Live listening response 1/29/25

 The first piece was a Gabrieli piece. As standard as Gabrieli is, I’ve always loved both listening to and playing his music. The way the parts flow together gives the music such as a nice sense of momentum. The ensemble playing does a good job of making every part sound soloistic and important. The trumpet players especially do a great job of making all the technical licks seem easy despite how fast they are. 

Next piece is performed by the English Cornett and saccbut ensemble. The sound of the saccbuts immediately strikes me with how much softer the ensemble sounds. The ensemble sounds closer to how a string ensemble sounds, and is missing a bit of the usual edge you get in brass instruments. The music itself is lovely, lots interconnected melodies, and generally major sounding 

Same ensemble. This piece sounds even more like it was recorded on period instruments. The intonation is just ever so slightly off. But that makes me think, is this a problem or a good thing? Older instruments were much harder to tune and likely tuning standards were much different back then,, so if we strive for historical accuracy isn’t that what you should want in the sound? I could be dead wrong and maybe people just hate it, but it think it’s nice that this music doesn’t need to sound completely “modern”. 

Next piece: Intrada and Courant from “battle suite” 

The piece is immediately very lively, typical of what an Intrada would sound like. I like that some of the lower instruments have some of the same technical licks that the higher voices do. I’ve never heard of a Courant before. Not knowing this, my guess is that it’s a type of dance. Listening to it, the dance feel in the 3 meter is very striking. The ensemble does a great job of emphasizing the important beats to really make this thing dance. At the same time, the music never feels too heavy, it’s very light.

Dovehouse Pavon

The American brass quintet does an excellent job playing these polyphonic melodies. It sounds like one long smooth melody, with each instrument just easily passing off different parts of the melody. It’s easy for older music like this to sound flat and lifeless, and the ABQ does just the opposite. It’s great. 

 Les Plassirs de la chasse

I love the sound of old hunting horns. It’s so different compared to what we expect today, but it’s so steeped in tradition no one complains that it sounds different. I can’t help but smile when the lyrical section of this piece starts and the lead melody is played with vibrato. 

Ellen Bayne Quickstep 

I don’t believe I’ve ever listened to historical music from the civil war era. Frankly I think it’s a shame that in a lot of music history programs don’t really talk about American music during the nineteenth century. I can’t imagine playing a song like this marching into gunfire. That said, the older instruments in this recording work well with modern instruments.

Galliard 

This piece sounds very similar to Gabrieli works. The polyphony is easy to listen to. One thing I always think of when I hear music from this era is how define style. Typically the default setting is to play in a style that matches vocalists, but what happens when we play music that was originally written for wind instruments.

 

Brass Quintet no. 2

Similar to his first brass quintet, the music sounds lovely. This may be a strange opinion, but I like that this sounds like it was written to be a quintet first, and not a “brass quintet”. A lot of our more contemporary works feel like they’re written to be test pieces for our instruments first, and pieces of music for audiences to listen to second. Obviously that’s an issue that goes beyond the scope of a blog post, but I think in our modern world, we need to pay more attention to music that general audiences would like. Brass players always joke about how poor we are, but we refuse to do things that would net us wider audiences. That’s not to say music written to push brass instruments is bad or invalid, but I feel like as performers we loose sight of the fact that people need to be able to understand and want to seek out our music. So with that I generally dislike when I  hear brass players stick their noses up at pieces like this.