In this edition, I will be focusing on music for the Wind Band. That's the "formal" name for the typical concert band. As inferred by the name, a concert band is made up of all wind instruments, plus percussion. The breakdown is usually as follows:
3-5 flutes plus piccolo
2-3 oboes
2 bassoons
8-12 clarinets
1 bass clarinet
2-4 alto saxophones
1-2 tenor saxophones
1 baritone saxophone
4-6 french horns
6-10 trumpets
6-8 trombones
2 euphoniums
2-3 tubas
However, bands vary by size and instrumentation. For instance, a very large group can have over 20 clarinets, along with alto and contra-bass clarinets as well as the bass clarinet.
The sound of the band, especially when playing sustained chords, is very organ-like. This is not surprising, as the organ is a wind instrument. The sound of the band can be brassy, reedy, dark, bright, or any number of other sonorities depending on how the music is arranged as well as the instrumentation. This also can be done on organ, by adjusting the stops.
For this diary, I'm going to focus on one of the most iconic composers of band music: Percy Aldridge Grainger.
That was his Children's March "Over the Hills and Far Away". I hope you paid attention to the rich thick chords, with plenty of suspensions and passing tones. This is emblematic of Grainger's work. The reason he is one of the pre-eminent band composers is because of his rich orchestrations. He also uses every instrument in the band. For instance, in the previous work, the main theme is written in the second bassoon and baritone saxophone parts. Listen to this recording of Molly On The Shore:
The tune starts out simply enough, but then Grainger begins to throw the melody around the band, including the percussion, and in different styles--we hear bouncy staccato and smooth legato versions. But as the tune goes on, we begin to hear different things: Some strange rhythms in the low voices, soaring and lyrical countermelodies in different modes from the original key,
All these things are part of his genius. Born in Melbourne on July 8, 1882, he was an early prodigy on the piano. He gave his first public performance at the age of 12. He performed for most of his life, although his main passion was composing. As early as 1899, he was foreshadowing many 20th Century compositional techniques, such as "beatless music"--shown by using metric successions including as 2/4, 2½/4, 3/4, 2½/4 for example. He also predated John Cage by 40 years by using "chance music" in 1912.
But in order to pay the bills, he performed. And like many composers, he grew to loathe his most well-known composition. He was asked to play Country Gardens on almost every program. Here is the arrangement Grainger made for Leopold Stokowski in which some of that loathing comes out in a tongue-in-cheek way:
Here's the same arrangement for band.
Grainger became friends with several of the most notable musicians and composers of his day, most notably Edvard Grieg and John Philip Sousa. He had some questionable views, most notably that he believed in the racial superiority of blond-haired and blue-eyed northern Europeans. This led to attempts, in letters and musical manuscripts, to use only "blue-eyed English" (akin to Anglish and the 'Pure English' of Dorset poet William Barnes) which expunged all non-Germanic influences. In his writings, a composer was a "tone-smith" who "dished up" compositions, and a piano was a "keyed-hammer-string". He hated Italian terms in music scores; "poco a poco crescendo molto" became "louden lots bit by bit".
This bias was not consistent; he was friends with and admired Duke Ellington and George Gershwin, and donated to African-American causes. Grainger collected folk music tunes, forms and instruments from around the world, from Ireland to Bali, and incorporated them into his works. Alongside his love for Scandinavia was a distaste for German academic music theory; he almost always shunned such standard musical structures as sonata form, calling them "German" impositions. He admired the wild, free life of the ancient Vikings, and the ancient Greece of the Homeric epics.
He also led a rather "eccentric" lifestyle. For instance, Grainger began designing and making his clothing, ranging from jackets, to shorts, togas, muumuus and leggings, all from towels and intricate grass and beaded skirts. He often wore it in public. He also designed a crude forerunner of the sports bra for his Danish sweetheart, Karen Kellerman, née Holten.
He also was a sado-masochist who practiced self flagellation. He documented and photographed everything he and his wife did. His walls and ceilings were covered in mirrors so that after self-flagellation he could picture himself from all angles, documenting each image with date, time, location, whip and camera settings. He gave most of his earnings from 1934–1935 to the University of Melbourne to create and maintain a museum dedicated to himself. Along with his manuscript scores and musical instruments, he donated the photos, 73 whips, and blood-soaked shirts. The museum opened in 1935 but the collection was not available to researchers until later.
But enough of the sordid and scandalous.
Grainger is best known for folk song arrangements. He spent years trudging through the English (and Scandinavian) countrysides recording folk songs on cylinders. He was intrigued and enamored of the way the singers "stretched" time, echoing his own early experiments in "free time".
Here are two examples of the old song "I'm Seventeen Come Sunday". The first is Graingers'a arrangement. Note the intermingling of meter--from two beats in a measure to three beats, and back to two:
Now we'll hear how Ralph Vaughan-Williams interpreted it:
Notice how the Vaughan-Williams is in strict meter and tempo. Grainger's, however, is much more free and "organic", much as a singer would choose to sing at a particular time. Grainger paid homage to these rustic locals who would sing for him by writing his music based on their songs in the way he imagined they would sing the song. In this video, you can see the cover of the score: Grainger expressly states that this is in the style of "Fred Atkinson", who was the person who sang for him. Also, you can see in the score examples of Grainger's use of "plain English" in his directions. As a band performer, I always enjoy playing Grainger, because his interpretations are so explicit and easy to understand, and everything is on the page.
So now let's look at his masterwork. Grainger wrote Lincolnshire Posy in 1937. In this work, all his compositional techniques and innovations are shown and highlighted. He based the movements on folksong recordings he made almost 30 years earlier. In this work, the wind band comes the closest to achieving the range of emotion and expression only the human voice can perform. As also with the "I'm Seventeen Come Sunday" recording, Grainger tried to capture the essence of the singer. In his words,
Each number is intended to be a kind of musical portrait of the singer who sang its underlying melody... a musical portrait of the singer's personality no less than of his habits of song, his regular or irregular wonts of rhythm, his preference for gaunt or ornately arabesque delivery, his contrasts of legato and staccato, his tendency towards breadth or delicacy of tone.
He dedicated the work to "the old folksingers who sang so sweetly to me."
Movement One: Lisbon (Sailor's Song)
This is the shortest of the movements. It features a brisk, lilting opening melody played with muted trumpets and bassoon. As a counterpoint, there is a martial theme in the horn which appears about a third of the way through. These two themes and their accompanying rhythms continue to play off of each other until the soft and gentle pianissimo at the end.
Movement Two: Horkstow Grange (The Miser And His Man: A Local Tragedy)
This is a slow movement, characterized by rich chords, expressive phrasing, and a moving meter--from 4/4 to 5/4 and even some 6/4. The grace notes in the melody are reminiscent of the quavers in an old singer's voice, as well as the ornamentations he would do. This movement also features a trumpet solo in the middle, which can be treated as a measured cadenza.
Movement Three: Rufford Park Poachers (Poaching Song)
This is the most technically demanding of the movements, and also my favorite, as you will understand when you listen to the recording. This movement is noted for being extremely difficult to count between the counterpoint, rapidly shifting and odd time signatures (such as 5/8), and unusual rhythms. This is one of the pieces featuring something he called "elastic scoring", where he would write substitute parts for bands that didn't have the proper instrumentation for whatever reason. Here, the movement begins with an asymmetrical melody between the piccolo and alto clarinet followed two eighth notes later by oboe and bassoon. After this, there is a soprano saxophone solo. This was Grainger's preferred version, which is heard here. He also wrote the same opening for piccolo and B flat clarinet followed by E flat clarinet and bass clarinet, with the solo for flugelhorn. At the time of the premiere, this movement was not played, as the group premiering the work did not have the ability.
Movement Four: The Brisk Young Sailor (Who Returned To Wed His True Love)
This movement starts simply with clarinets playing a jaunty melody. The melody is expanded on in different ways, first with a legato euphonium solo with fiendishly difficult flute and clarinet sextuplets running underneath. Another way is a contrapuntal fugue-like version featuring soprano saxophone and oboe. It ends on a gentle pianissimo dissonant chord. Because of its speed and need for accuracy, this is one of the three most difficult movements.
Movement Five: Lord Melbourne (War Song)
This movement opens in free time, where the conductor marks every beat with a different length. This movement slides rapidly into different time signatures including unusual times such as "2.5/4" and "1.5/4" as well as in and out of "free time". The movement also explores the extreme ranges of some of the instruments like trumpet, clarinet, and flute. It opens with heavy brass chords and then slides to a trumpet solo in measured time, then goes back to free time. It then goes into a light jaunty tune in the woodwinds which is based on the free time melody. Following a euphonium solo, the light tune returns until it slides into the odd meter section, where there all the unusual time signatures mentioned earlier. The movement ends with a repeat of the free time section and gigantic chords featuring the brass. Perhaps the second most difficult movement, when the piece was premiered, this movement, like the third, was not played because it was too difficult for the band.
Movement Six: The Lost Lady Found (Dance Song)
This is considered the "easiest" of the movements. It is a quick straight 3/4 melody. The melody repeats itself throughout virtually every section in the band in different styles and sonorities.
Most of the music heard today was performed by the North Texas State University Wind Symphony.
I hope this has been a good introduction to the sounds and style of the wind band. Most of the music on the radio is either orchestral or vocal, and there's not enough good recordings of band music, even though there is very serious classical literature written for band, as I hope I have shown.
And Band is the hope of educators everywhere, as in many places the band is almost as important as the football team. Therefore, in many places it is the only way to get a good musical education in this country. So let me end on this advocacy note: Support your local school band program, and encourage your children and your friends' children to participate. Go to school board meetings and advocate that music in our schools remain. As I mentioned, most of this music embedded here has been done by university students. There is one recording here done by high school students (the band version of Country Gardens). This would not be possible without dedicated teachers who are passionate about what they do (like me).