Reactions to Oskar Boehme’s brass sextet

 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 instruments. Obviously there are a lot of reasons why we don’t really ever play on period instruments, but I feel like it could provide a lot of insight into how these pieces were composed, and the sound concept that the composers were working with. I think it’s interesting how we approach works from before the nineteenth century with respect to using period correct instruments, but not music from this era. 

Unfortunately, I personally have not been able to find recordings on period instruments. I imagine it’s a pretty tough group of instruments to get together. Bass trumpets and Alto horns are rare instruments to have to available, so I imagine something of this nature would be a major project. 

All that said, part of my curiosity about the period instruments is that for whatever reason, brass quintets went from virtually nonexistent before this period, to having several major works, mostly coming from the St. Petersburg area. So even if the period instruments might not have sounded as good, they probably sounded good enough to get composers to write for this type of ensemble. Now days we have plenty of works for brass ensembles being written by major composers, but I think it’s important to understand how these types of ensembles got popular and how we managed to get to where we are today.