At 9:19 AM -0500 1/21/09, David W. Fenton wrote:
On 20 Jan 2009 at 23:17, John Howell wrote:
(And no, there were
no trombones in the Toccata, just the trumpet
corps from the Duke's military establishment who
played their little fanfare and then went out for
a beer or three!
Er, there aren't any trumpets in the Toccata, either, just cornetti.
Whether or not those were military instruments I don't know, but they
sure weren't trumpets.
I could be wrong, of course, but I have worked
with a microfilm of the original printed score,
and the impression is that they were indeed
trumpets, in fact muted trumpets. (There were,
of course such things as "mute cornetts," but
those where quite different and I believe were
only found in the Germanic Kingdoms.) And the
writing is precisely what one would expect for an
experienced trumpet fanfare band. It was when he
recycled the Toccata for the 1610 Vespers that
cornetti and sackbuts got involved. And the
"Orfeo" Toccata is quite playable on the natural
trumpets of the time, not requiring cornetti at
all.
Mozart called for alto, tenor and bass
doubling the alto, tenor and bass choral lines in
many of his sacred works, and the only reason
Mendeslssohn used trombones in his "Reformation"
symphony was because of that religious reference.
Mozart didn't "call for" trombones -- there's no indication of that
in the scores of any of his liturgical music.
I may have seen the indications in modern scores.
But in a graduate seminar I was assigned some ms.
pages to analyze that happened to include a piece
by Schütz (possibly from the "Psalmen Davids"
composed under the influence of Venetian
practice), in which the score had very clearly
hand-copied indications of "con tromboni" and
"senza tromboni." One could argue that those
indication were entered by a choir director
rather than the composer, but the result is the
same in either case. (There was also a wonderful
place where I discovered that a mensuration
change overlapped in various parts, making the
proportion absolutely clear!)
But it was standard
practice to double the bottom three choral lines with trombones. He
didn't indicate what instruments would play the bass line, either,
but it's clear in the choral music that it would likely be organ and
one or two bass instruments. Likewise with the trombones, it's not
explicit in the score precisely because it didn't need to be.
Exactly so.
Thus, in the Reformation symphony, Mendelssohn is drawing on a sound
that would be a clear point of reference for his listeners and
immediately summon up the associations of liturgical music.
So, trombone players were actually pretty busy pre-Beethoven, just
not in secular instrumental music.
Yes, the point I was trying to make. Now with
all that given, one has to wonder whether
Beethoven harbored some kind of secret liturgical
idea regarding the Finale of the 5th.
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[email protected])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
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