My Experience with Politics in Music
I tell this story about my experience in the music world. I don’t know that it has a linguistics point to it, but as I begin this post, I cannot predict what will emerge.
Any realist knows that there are politics in every part of life. Everyone, in one way or another, is expected to play the game.
From an early age, I wanted to be a professional trumpet player. And in my naivete, I assumed that being a good performer was enough to make me a success. Not so, as I eventually had to admit.
By the time I began my stint with Nautilus, I had been performing professionally for about 10 years. My focus was primarily narrowed to the classical and baroque, and this overlapped into a lot of church music. I also did occasional popular selections.
Brenda worked in the music department of a local university. Related to her work, I became friends with several of the music faculty and became accepted as a performer for some of their works.
The B-Minor Mass
In 1981, a faculty member recommended me to a local conductor friend to perform the first trumpet part of a public performance of Bach’s B-Minor Mass. The conductor of the chamber group contacted me and I agreed to look over the part and quickly tell him if I was capable of the assignment. He sent over the French horn part and this had to be swapped out, thus costing precious time for preparation—both for me as well as for whoever was the French hornist.
When I finally viewed the first-trumpet part, I was horrified. It seemed impossible. It called for a D trumpet which many professional trumpet players did not have as the standard trumpet is a Bb instrument; however, I was properly equipped. After working with the part for about a week—even taking the project with me as I traveled cross-country for Nautilus—I decided to give it up. I opted to play the third part and the conductor sought another trumpet player for the first part.
At the time, I did not know that contemporary performances of the Mass used A-piccolo trumpets on the first and second parts, leaving the third part to be played on the called-for D trumpet—the third part more or less doubling with the tympani more so than playing with the other two trumpets. And I did not then know how to transpose the A-piccolo trumpet that I owned to the D part.
At least, my trial period with the first part gave me an appreciation as to how incredibly difficult is this trumpet part. I have a high-range ability, but this part was as much endurance challenging as range challenging.
The rehearsal occurred a few weeks later and I was shocked at the proficiency of the guy hired for the first part. He was using the same make and model of piccolo trumpet that I owned, and as I heard him warming up on some of the passages, he was truly amazing. His name was Ace Martin.
The Mass was publicly performed twice—each time in different venues about 50 miles apart. Both performances were a disaster—a disaster properly blamed on the trumpets. I was deeply embarrassed, and no one knew that I was mostly playing with the tympani and truly divorced from the disaster of the first two trumpets. I feared being blamed as I was certainly associated with the trumpet section and there were only three of us.
I could not fathom how Ace could have sounded so good in rehearsal and have made such a mess of the performance. Then I began to suspect that Ace was not the problem. The disaster was caused by the second-part trumpeter (denoted henceforth as B).
A second-part trumpeter—although perhaps not as illustrious as the first-part trumpeter—plays a very critical part. And he can utterly destroy the performance of a fine first-part player.
Eventually, I picked up on a rumor that when B had been a student at the university, he had been screamed at by a visiting conductor with,
Do you just hate music?
[By the time I had encountered B, he was a local band director.] Of course, this proves nothing. I have had conductors that were bombastic and temperamental. But the story somewhat corroborated my suspicions about Ace’s fate.
The Christmas Oratorio
To my surprise, the conductor contacted me a year later and asked if I wanted to play the third part on the Bach Christmas Oratorio. I was shocked that he did not hold the previous year’s performance of the B-Minor Mass against me.
He volunteered that he had the first and second parts already covered by two trumpet students from the Florida State Music Department. They were highly acclaimed as budding stars by the trumpet professor. I supposed that they were graduate students.
[Since the B-Minor Mass performance I had obtained all the trumpet parts for all the major Bach works and obtained the ability to flawlessly perform all of them back-to-back (sometimes multiple play-throughs a day)—with either the D trumpet or the A-piccolo trumpet or a newly acquired F-trumpet. I had become proficient at transposition—playing in one key while reading the music in another.]
At the rehearsal, I was extremely impressed with the two guys from FSU. They both used Schilke tuning-bell D trumpets—superb instruments that were very expensive and rare to encounter at that time—especially rare outside the symphonic realm. Also, the two players were perfectly matched and very capable at their parts—only slightly less demanding than the B-Minor Mass. I felt privileged to play with them.
After the rehearsal, I overheard them talking with the conductor. He was impressed with their playing, but demanded that they not use the D trumpets (messo-soprano instruments). He wanted the more modern sound of two matched A-piccolo trumpets on the upper parts.
At that moment, I wondered:
Did these guys have access to piccolo trumpets?
Could they transpose the parts by sight or have time to write them out?
Could they adjust to different instruments within the 48 hours before performance and drive back and forth between Ormond Beach and Tallahassee (approximately 500 miles, round-trip), Florida and sort this and obtain enough rest? This probably required them obtaining piccolo trumpets from their professor as they were not common at the time for most trumpet students. And they probably would need intimate guidance from the trumpet professor about the transposition. They also required practicing together to match intonations.
But what did I know. Perhaps they were, indeed, really advanced students. They certainly were as evidenced by their performance in the rehearsal. After all, when I was 18, I had performed with one Jan Roller, a high-school student who could transpose so fluently on the fly that no listener would know that he was transposing. [Jan is now retired as principal trumpet of the San Antonio Symphony.] And I regularly practiced with Mike Young, a high school trombonist that transposed constantly using the different clefs. For transposition, I was late to the party. I could transpose simple passages when I was in high school but nowhere near to the proficiency of these performers.
By this time, I was highly proficient at switching back and forth between instruments on three scores (B-Minor Mass, Christmas Oratorio, and Magnificat). As already mentioned, I had the luxury of studying and practicing these three pieces—almost exclusively—every day for over a year. But if given a choice, I would not like to have made the switch on the fly. I would prefer to have had several days to change instruments and to make fine adjustments to my intonation and attack skills. Of course, the conductor did not know of my newly acquired skills.
Regardless, I considered the conductor’s demand for the FSU students to change instruments outrageous and extremely risky.
The performance was another disaster. And there I sat as they crashed and burned all the while with me considering to snatch the first part away and take over. I could not see how I could manage this. Besides, they might just pull out of their mess during the finale. No such thing. It was awful.
The two students were not solid with the transpositions. I suspect that they had satisfactorily mastered them with their professor, but when under pressure they were shaken to defeat.
I wanted to defend these players to the conductor. He was a vocalist and somewhat insensitive to the needs of instrumentalists… or so I was led to believe.
This time it was obvious that I was not part of the problem.
The Magnificat
A year later, I was in the university music department only because I had driven from my assignment at the Nautilus-funded osteoporosis research project (90 miles) to see a friend in the music department. I chanced into the conductor—who did not work in the department or live in the town—and he launched into telling me that his group was going to perform Bach’s Magnificat and “would you like to play?”
I answered, “Yes.”
He asked, “What part?”
I answered, “First.”
He then warned me that there must not be another trumpet disaster this time. And I told him that there would not be if he allowed me control over the trumpets.
He said, “Okay, who do you want for second?”
I answered, “Ace Martin.”
We agreed.
A couple of weeks later, the conductor phoned me in Gainesville to alert me that Ace Martin was not available and that he had hired the two other trumpeters. One of them was B… Yikes !
I knew the other trumpeter and regarded him as very friendly but somewhat of a goofy guy. I had not heard him play before. I reasoned that I could put him on second and B on third.
I then arranged for a section rehearsal to be two weeks before the performance. This schedule provided all of us two weeks to master our parts before the sectional.
I arranged for us to meet at the Nautilus studios. I cleared it with the Nautilus Network security and drove with Brenda the 90 miles to meet the other trumpeters.
The section rehearsal was another disaster. These two clowns had not learned their transpositions (as the third-part guy was using a Bb trumpet on the D part). I was furious. And Brenda begged me to bail on the job, she claiming that we sounded like a calliope. In fact, Brenda refused to attend the concert unless I find a way out of this dilemma.
To top it all, one of these players was remarking that, “Bach, of course, was a madman and composed impossible music. What do you expect of me?”
[Bach and other composers of his era wrote high-pitched trumpet parts for a good reason. They lived before the invention of valved trumpets. Before the 19th century only so-called natural* trumpets (without valves) were available. {*I might use this reference as an excuse to question the linguistics. What is “natural?”... not found in nature? And are modern valved trumpets, therefore, unnatural? This is nonsensical.}
A modern valved C trumpet has the following harmonic series for its open (no valves depressed) state. Note that the pitches get closer as the series is ascended. Without using its valves (as not found in a natural trumpet), this instrument limits a composer to very few possibilities for lyricism. Neither a chromatic or a diatonic scale is possible in the middle and lower ranges of the instrument. {This is why much of early trumpet music is usually fanfare-type flourishes—and also using a range that was within the capability of the average player.}
With the introduction of valves, the effective length of the instrument can be altered on the fly. The common three-valved trumpet provides four trumpet lengths—each with its own harmonic series. Thus, most of a chromatic is possible by using one of the four valve possibilities: no valves, valve #1, valve #2, valve #3. And the remaining pitches in the chromatic are provided by pressing combinations of the valves: #1-#2, #1-#3, #2-#3, #1-#2-#3. {Note that these combinations are often a source of intonation problems.} Hence, in a way, a modern three-valved trumpet is effectively four trumpets!
In Bach’s day, as trumpets then had no valves, the solution to the quest for lyricism potentiated by a chromatic or diatonic was to lower the harmonic series an octave. The fundamental of a natural trumpet is one octave lower than a modern (valved) trumpet.
By moving the fundamental lower with the use of a longer trumpet, Bach and other composers could access that tighter part of the series for lyricism. But still, for the optimal musicality, the upper range was sought for clever runs, progressions, and ornamentations.]
I felt as though squeezed in a proverbial vice. What could I do about this? Ace was unavailable and I had no reliable contacts with the local music schools. [By the way, playing second part on a work like this is often as difficult or more difficult than playing the first part. It just isn’t as screaming-high in some passages.] And the conductor, by hiring these Bozos without my approval, had taken management control away from me. I was resolved to get the control back lest break my promise that there would not be another trumpet disaster.
As Brenda and I traveled back to Gainesville we devised a plan to employ a new friend as a ringer. Devon was the former principal trumpet of the Stuttgart Symphony. I offered to pay him more than my remuneration to play the second part. He agreed, if only he could prove to himself that he could still hold pitch as he had not played in a long while. To my surprise, he was able to adjust to my intonation problems on the fly. He just did not have much endurance.
I did not advise the conductor of this arrangement. It would have made a political mess for him, and I would have been usurped again and the performance would have been another disaster.
The full rehearsal was cancelled (the conductor deeming a rehearsal unnecessary—an unwise decision), and two days before the performance, the conductor phoned and asked me to play the trumpet solo accompanying Grosser Herr, o starker König, the basso solo from the Christmas Oratorio that was disastrously performed the previous year. The basso was an illustrious faculty member of the same university music department where Brenda had worked.
This request to play this encore on such notice was outrageous, but I was excited to perform the piece. It turned out to be the best performance of my life up to that point. And the local newspaper’s arts columnist congratulated me at intermission. Devon gave me a thumbs-up from his seat on the front row of the audience. I reveled in glory for a short moment.
The Magnificat Performance The Magnificat began immediately after the intermission. I delayed shuffling the trumpet players until the last possible moment so as not to allow leeway for complaints to the conductor, or protests to the choral group’s personnel manager. I had to be quick and sneaky to get Devon seated in the orchestra with me and to get B seated on the front row with the audience where he could not cause mischief. I kept B’s band-director friend on the third part where he had been and where I believed he would be competent.
After the Magnificat, the personnel manager approached me and graciously thanked me for “saving the day.” They had finally pulled off a non-disastrous performance of a major Bach work. She promised that I would receive a tape of the performance.
I was now convinced that the conductor was a true idiot. And I knew that my ace in the hole (referring to Devon, not to Ace Martin, as a stand-in) would be turned as a play against me.
I attempted to get the ear of the conductor after the performance, but he was engrossed in socializing. I intended to explain my troubles with the sectional and my fortunate solution by employing Devon, but then I reasoned that the conductor was now in an untenable political position that he had to cast off onto me.
You see, the two errant trumpet players—one of which I set aside—were degreed musicians from the same music department where Brenda no longer worked and to where most of the choral and chamber orchestra performers were linked. And both trumpeters were band directors with family and strong connections in the same community as with the conductor. They formed a professional and social network that I was not part of. Besides, I had no music degree. [In fact, I was the only performer that night without a music degree.]
I was ostracized from the local music community. I was persona non gratis in the Central Florida music establishment.
For the conductor to have acknowledged my contribution to the performance would have been social suicide for him. Since I was living and working for Nautilus outside of his immediate milieu, it was wise for him to allow me to take the fall.
I never received the promised tape of the performance.
For about a decade thereafter, I was determined not to play trumpet again. I eventually relented.