but in no way as a principal tool.
- Commercial pop music works almost exclusively through mood creation, and passive listening. Painting a picture or telling a story-ette or some such word use to plug the listener in is essential. No Preludes and Fugues here. The aim can be to passively gee you up, calm you down, to make you feel romantic, or dynamic, or to persuade you to buy more goods or just to have a good time. It works through short duration shots, usually around three minutes, that offer a mood hit or fix. There is an enormous amount of high-quality musical talent employed in barbing the hooks of the commercial pop market, because there is a matching amount of money showered on those who are successful.
- Serious jazz uneasily occupies the territory between serious classical and commercial pop, and as the gap widens, it is pulled this way and that as it tries to find a comfortable home that it can call its own.
- Replies to ‘What’s on your iPod’ questionnaires in various brass publications contain mostly pop music. What does that tell you or me? I have met many music students over the years whose wish to be a classical music performer puzzled me. They didn’t listen to classical music, didn’t know their instrument’s repertoire. When asked what they listened to, a brass player’s reply would often be “big band and jazz”, to which I could only reply that’s where you should go, because that’s where your natural enjoyment lies. It’s a long life ahead not to enjoy!
- Players can now listen to the whole of musical literature, give or take, played in multiple versions by almost all the finest performers of more than the last 50 years. CD sound is hyper fresh, brilliant, dazzling sound, that is, with added unreality. Normality has been bleached out. Engineers record with a microphone for at least every section of an ensemble, if not every player. Knob twisters then control the ‘production’. What arrives with you and me is not real. It is synthetic. It is a synthesis of many off-stage decisions, very few of which are taken by the conductor or the soloist. In fact the latter are often excluded.
- Modern concert performances try to sound like CD recordings for greater impact and memorability. Are conductors seeking ‘success’ with the public through high decibel levels, not to mention with speed and attention-catching effects? If so it is bound to affect the individual sound quality the players can make, and the overall tone generated for a particular piece of music. Sound quality can only come into play after the initial articulation of a note and some conductor’s speeds are so fast that there is no time for the notes to have a sound. Listen to most modern accounts of baroque music: the brilliance of the high-speed technique employed is astonishing, but the music is, to my ear, often just that, a cloud of dazzling brilliance. Again, modern Andante movements … walking speed? … can only be walking if power-walking is the mode. Did the upper-crusty-baroquracy walk that fast? And in those clothes? Minuets & Trios … the Minuet, a stately dance, say the books … have now all become one-in-a-bar bashes. The ‘WOW’ factor rules. Dynamism reigns. Excitement gorges on itself. Is that all there is, my friend?
- And if modern recordings are of a different genre to older recordings … apples and pears again … where does that leave our memories of wondrous old performances? I cherish many myself. Ah, it’s those warm-glow memories again! From those good old, authentic old days!
This Last Slice, the 4th, rounds up some stray threads and offers a few random thoughts. I’m allowing for the fact that we’re all in the same boat: we don’t know what we don’t know. To which the only answer is, stay curious about everything. Even the past is not what it used to be. Don’t nod off.
First - Plain Sound
Non-vibrato does not mean without feeling, it means with a certain kind of feeling. Vibrated sound means with yet another, different kind of feeling. When a sound quality is good, whatever its character, it is then usable by a musician. It is possible to blow straight through a note, senza vibrato, and for the sound to be warm, colourful and beautiful. If players choose not to develop this particular sound that is their choice, but it is a self-imposed limitation.
A player who is unable to play well without vibrato is essentially a one-trick pony, and vice-versa. How do you make any kind of sound? Imagine it. Then play it and listen, then again, and again, adjusting it until it matches your idea, and pleases you.
As a young trumpet player in the mid-fifties, older players talked constantly about “beauty of sound”. It was the highest form of compliment to have one’s sound praised. It was not in the slightest a matter of vibrato or non. It was plain sound, perfectly and simply presented. Today’s young brass players talk very often about range, volume and technique, but sound is rarely mentioned, beauty of sound almost never. They achieve a very great deal in the areas that interest them, much more than ever I did, because … that is what interests them!
Second –Vibrato and Voice
Vibrato is one major option in the service of tonal effect. It can be used in an extraordinary variety of ways, particularly by exploring the palette of vibrato’s speed and width.
Colouring sound in different ways can be achieved if a player’s imagination runs that far. For one example in the use of sound-colour to enhance mood, and also of consummate vibrato use, listen to Maria Callas.
To find a direct response to the composer’s music, try to imagine the song in the composer’s mind when he or she wrote the line of notes that faces you. To help that process, listen to the greatest music performed by the greatest artists and see if you can enter the process yourself. Don’t copy the result but seek out the process.
Third - Bores, Browns and Bouquets
The so-called classic, but now defunct, brass band sound was the child of its time. The key to producing this reference sound … the sound so often referred to as classic … was in the scoring. It was born in an era when bores were smaller, instruments were of ‘sharp pitch’, and made a lighter and more transparent sound.
The formation of this sound had developed via communal selection that, over many years, preferred some sounds while rejecting others. These preferences also ran to the types and numbers of instruments until it reached the settled combination that we now know. Conductors come and go but the ensemble remains. And thank goodness Adolphe Sax was the dotty genius he was.
In those narrow bore and sharp pitch days, ensemble quality was not based on the modern practice of blending individual sounds into a unity, but on fitting individual sounds together so they retained their individuality while contributing to the ensemble. In this regard the wisdom of our forefathers has been jettisoned. I could easily say “To our very great loss”, but it’s gone, it’s spilt milk. That ensemble vision was not of a unity made up solely of dark, blended, and opaque browns, as it is today. It was of a bouquet of separate sounds that worked as a family, not as a grouping of a number of cloned equals … as it so often seems today.
Fourth – Volume
While the world currently has the Credit Crunch, music has its own Crunch … less damaging to life and limb to be sure, but potentially as damaging to music … the Volume Crunch. The general noise of the everyday world sets the backdrop, so it not surprising that so much musical performance today is high-volume, with the stakes always rising. The constant raising of volume is crushing nuance and detail in performance, because, at higher volumes, variety of phrasing or articulation becomes impossible.
This was the point at which one of the correspondents to the 4barsrest site got close. But how often do the loudest bands now win at contests and the gentler bands are judged too anaemic? I’ll leave that matter there for the reader’s further thoughts. An afterthought: when I made my selection of repertoire for programme contests, three quarters of the music I chose was dynamically quiet or moderate.
For most instruments, it is very difficult to have variety in very soft or very loud dynamics, whereas the most fruitful field for expressive subtlety is in the mezzo-forte range, the comfort zone where there is an upside and a downside always available. (Debussy and his soft piano markings were more to do with touch than volume. The pianos of his day have been superceded by noise machines that are primarily built to fight and win against orchestras!) On most instruments today, including the voice, effective mezzo-fortes are infrequently heard. It is as if many musicians regard them as dull patches that offer little chance for satisfying display.
Fifth - Authenticity
Without doubt, we must support the research into composers and performers of the past as best we can. An on-going vigorous clean-up of tradition is as valuable as any good hygiene. But when the authenticity vanguard oversells itself, when its leaders march off bossily ahead of the game, telling everyone what they should and should not do, it can suddenly seem too dictatorial, with something of the jackboot about it. And more important than the thing itself. The Nu-Truth becomes the Only-Truth. Just show us and we’ll decide, thank you very much!
Even though the past is irresistibly interesting, it is irretrievable. While keeping a keen eye open for any new maps to Treasure Island washed up in those ancient bottles on the shore, why not just relax and enjoy the very best of the present? “Don’t worry, be happy”. Warts and all, the best of today is wonderful. I listened to some minutes from the 2008 National Contest broadcast and was enormously impressed by the playing. It wasn’t like the old days. It was just as good, but different.
If you enjoy the best of an in-authentic modern performance … Bach on the piano? I love it … you can also enjoy the authentic past, as far as it can be guessed at or re-invented. (I particularly love a consort of viols and the gentle clavichord … I have Archiv LPs of them I bought in the 60s.) You can have both. Today you can have it all. Authentic is there when you want it, but when you don’t want it, just don't bother about it.
Finale (- subtitled – So, Never Mind the Past,) The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be, It’s Going To Be a Lot Stranger …
The past constantly changes because we change it, in our minds, now, from here, the present. So why are we here, where we are at this moment, in the dregs of 2008? It’s in the air, in the water, in the times. Even to ask “What can be done about it?” is to be hopelessly irrelevant. And there’s even more new stuff just round the corner, approaching at full speed. So don’t nod off, it’s getting really interesting! And it will all be authentic for a brief while.
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