Brass Music In The Public Eye

 Todays post will be about this video I found on YouTube a few weeks ago  https://youtu.be/Hv-5Rh4L_IA?si=nh52FA9-vSqk5pgH   This video is striking to me because seeing a group of brass chamber musicians playing on live TV is really on something that I think of when it comes to seeing a Salvation Army group play some holiday tunes on the morning news. I’m no stranger to the fact that there used to be a number of variety shows that would feature all kinds of musical acts, but for a program to feature a brass quintet, even the empire brass, is pretty wild to me.  This leads me to my first main point, which is wondering how something like this happened. Some of the answers are fairly obvious, like the fact that Empire Brass was already a popular recording ensemble. But I think there are other aspects that we can hone in on that make this seem particularly interesting. For one, when watching the program, the musicians aren’t just sitting. They’re playing like a live act,...

 In class today we listened to Boehme’s brass sextet in Eb minor. My initial reactions to it are that it sounded lovely. There were a number of varied styles in each movement of the piece, and generally it was easy to follow along with.  Listening to it, I had two thoughts. Many of these early works for brass quintet from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century really like flat keys like Bb minor, Db major, Eb minor, and Gb major. Listening to it, one obvious reason is that those are keys that sound lovely on brass instruments despite how difficult those keys can be to play in. It makes the pieces sound rich and lovely, like being wrapped in a warm blanket. But just saying it sounds good doesn’t seem like that good of an explanation, and there are enough of these works written by composers in the St. Petersburg area for this to just seem like a coincidence.  My other thought is I’m very curious what these works would sound like on their period correct inst...