Johann Sebastian Bach (aged 61) in a portrait by Elias Gottlob Haussmann, copy or second version of his 1746 canvas.
Johann Sebastian Bach made little use of trombones. Anything he did, however, is worth study. For one thing, as it turns out, Bach composed the earliest extant music that calls for soprano trombone.
One piece in particular shows how well he understood the trombone. A complaint he wrote to his superiors explains why he didn’t make more extensive use of it. Continue reading →
Indiana University Trombone Quartet
According to an anecdote I read long ago and now can’t find, Theobald Boehm, inventor of modern flute fingering, spent a night at Rossini’s house. In the morning, he began a warmup, playing low trills.
Rossini burst into the room and said, “You can’t play that on a flute.” Boehm said, “But I just did.” Rossini responded, “I don’t care. You can’t play that on a flute.”
The same sentiment has followed performances on trombone, too. A European orchestra actually took Arthur Pryor’s trombone apart looking for the trickery. They knew what they had just heard was impossible. “You can’t play that on a trombone!”
But I’m not writing about soloists this time. A quartet of trombones can also astound audiences with what seems to be impossible. Continue reading →
Isenheim Altarpiece (detail) / Matthias Grünewald
Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki grew up under the heavy hand of communism and its socialist realism aesthetic. Like many Eastern Europeans of his generation, he looked to the West for inspiration and a sense of liberation from official dictates.
What he and many other like-minded composers found was the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez, and other representatives of a generation of composers who grew up chafing under similarly oppressive Nazism and fascism.
As he commented later, this music gave the illusion of universalism, but strayed too far from the expressive qualities of Western music. Of course, his earliest works to attract international intention, including hisThrenody to the Victims of Hiroshima and St. Luke Passion, were written under the influence of these older composers.
They display, however, emotional qualities that have continued to earn them performances where most post-war avant-garde music has never been welcome. Composing the Passion further allowed Penderecki to express his devout Roman Catholic faith and thereby find yet another way to snub communist orthodoxy. Continue reading →