Month: March 2012

Honey Pie For Saxophone Quartet

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I cranked out another arrangement for the Lenoir Saxophone Ensemble recently.  This one was on the Beatles tune, Honey Pie.  Here’s a MIDI realization.  You’ll have to pretend you’re hearing real musicians, but you can get an idea what I did with it.

With every arrangement I’ve written for them I’ve tried to give each one it’s own unique feel or hook to set it apart from the rest.  This one was easy in that respect.  I left the old-timey feel from the Beatles recording in there and pretty much stuck to the same form and harmonies, just scored out for the saxophones.  The members of the Lenoir Saxophone Ensemble told me they usually perform one novelty-type piece on every performance and when they listed this tune as one of the possible charts to write I figured it would fit that bill pretty well.  I think it should sound pretty good on real saxophones.

This is the last chart of the series they asked me to write for their upcoming project.  I’ll be sure to post when they are performing any of these pieces, in case anyone is in the area and cares to hear them.  I think they’ll be doing some recording sessions this summer too.  They are an excellent quartet and worth hearing if you get the chance.  Go to their web site and you can listen to some samples in the audio player, including my arrangement of Body and Soul.

Surveys of European Horn Styles

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The International Horn Society has digitized and made available the raw data from a couple of surveys done on European horn players.

In 1964 and 1965, Wendell (Pete) Exline took a sabbatical leave from his position at what is now Eastern Washington University. He flew to Frankfurt, Germany, bought a VW bus and drove all over Europe, interviewing, recording and photographing principal horn players of several European orchestras. Pete’s account of his trip can be found here. In 2009, Pete gave all of the the audio tapes, photographic negatives and interview notes he collected to the IHS. Data from that sabbatical project, now digitzed, is the basis for the first “Survey of European Horn Playing Styles” presented here. Each player was photographed four times, playing the horn from both front and back and buzzing on an embouchure visualizer ring.

Being an embouchure nut, I was most interested in looking at each player’s mouthpiece placement.  Rim visualizers can be a little deceptive compared to a transparent mouthpiece, but you can frequently get a good enough look to know the player’s embouchure type.  Since you can’t see a musician’s embouchure motion in still photographs, it’s not possible to say for certain which of the two downstream types the player belongs to, but you can usually tell if the player has an upstream or downstream embouchure.

Since downstream embouchures are more common, particularly among horn players (I believe for reasons based more on tradition than anything related to the instrument itself), you would expect those embouchure types to be more prevalent in these surveys.  There are 23 subjects.  My best guess is that maybe around 10%-15% of brass players (regardless of instrument) are (or should be) upstream players, so I would expect 1-4 of these players to have a low placement type embouchure and the rest to be very high or medium high placement types.

Continue reading “Surveys of European Horn Styles” →

Appreciating Jazz Podcast Part 8 – Duke Ellington

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Duke Ellington was one of the most significant musicians in jazz.  His influence is particularly far reaching because he was not only an important pianist, but also a highly creative and original composer and also led one of the longest-lived and most stable big bands in jazz history.  This podcast discusses Ellington’s music, personality, and also that of some of the more important sidemen who performed with Ellington throughout his career.

You can download this episode by clicking here, viewing it on my Podcasts page, or by subscribing through iTunes.

Pure Imagination for Saxophone Quartet

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I just finished another saxophone quartet arrangement for the Lenoir Saxophone Ensemble, one of a series of charts I’ve been writing for them.  This particular one is on a tune by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, written for the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  Here’s a MIDI realization of my arrangement.

For all these sax quartet arrangements I’ve tried to explore something a little different to give each one something unique to set it off from the rest (beyond just a different tune).  In this chart I experimented with changing meters around and an unusual metric modulation between the different feels.  It starts off with a rubato introduction based on the bridge and then a faster swing feeling.  The metric modulation between the faster passages (usually in 5/4) and the slower (4/4) passages is 3:2.  The quarter notes of the faster 5/4 is equal to the quarter note triples of the slower 4/4 measures.  It reads a little trickier than it sounds, I think.  At times I even explicitly incorporate the quarter note triplet to become the quarter note as the tempo changes in order to make the transitions a little more obvious.

If you aren’t familiar with this tune already, here it is from the movie.  My treatment of this tune is quite a bit different.

Fostering Your Creativity

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Yesterday I happened to catch a radio program with an interview of Jonah Lehrer, whose work I’ve blogged about before.  Lehrer recently published a book called Imagine, How Creativity Works.  Lehrer’s book and the interview are at least partially focused on how innovated companies inspire creativity in their employees, but I find much of what Lehrer comments on to be relevant to finding inspiration and creativity in musical composition as well.  Lehrer said:

Moments of insight are a very-well studied psychological phenomenon with two defining features.  The answer comes out of the blue – when we least expect it. … [And] as soon as the answer arrives we know this is the answer we’ve been looking for. … The answer comes attached with a feeling of certainty, it feels like a revelation. These are the two defining features of a moment of insight, and they do seem to play a big role in creativity.

I’ve found that when composing music the correct idea I’ve been looking for often appears suddenly, sometimes after a long period of struggling with finding the perfect phrase.  And when it does come it also frequently feels correct.  I just know that this phrase is exactly what I was looking for.

But having this sudden burst of insight doesn’t always come so easily.  You can, however, put yourself in a frame of mind that will allow it to happen.   Continue reading “Fostering Your Creativity” →

Sammy Nestico Interview by Dave Black

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While some people may feel the compositions and arrangements by Sammy Nestico are dated, I have always loved his music and count Nestico as being one of my biggest influences.  In the summer of 1993 the now defunct International Association of Jazz Educators published an interview of Nestico by percussionist and composer Dave Black.  Black has made his interview available here.

One of my favorite questions by Black, and Nestico’s response, was:

Do you have a special approach to your writing which has made your compositions so successful?  

It’s hard to answer that question.  I’ve always felt that there are three elements in music – melody, harmony, and rhythm – and I try to make my music as melodic as possible.  I love Tchaikovsky!  When you go to the Hollywood Bowl to hear Tchaikovsky, it takes two nights to play all his music because people love to hear melodies.  I always think about an audience listening to my music, so I’m very conscious about melody first, harmony second, and rhythm last.  That’s the rule I try to follow, and it seems to please the people who like my music.

Today’s contemporary music, however, very successfully reverses these elements – rhythm has become the most important element, melody is second in importance and harmony is third.

Thanks to Jim Martin for passing this along to me.  Jim is a fantastic composer and arranger.  I have a few of his charts in the Asheville Jazz Orchestra book that we play a lot.

Appreciating Jazz Podcast Part 7 – Swing Era

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The 1930s and 1940s was jazz’s most popular style period.  Moving away from the collective improvisation of early jazz styles, the Swing Era marked the development of the big band and focused more on the arrangements rather than improvisation.  There were still many notable soloists the developed in the Swing Era and these musicians left important influences on jazz.  This podcast discusses some of the stylistic traits of Swing Era jazz and covers some of the most influential artists and bands from this period.

As with my other podcasts, you can download this episode by clicking here, viewing it on my Podcasts page, or by subscribing through iTunes.

 

Physical Therapy For Musicians

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The other day I had a great phone conversation with David Shulman.  Shulman is a physical therapist who specializes working with musicians who have repetitive motion injuries related to playing.  He had contacted me to ask for some ideas working with brass players who have injured lip muscles.  We talked for a while about some of the things brass musicians can do away from the instrument to help build (or rebuild) muscles around the lips without actually playing, which can lead to re-injuring a damaged muscle.  I talked to him a little bit about free buzzing, the pencil trick, and the P.E.T.E.

Here’s a short video he has put together where he describes his practice and the workshops he presents to music students and teachers.

One of the things I asked David about was about which lip was more prone to being injured.  Donald Reinhardt felt the upper lip was more likely to be injured due to excessive mouthpiece pressure.  David also noticed that the majority of lip injuries happen on the upper lip.  Reinhardt’s advice to keep more mouthpiece “weight” on the lower lip should help brass players avoid injuries like this.

Reducing Academic Pressure Through Failure

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When I first saw the title of this article in Science Daily I was skeptical.  I figured an article with the title Reducing Academic Pressure May Help Children Succeed would be along the “A for effort” lines.  Unfortunately there seems to be a trend towards grade inflation, in spite of how current pedagogical research shows that reducing academic pressure in this way doesn’t actually improve students’ learning.  But this article covering research by Dr. Frederique Autin demonstrates how failure is a normal part of the learning process and can be used to actually improve the long term outcome.

It’s not about reducing pressure through grade inflation or dumbing down the work, in fact Autin’s study actually took a close look at the reverse situation.  In one experiment he gave students a problem to solve that was above their abilities, but the students in the test group were told that learning was difficult and that failure was common while the control group were just asked to solve the problem.  Both groups were then given a test to measure their working memory capacity.

The students who were told that learning is difficult performed significantly better on the working memory test, especially on more difficult problems, than the second group or a third control group who took the working memory test without doing the anagrams or discussions with researchers.

As with all studies of this nature it’s important to put the results into a proper context.  For example, the students’ improvements were temporary, yet there are some important implications.

Continue reading “Reducing Academic Pressure Through Failure” →

Guess the Embouchure Type – Tine Thing Helseth

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This one is a sort of a repost.  I had done this same “Guess the Embouchure Type” of Tine Helseth from this video earlier, but a server hiccup (and not remembering to put on automatic backups) caused about 2 weeks worth of posts and comments to be deleted.

At any rate, Helseth is a very fine Norwegian trumpet player.  She’s really known for her classical trumpet soloing, but the below video shows some excellent closeups of her embouchure while playing (or at least during a video shoot, the production value of this video is such that they may not be playing exactly what we’re hearing).  Take a look and guess which embouchure type you think she plays as.

Continue reading “Guess the Embouchure Type – Tine Thing Helseth” →