Sounding Pipes, Edition 8

It’s a year or so since I last brought you one of my Sounding Pipes playlists, and during the intervening months I’ve been collecting a myriad of wonderful recordings, played on recorders of all sizes. This eighth edition of Sounding Pipes, focuses on one of our instrument’s superpowers - its infinite flexibility and versatility.

The recorder’s native repertoire stretches for 1000 years, but we do have a missing century and a half - that period from around 1750 to the early twentieth century when orchestras grew ever larger, thus squeezing our relatively quiet instrument into oblivion. During this period other woodwind instruments evolved, with a larger bore and extra keywork to give them added power, a greater range and the ability to easily play chromatic music. The recorder, however, missed out on these innovations and it wasn’t until well into the 20th century that modern makers really began to experiment and expand our instrument’s technical possibilities.

There were of course recorder-like instruments that persisted in particular geographic areas (as you’ll see and hear below), but even these remained fairly true to the way Baroque recorders were voiced. At first glance this lack of evolution may seem a negative thing, but I would argue it’s ultimately worked in our favour. Having too much choice can be a bad thing - one gets paralysed by the endless possibilities. Because we have that historical gap in our instrument’s native repertoire, recorder players have become very good at ‘borrowing’ music and making it our own. Admittedly it’s not possible for every type of music to suit the recorder (anyone fancy Wagner’s Ring Cycle of operas for voices and recorder orchestra?!), but our willingness to try playing unexpected music on recorders has proved surprisingly effective at times. It’s hard to think of another instrument which can play such a wide range of musical styles as effectively as the recorder. For instance, how often do you hear a string quartet playing jazz, or a clarinet choir exploring the medieval stylings of Perotin?

It’s this thought which inspired the collection of music I’ve brought together for you today. Prepare yourself for a smorgasbord of musical styles, from the Medieval to jazz, with forays into Classical opera and lush orchestral Romanticism along the way. I realise not everything will be to your tastes - after all, you can’t please all the people all the time. Hopefully though you may find some unexpected pleasures along the way and I feel sure it’ll broaden your horizons, opening your eyes to even more of the recorder’s possibilities.

Let’s begin by stepping back 700 years to Medieval France….

Guillaume de Machaut - Douce Dame Jolie

Performed by La Morra: Corina Marti (recorder), Michał Gondko (lute), VivaBiancaLuna Biffi (voice, vielle) and Marc Mauillon (voice).

This was one of the most popular songs from 14th century France and here it’s performed on instruments which would have been familiar at the time. Like most popular songs today, the lyrics are written in verses, interspersed with choruses, talking of love - some things remains the same, even after 700 years!

Sweet, lovely lady for God's sake do not think that any has sovereignty over my heart, but you alone.

For always, without treachery cherished have I you, and humbly all the days of my life served without base thoughts. Alas, I am left begging for hope and relief; for my joy is at its end without your compassion.

Sweet, lovely lady....

But your sweet mastery masters my heart so harshly, tormenting it and binding In unbearable love, so that [my heart] desires nothing but to be in your power. And still, your own heart renders it no relief.

Sweet, lovely lady....
And since my malady healed will never be without you, sweet enemy, who takes delight in my torment with clasped hands I beseech your heart, that forgets me, that it mercifully kill me for too long have I languished.

Sweet, lovely lady....

Hildegard of Bingen - O virtus sapientiae

Sophia Schambeck - double recorder

Much is made today of the need for women composers to be more visible - the world of composing has long been dominated by men. But there have always been women who defy this norm, composing music which survives to this day. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) is a prime example. A German Benedictine Abess, she was also a polymath, active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary and as a medical writer and practitioner during the Middle Ages. And she did all of this over a long life - 81 years - which would have been exceptional during the 11th century.

Music at this time was simple in form - single melodic lines, or perhaps organum - that’s two lines played in parallel, creating the simplest form of harmony. Here this beautiful melody, O virtus sapientiae, is performed by Sophia Schambeck on a double recorder. With one hand she plays the tune, while the other half of the instrument creates a static accompaniment of drone-like held notes. The result is absolutely mesmeric.

Antonio Vivaldi - Concerto RV580 for 4 recorders, first movement

Recorders: Michael Form, Claudius Kamp, Yi-Chang Liang, HyeonHo Jeon, Baroque Cello: Hyunkun Cho, Harpsichord: Eunji Lee

It’s been said that Antonio Vivaldi composed the same concerto 600 times, but I think that’s more than a little unfair! Granted, there are many works among his output which feel quite similar - hardly surprising for a composer who was so prodigious. But there are some wonderful works of tremendous ingenuity and drama too. This piece comes from a collection of twelve concertos for strings, published in Amsterdam in 1711, titled L’estro armonico - The Harmonic Inspiration. In this volume Vivaldi uses solo instruments in a creative way, with combinations of soloists rather than just a single violinist. In this concerto, No.10, he writes no fewer than four solo violin parts and in this performance they’ve been replaced by four recorders.

One of the challenges of playing music with multiple recorders of the same size is making each voice stand out as an individual. Without the dynamic range of the violin, recorder players have to get creative with articulation instead, using infinitely varied note lengths to create contrast between the lines. This wonderful performance does so beautifully when all four recorders are together, as well as having solo spots featuring each individual player.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Overture to The Marriage of Figaro

Flutes in Situ - Belgian duo Laterna Magica: Nathalie Houtman & Laura Pok - csakans, Thomas Waelbroek - piano.

From the Baroque period, we shift forward into the recorder’s missing century and a composer who wrote some of the most exquisitely perfect music - sadly none of it for our instrument. As I mentioned earlier, recorder-like instruments continued to exist in small pockets throughout the Classical period. One of these was the csakan in Austria and Hungary. Like the recorder, it’s a fipple flute, but usually pitched in A flat and designed as part of a gentleman’s walking stick. A small group of composers (Anton Heberle and Ernst Krähmer being the best known) wrote original music for the instrument, but it wasn’t unusual for performers to use it to play arrangements of popular music from the era.

In this arrangement of the Overture from The Marriage of Figaro, Nathalie Houtman and Laura Pok play two csakans, accompanied by a piano typical of the period. The lighter sound of the piano (compared to modern grand pianos) pairs with the csakans perfectly and it’s such a delight to hear Mozart played in this way.

Gustav Mahler - Symphony No.1, third movement

Hsin-Chu Recorder Orchestra, conducted by Meng-Heng Chen

Mahler isn’t a composer who immediately springs to mind when you think of the recorder, but this is an unexpected arrangement which works surprisingly well. In the third movement of his first Symphony Mahler reuses the familiar children’s song, Frère Jacques, changing the key from major to minor to create a funeral march. Along the way he also incorporates melodies reminiscent of Czech folk songs. Mahler was a master of orchestration, using colourful combinations of instruments, and that’s the one element which inevitably remains absent in a recorder arrangement. The Hsin-Chu Recorder Orchestra add cello and double bass in their performance, and the pizzicato strings sound undoubtedly adds a fresh tone colour. Even if you disagree with the borrowing of music which is so alien to the recorder, I think it’s important to push the boundaries from time to time to explore the almost limitless boundaries of our instrument.

Eugene Magalif - Colibri

Berlin Recorder Orchestra, conducted by Simon Borutzki

Born in Belarus and now living in the USA, Eugene Magalif may be an unfamiliar name, but he has a long track record of composing music for the flute. Colibri (Hummingbird) was originally composed for flute and string orchestra and was crucial in bringing Eugene to the attention of flautist James Galway, with whom he had a long working relationship. Simon Borutzki, the conductor of the Berlin Recorder Orchestra, created this arrangement for recorder orchestra and, listening to this spectacular performance, you’d be hard pushed it realise it’s been borrowed - it first the BRO like a glove.

Eugene writes the following about the piece:

“Hummingbirds migrate annually from Central America to New Jersey for the summer months and then back again, flying thousands of miles. They are the only birds that can move in any direction and hover in the air like bees. There is a family of hummingbirds that return every summer to our backyard, where we put out feeders filled with sweet nectar for them. One day I was sitting on the balcony, talking with professor Oleg Sytianko, from Turku, Finland. He asked me to write something for flute, promising to perform it at the music conservatory. In the same moment, the hummingbirds arrived. Seeing these cheerful little birds, a melody instantly came to mind—a simple melody, but with a special rhythmic pattern.”

Chick Corea - Armando’s Rhumba

Arrangement by Tal Zilber. performed by Tali Rubinstein - recorder and Tal Zilber - piano

My last Score Lines blog introduced you to advice from jazz musician Chick Corea, so when I discovered this phenomenal performance of his music by Tali Rubinstein I just had to include it in my Sounding Pipes playlist. This may have the genes of jazz at its heart, but Tal Zilber also manages to squeeze in snippets of music from Georges Bizet’s Carmen and J.S.Bach’s Badinerie from his second orchestral suite. A musical tour de force!

That concludes my playlist, featuring a tremendous variety of music, covering ten centuries. I can’t think of another instrument which could so effortlessly play all these different styles of music and I hope you’ll agree our lives as recorder players are richer for this. Have I missed out a style of music you might have included? If so, why not leave a comment below and share some of your favourite recorder gems with us?

Advice from beyond the recorder world

Every so often friends send me pieces of writing they think I might appreciate. Two of these struck a particular chord, and I thought I’d share sections of them with you. Chick Corea and Richard Strauss come from very different musical genres, neither of them with any connection to the recorder, but I think their words still have something to teach us.

Cheap but good advice for playing music in a group

This is the title of a list shared with me by Steve Marshall, himself a composer who most recorder players will have encountered at some point. Steve has spent a lot of his life playing jazz, so naturally he would have a greater knowledge of the work of Chick Corea (1941-2021), an American jazz musician, composer and band leader, than I do. Of course, not all of Corea’s advice is applicable to playing the recorder, but these items which particularly jumped out at me as being pertinent to our own music making…

• Play only what you hear.

• If you don’t hear anything, don’t play anything.

• Don’t let your fingers and limbs just wander – place them intentionally.

• Leave space – create space – intentionally create places where you don’t play.

• Make your sound blend. Listen to your sound and adjust it to the rest of the band and the room.

• Don’t make any of your music mechanically or just through patterns of habit. Create each sound, phrase, and piece with choice – deliberately.

• Guide your choice of what to play by what you like – not by what someone else will think.

• Use contrast and balance the elements: high/low, fast/slow, loud/soft, tense/relaxed, dense/sparse.

• Play to make the other musicians sound good. Play things that will make the overall music sound good.

• Play with a relaxed body. Always release whatever tension you create.

• Create space – begin, develop, and in for phrases with intention.

• Never beat or pound your instrument – play it easily and gracefully.

Advice from the conductor’s rostrum

Richard Strauss, painted by Max Liebermann, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Richard Strauss (1864-1949), whose life overlapped with Chick Corea by just eight years, occupies a very different musical style, but like Corea, he was a prolific composer and a musician whose words are still pertinent to the rest of us. This collection of musical advice was sent to me by another composer of recorder music, Michael Graham. Like myself, Michael spends a lot of his time conducting ensembles and orchestras, and he thought I might appreciate Strauss’s Ten Golden Rules for Young Conductors. While some of these comments may not be applicable to you as a recorder player, the humour is undeniable, and yet his words have a lot to teach about making music sympathetically with others.

• Remember that you are making music not to amuse yourself, but to delight your audience.

• You should not perspire when conducting. Only the audience should get warm.

• Conduct Salome and Elektra (two of Strauss’s most challenging operas) as if they were by Mendelssohn: Fairy music.

• Never look encouragingly at the brass, except with a brief glance to give an important cue.

• But never let the horns and woodwinds out of your sight. If you can hear them at all, they are still too strong.

• If you think that the brass is now blowing hard enough, tone it down another shade or two.

• It is not enough that you yourself should hear every word the soloist sings. You should know by heart anyway. The audience must be able to follow without effort. If they do not understand the words, they will go to sleep.

• Always accompany the singer in such a way that he can sing without effort.

• When you think you have reached the limits of prestissimo, double the pace.

• If you follow these rules carefully, you will, with your fine gifts and your great accomplishments, always be the darling of your listeners.

If you’d like to see Strauss’s conducting for yourself, this film from his 1944 recording of his own tone poem, Till Eulenspiegel, makes fascinating viewing. He’s a model of minimalism and economy of movement - something I know I could sometimes learn from!

With that I’ll leave you to ponder the advice of these masters, I’m off to figure out which section of a recorder orchestra is the equivalent of the brass, with whom Strauss evidently had something of a love/hate relationship! Many thanks to Steve and Michael for sharing these gems with me - if you’ve come across useful musical advice from an unlikely place which might help others why not leave a comment below so we can all enjoy it?

Time travel for musicians - from the Medieval to the 18th century

What’s your favourite era of music? Is there a style of music that communicates to you more clearly than others? Teachers often refer to different periods of music, but what do we actually mean by Renaissance or Romantic music?

Like art and architecture, music is generally defined as belonging to particular stylistic eras. There are often features in common between these genres - for instance ornate decoration is a characteristic of both Baroque architecture and music. But there are also other terms too, which describe particular styles of music, as much as the period of history in which they were composed. At the most basic level, musical eras are divided up into periods of time, as follows:

• Medieval up to around 1400

• Renaissance 1400-1600

• Baroque 1600-1750

• Classical 1750-1820

• Romantic 1820-1900

• Modern/Contemporary 1900 onwards

While these dates are a useful guide, music doesn’t necessarily fit neatly into them, as we’ll see. Some composers were rule breakers, ahead of their time - think of Carlo Gesualdo, composing extraordinary harmonies in the Renaissance, some of which still feel extreme today. In contrast, we have composers like Elgar whose music is firmly rooted in the Romantic style, even though he was writing at the same time as modernists like Schoenberg. As a result the boundaries become rather blurred, so the dates above are a rough guideline rather than strict rules.

Having a sound knowledge of these different periods of music will undoubtedly help you understand the repertoire you play more easily - a composer’s intentions often become clearer when we understand the context in which they were writing. Of course there are some periods in which our instrument, the recorder, barely featured at all. That’s not to say we won’t play music from the Classical and Romantic periods, but in order to do so, we have to be prepared to borrow repertoire from other instruments.

In this blog post, I’m going to focus on three periods of music, returning to later eras in a future post. My original intention was to cover the whole of western classical music, but I quickly realised doing so would result in something worthy of an entire book, rather than a single blog post! Let’s make a start with the earliest years of formal music making…

Medieval Music

Humans have been making music in one way or another since our species first evolved. Initially we used our voices, but instruments made from animal bones have been found from 60,000 years ago. By the start of the Medieval period, music had become intrinsically linked with the church and it was here that vocal music first flourished. This earliest music can be described as monophony - that is a single line of plainsong, sung in unison. Over time this expanded into organum, where two lines were sung in parallel, a fourth or fifth apart - the simplest form of harmony.

But music wasn’t purely used in religious settings. Troubadors travelled throughout Europe, singing secular songs, often about courtly love. These musicians would have accompanied their singing with instruments such as the lute, dulcimer, vielle, psaltery and hurdy-gurdy. Wind instruments, such as the recorder and flute, were also common, as well as simple brass instruments and percussion.

An Ars Subtilior manuscript

Gradually polyphonic music developed during the Medieval period - the use of multiple lines working independently of each other - by composers such as Machaut and Perotin. Later still, in southern France, music of even greater complexity evolved - Ars Subtilior. This was mostly secular vocal music, with enormous rhythmic complexity - some of it unmatched until the 20th century.

A selection of Medieval composers

Hildegard of Bingen, Léonin, Pérotin, Guillaume de Machaut, Francesco Landini, John Dunstable.

A musical Renaissance

By the time we reach the Renaissance, music was an important feature of all parts of life, appearing in religious, civic and courtly settings.

Early in the Renaissance, the church was still the most significant setting for music and many composers wrote motets and masses for this purpose, usually based around Latin texts. Polyphonic music had now become the norm, with parts moving independently of each other, and lots of imitation between the voices.

A Renaissance printed part book

The advent of printing allowed music to be published at an ever greater rate, with much of it aimed at amateur musicians. Secular vocal music, such as chansons and madrigals, and instrumental music too, was published in partbooks which could be used in a domestic setting. Before this music had to be copied by hand, a very time-consuming and expensive process, and the advent of printing allowed music to be disseminated much more widely and speedily.

Many different forms of instrumental music developed during this period, including forms such as the toccata, prelude, ricercar and canzona, as well as many types of music for dancing. The Canzona gradually evolved into the sonata, a form which composes continue to us to this day. I’ve written a blog all about the evolution from the canzona to the sonata which you can read here.

Madrigals became one of the most popular types of secular vocal music during the Renaissance, and composers typically used word painting to depict the text they were setting. For instance, in Thomas Weelkes’ As Vesta was from Latmos Hill Descending when the text talks of running down the hill we hear the notes in scurrying downward runs.

Renaissance instruments

A bass viol or viola da gamba

The Renaissance saw many developments in musical instruments. The viol family became very became very popular and a huge repertoire of music developed for this family of instruments. Viols (not to be confused with the violin family, which we’ll look at later) have sloping shoulders and a flat back, with six strings (occasionally seven for the bass viol) and frets on the fingerboard to help the player with intonation. Like the recorder, they come in several sizes, from treble down to bass and consort music was composed for endless combinations of treble, tenor and bass viols. This consort repertoire included standalone pieces, such as Fantasias, but dance music too became very popular. Many composers wrote sets of dances, often pairing the Pavan with a faster dance such as the Galliard. I’ve written in more detail about Renaissance dance music here if you’d like to learn more about this topic.

Wind instruments were also popular in the Renaissance, such as the recorder and flute, and they were sometimes combined with strings in broken consorts. Music formed a large part of life in the royal court, in religious, domestic and ceremonial settings. Henry VIII in particular employed a large number of musicians, including a court recorder consort based around the Bassano family.

Precursors to many of today’s instruments developed during the Renaissance, including the violin, lute, guitar, curtal (predecessor to the bassoon) and sackbut (an early form of trombone). These presented composers with an ever greater array of musical colours to explore, although the precise instrumentation was rarely specified in the music. Of course this gives us carte blanche as recorder players to explore any type of music from this period!

The following video features a consort of sackbuts and cornetts. The cornett uses a cupped mouthpiece, much like the trumpet, while the body is made of leather-covered wood and fingered much like a recorder.

Harmony and ornamentation

Although complex polyphonic writing was common during the Renaissance, composers still used simple major and minor harmonies, saving dissonances for special effects and moments of high tension. One harmonic curiosity existed in English music of this period - the use of false relations. This is a simultaneous clash of major and minor harmonies, often at the end of phrases, as rising and falling melodic minor scales meet with each other, as you can hear in the video below. These piquant harmonies are particularly prevalent in the music of composers such as Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.

Another innovation during the Renaissance was the development of ornamentation, in the form of divisions. In contrast to the free trills and embellishments we encounter in Baroque music, Renaissance ornamentation is more structured, with melodic lines being mathematically divided into smaller note values. Sylvestro Ganassi wrote a very detailed treatise teaching the art of divisions, Opera intitulata Fontegara (pictured below), and performers of the day would have been well versed in adding such decorations to the music spontaneously.

The cover of Ganassi’s Opera intitulata Fontegara

A selection of Renaissance composers

Guillaume Dufay, Johannes Ockeghem, Jacob Obrecht, John Taverner, Claudin de Sermisy, Tielman Susato, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Orlando de Lassus, Andrea & Giovanni Gabrieli, William Byrd, Maddalena Casulana, Anthony Holborne, Elway Bevin, Thomas Morley, Peter Philips, William Brade, Claudio Monteverdi, Thomas Lupo, John Wilbye, Giovanni Coperario, Thomas Weelkes, Michael East, Samuel Scheidt, John Dowland.

The Baroque - a musical pearl

Next we come to a period beloved by recorder players - the Baroque. The word itself comes from the Portuguese barocco - an oddly shaped pearl - which hints at the ornamental character of music from this period, stretching from Monteverdi to Bach.

While Baroque music had distinct national styles, these became ever more fluid as people travelled more widely. 17th century London, for instance, was a tremendously popular location for musicians, and became a melting pot of composers from all over Europe. The type of music a composer wrote was often dictated by their employer and location. For instance, J.S.Bach wrote lots of sacred music because he was employed by the church, while Henry Purcell wrote many works for the London theatre scene.

A movement from Telemann’s Methodical Sonatas, showing a simple melodic line and how it could be ornamented. Click on the image to see it enlarged.

Ornamentation developed from the divisions of the Renaissance, into much freer but equally florid decorations, including the trills we perhaps most closely associate with Baroque music. Again, several composers (Quantz perhaps being the most famous) wrote treatises on the art of ornamentation, while others composed music with sample ornamentation as didactic resources - for instance, Telemann’s Methodical Sonatas.

In contrast to the Renaissance, polyphony became less important and the concept of a melody with an accompaniment became more prevalent. This was the period where basso continuo developed - a style of accompaniment usually played by a sustaining bass instrument, such as the cello, with a keyboard instrument (harpsichord or organ) providing the harmonies. Rather than prescribing precise notes for the keyboard player, composers simply indicated the harmonies they desired with numbers – figured bass – written above or beneath the bassline. This is a type of shorthand, which may seem impenetrable at first glance, but allows immense freedom for the harpsichordist. With practice a skilled continuo player can interpret the numbers very quickly and add lots of character to the music.

An extract from a recorder sonata by Francesco Mancini, with figured bass above the bassline

The idea of writing for specific instruments became much more common, allowing composers the ability to create carefully planned contrasts of musical colour. That said, it was also common for publishers to suggest a sonata could be played on a variety of instruments (flute, oboe or recorder, for instance) - no doubt a ploy to sell more copies of the music! Baroque composers began to write solo and trio sonatas for specific instruments and continuo, and it was during this period that the concept of a Concerto for soloist and orchestra evolved. The solo parts in concerti were often highly virtuosic – a feature that was retained and expanded during the Classical and Romantic periods.

Another huge development during the Baroque was opera. The genre evolved a long way during the period, from the free flowing writing of Monteverdi to Handel’s very formal Italian operas of the late Baroque. Opera featured two distinct types of music - recitative and arias. Recitative was a musical imitation of speech, usually for a singer with basso continuo accompaniment, and its purpose was to move the storyline forward. In contrast, the aria was a moment for an operatic character to express how they were feeling about what had just happened. These usually had an orchestral accompaniment and gave singers a chance to demonstrate their enormous virtuosity. At this time it was common for men to take all of the leading roles, even playing female characters. The highest, dramatic roles were most often given to men with castrato voices, with best castrati, such as Farinelli and Senesino, commanding huge fees and mass adulation – the equivalent of a modern day Hollywood star. Lower voices tended to be used for comic roles.

Dance music also continued to thrive during the Baroque, although the dances themselves evolved. Out went the Pavan and Galliard, and in came the Gavotte and Minuet. If dance music of this period particularly interests you I’ve written a blog all about the dances which you can find here.

Baroque performance practice

In common with music of the Renaissance, most Baroque composers gave very little information in their music regarding the way it should be played. Performers of the day would have been taught what was expected of them in terms of articulation, phrasing, dynamics and more. But for those wishing to learn more, numerous treatises were published during this era to help performers. For recorder players, the notable sources of advice are by Ganassi and Dalla Casa in the Renaissance, with Hotteterre and Quantz during the Baroque. But if you’re interested in looking for advice from either period, I can recommend this article which shares a comprehensive list of historical treatises.

Instrumental evolution

There were continued developments in musical instruments during the Baroque period, with composers taking advantage of these innovations. The Baroque orchestra was based around an ensemble of strings, as are today’s orchestras, usually with harpsichord continuo adding colour and texture, as well as filling out the harmonies. The instruments used were almost all members of the violin family - violins, violas and cellos. Sometimes you’d have an instrument doubling the cello line an octave lower - either a double bass (with four strings, like the cello) or violone (which had up to six strings). The popularity of the viol family gradually waned during the Baroque, and Purcell’s astonishing Fantasias (composed at the tender age of 21) are some of the last consort works for viols. The bass viol or viola da gamba persisted though, often used in chamber music as both a continuo or solo instrument.

Baroque violin

The violin family became the most important string instruments of the Baroque. Compared to the viol, they have rounded shoulders, a curved back and f-shaped tone holes in the front of the instrument. Both the viol and violin were strung with gut strings (today’s violins use metal strings), so they produce a softer, less strident tone than their modern counterparts. The Italian city of Cremona became a hugely important hub for luthiers (makers of violins, violas and cellos) during the Baroque, with the most talented makers creating instruments which are still in use today. Violins by Stradivari, Amati and Guarneri are played today by the world’s top virtuosos, although many have been modified and strengthened to suit the greater technical demands of 19th century repertoire.

A Baroque oboe, with fewer keys than its modern counterpart

Woodwind instruments were often added to orchestras to create extra colour - perhaps a bassoon doubling the bassline and oboe, recorder and flute player higher lines. It was common for Baroque woodwind players to be multi-instrumentalists, playing oboe, flute and recorder in the same work, switching between movements. It was only in the Classical period that it became the norm to specialise on a single woodwind instrument.

Some composers also add brass instruments into the mix from time to time - notably the trumpet and horn. At this point they were made from simple lengths of bent and coiled metal, with no valves or pistons, so players had to use their embouchure (shaping the lips and surrounding muscles) to play different pitches in the instrument’s native harmonic series. This also meant each instrument could only play in one key. If a composer chose to use the horn or trumpet in a movement with a different key signature, the player would need to remove a section of tubing, replacing it with one of a different length to make the instrument longer or shorter, thus changing its native key.

A Baroque trumpet

Composers of the Baroque

Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Johann Christoph Pezel, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Matthew Locke, Henry Purcell, Arcangelo Corelli, Jean-Baptiste Loeillet, Johann Mattheson, Georg Philipp Telemann, James Paisible, Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Friedric Handel, Domenico & Alessandro Scarlatti, Johann Joachim Quantz.

If you want to explore the music from these periods for yourself, clicking on the composer links will take you to some of my favourites from the consort music I’ve shared with you over the last five years.

So there I’ll pause our exploration of the many musical periods - the remaining eras will follow in a future blog. We stop at the recorder’s high point, with the prospect of more than 150 years to be spent in the shadows. However, a second heyday is still to come, about which more very soon!

The art of listening

Photo by Rupam Dutta

I’ve written before about the act of listening, while playing music and as an audience member. My blog post from 2021, The Importance of Awareness, focused mostly on paying greater attention to the musical world around you as a participant, from the physicality of your technique, to the creative use of expression in your playing and awareness of those with whom you are playing in an ensemble.

Today we’re going to widen our listening to the work of other composers and performers.

For most people listening is an activity we do for pleasure - perhaps we allow the music to wash over us as a way of relaxing, or maybe we’re inspired by the virtuosity of professional performers. As a performer and teacher, I’m very accustomed to listening to music in a critical way. That might be in a pupil’s lesson, picking up on both the positive and negative elements of their playing and musicianship. Or it could be while I’m listening to a recording or live performance, noting the way the musicians interpret the music, or how the composer has chosen to structure it. During my student years we spent a lot of time listening in an intentional and active way, because this is a great way to learn how music is composed.

Passive listening can be a wonderful thing, but opening your ears in a more active way can teach you a huge amount - it’s this we’ll be looking at today.

“Music is organised sound”. Edgar Varèse, composer

All the music we play and listen to has a high level of organisation - it’s this that helps us understand it as a listener, whether we do so instinctively or through an understanding of the composer’s methods. But have you given much thought to exactly how a composer organises the notes to create a coherent structure, ensuring the music is satisfying and logical? Perhaps not, especially if you’ve never had a formal musical training. Let’s break these building blocks down into what are often known as the seven ‘elements of music’ - timbre, rhythm, tempo, dynamics, melody, harmony, and texture.

Timbre

This word describes the tone colour or quality of sound in music. Sometimes a composer will choose a particular instrument to play a melody, or perhaps combine several different instruments to create a specific type of tone colour. Each instrument produces its own individual tone colour - the clarity of a recorder, the warmth of the low notes on a violin, the power of a trumpet or perhaps the focused tone of an oboe. Some instruments can also create changes of sound via specific techniques - for instance, a violinist can pluck the strings as well as bowing them, and brass players can insert different types of mute into the bell of their instrument to modify the tone.

Rhythm

This is the way the spacing of beats and silences are organised. Time signatures and barlines govern the way the beats are grouped, and the composer chooses his or her desired combination of long and short notes. The speed of the beat or pulse is often related to the human heart beat, especially in early music. The type of rhythms used can also vary enormously, depending on the style of music - for instance, jazz will commonly have more syncopated or swung rhythms than other styles. Composers will often use repetitive rhythm patterns to create a coherent structure in the music.

Tempo

This is the speed at which music is played or sung - often indicated with a metronome mark, which describes the number of beats per minute. Tempo follows a sliding scale, from very slow to very fast and doesn’t need to be the same throughout a single piece of music. Some composers use lots of subtle tempo changes to create a feeling of ebb and flow in their music.

Dynamics

The volume of sound produced by instruments or voices, from soft to loud. Sudden or gradual changes of dynamic can create depth and variety in music, as well as enhancing the way it makes us feel as we listen. Dynamics are usually indicated with combinations of the letters - p (an abbreviation for piano - the Italian word for soft), f (forte/loud) and m (mezzo/moderately). The words crescendo and diminuendo (growing and diminishing respectively) are used to indicate gradual changes of dynamic.

Melody

Put simply, this is the tune. Melodies are created from combinations of scale and arpeggios and are often the element you recall long after you’ve heard a new piece - think of that earworm which can get stuck in your head for hours or days! A melody might be a short motif, or a longer, more expansive phrase. Melodies can be made of conjunct notes (stepwise - like a scale) or disjunct (notes which leap around by larger intervals) and this can entirely change the character.

Harmony

These are the notes which sound simultaneously with a melody, often enriching it and perhaps changing the way we perceive it. Harmonies can be consonant (pleasant combinations of sound, such as the notes from a single arpeggio) or dissonant (clashing, discordant notes which create a sense of tension). Harmony has changed over the centuries, from simple octaves in medieval music, to rich chromatic chords in the works of Romantic composers.

Texture

This is the way the music is constructed, combining one or more melodic lines and the accompanying parts together. Density of texture can vary enormously, from sparse to rich. One extreme might be a single line, played or sung alone (monophonic - literally one sound). A choir singing a hymn tune would be described as homophonic, because they are all largely singing together in chords. In contrast, a canon or fugue would be described as polyphonic (many sounds) because the voices are playing and moving independently of each other.

Whether you want or need to know the technical terms for all these characteristics will depend on the depth of knowledge you desire. But just recognising the differences will bring you a greater understanding of the music, both as a listener and as a player.

I’m going to share some pieces of music with you to illustrate many of these characteristics. I’ll include recordings, as well as links to the scores so you can follow along with them. We all learn in different ways. For those who learn aurally, hearing the music may illustrate my points well enough, but if you find it easier to pick up new concepts through visual cues, having the scores may help reinforce your learning.

The music I share below covers a wide range of repertoire. We’ll begin in the recorder player’s familiar territory of the Renaissance and Baroque. Other pieces venture beyond the recorder’s home sound world, but I hope you’ll still find them interesting and inspiring. Even if you play mostly early music, it’s a good idea to widen your musical horizons from time to time as a means of opening one’s ears to fresh ideas.

With each piece I’ll highlight one or more of the elements of music to listen out for - you may make some surprising discoveries.

Bach Chorale - Jesu meine freude

We’ll begin with texture and this is a good example of homophonic music. From the score you can see that the voices move together most of the time, shifting to a new harmony or chord on each beat - I’ve highlighted this vertical movement with red lines in the first two bars. This creates quite a dense texture, with sound levels remaining the same throughout the piece. While the notes are easy enough to play or sing, such simple music requires excellent ensemble skills to ensure everyone’s rhythms match exactly.

Byrd - Fantasia à 4

At the opposite textural extreme we have the polyphonic music of the Renaissance, where composers such as Byrd write multiple independent parts, which have a conversation, weaving in and out of each other. In this Fantasia you hear each line begin at different times, but the way they interweave creates a coherent musical whole.

Notice too how on the first page (shown below), all the voices share a single line of melody - sometimes imitating each other, sometimes playing together a beat apart. This melodic shape is highlighted in yellow in the extract below. When Byrd has finished exploring this particular melodic fragment, he moves on and uses a new tune, working with six or seven different themes during the course of this one Fantasia.

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Even Byrd steps away from polyphony at times - notice how all four voices come together for just a few seconds at 1:57 to play chords in rhythmic unison, before breaking away once again into a musical conversation.

Download Byrd’s original score here.

Download and play the music as a recorder consort here.

Mozart - Kyrie from Requiem

Before I move away from polyphonic music, one of the most formal examples of this genre is the fugue. Unlike a Fantasia, which meanders from one melodic idea to another, the fugue has a very precise structure. I plan to explain this in more detail in a future blog post, but this recording of the Kyrie from Mozart’s Requiem illustrates it very well. In the video you can see how Mozart combines two contrasting musical ideas to create a conversation between the voices. The subject (the main melodic theme, highlighted in purple) is a robust and quite angular melody, leaping dramatically, while the countersubject (a melody which works against the subject, highlighted in pink) is much busier, running hurriedly in short bursts of scales, building up the excitement.

Download Mozart’s full score here.

Download and play the music as a recorder consort here

Corelli Concerto Grosso Op.6 No.8

This well known work by Corelli gives us an opportunity to explore harmony and texture.

If you listen to the second movement, which begins 17 seconds into this recording, you’ll hear how the chords perpetually shift between discords and concords - moments where the notes clash with each other to create tension, before the harmony resolves into something less strident. In the extract below I’ve circled all the notes that clash with each other so you can see just how many there are.

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In the following Allegro (which begins at 1:18 in the video) you can hear the texture change from being mostly formed from chords, to something more dynamic. The violins continue to shift between concords and discords (highlighted in the extract below) but the bassline takes on a much more energetic and melodic role, powering the music along through a continuous flow of quavers. As you can see from this extract, this melodic lines uses lots of disjunct movement (notes which jump around rather than moving in scales) which gives the music a lots of energy and drive. Notice how the players also take a creative decision to make the notes quite detached, even though Corelli gives no staccato marks in the music.

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Download Corelli’s Score here.

Download and play the music as a recorder consort here.

Beethoven - Piano Concerto no.4, 2nd movement

Moving away from the recorder’s natural musical territory, we turn to music with a greater range of timbres and textures. In Beethoven’s 4th piano concerto he composes for a typical classical symphony orchestra - strings, woodwind (two each of flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon), two trumpets, two French horns and timpani. This brings him plenty of scope to create interesting combinations of tone colour, but in the 2nd movement he pares the scoring right back to the basics – just solo piano and the string section. This minimalism has a magical simplicity and there’s a real sense of conversation between the soloist and orchestra.

As you can see in the extract of the score below, at first the piano and orchestra don’t play together at all. The strings play a staccato melodic line together in octaves and their phrases are answered by a simple, legato melody in the piano, accompanied with chords. At 2:47 in the video the strings shift to just playing occasional pizzicato (plucked) notes, setting the piano free to explore alone, with more flowing melodic ideas. At 4:27 the orchestra returns, with the cellos and double basses playing a melody in octaves, while the violins sustain a single note. It’s not until 4:41 that the strings finally get to play together in harmony, accompanying the piano for the last few bars of the movement.

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Download the full score here.

Isn’t this a magical effect? Beethoven composed lots of powerful music, which grabs you through its sheer force. But here he goes back to the simplest of elements and I think it’s all the more powerful for this.

Holst - The Planets - Mars, The Bringer of War

This is a piece which probably needs little introduction, but have you ever thought about how Holst creates a sense of Mars as the Bringer of War? Listen carefully and you’ll hear the way he uses many elements of music to do this.

Download the full score here.

First he uses rhythm. Listen to how the repeated rhythm which appears first in the timpani, harp and strings, creates an incessant drive - like an army marching into war. The use of a repeating rhythm like this is called an ostinato and you’ll have heard the device in many other pieces of music - Ravel’s Bolero, for instance, where the side drum plays the same repeating rhythm throughout the work.

It’s not just Holst’s use of an ostinato that creates this war-like feel. His choice of time signature is unsettling because we generally prefer rhythms which feel balanced and symmetrical -  after all we have two of most of most parts of our body - eyes, ears, lungs, feet, hands. By having a time signature of 5/4, the two halves of the bar feel unbalanced - three beats followed by two - so this immediately creates a sense of tension.

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Now listen to the harmony Holst uses - rather than being straightforwardly major or minor, there are many more discords, once again creating a sense of tension. Later in the movement, the focus move onto a sinister melody in the lower instruments (3:37 in the video). But if you listen carefully you can still hear the side drum and trumpets nagging away with little snippets of the original ostinato rhythm - highlighted in red boxes below.

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Andy Williams - Music to Watch Girls By

After all that tension, let’s move onto something complete different, and much sunnier too. Even if 1960s pop music isn’t your thing, there’s plenty to listen out for - in particular the use of melody in this classic sung by Andy Williams.

The main melody of the song is undeniably catchy - one of the character traits of any good pop song. But listen more carefully, beyond Williams’ vocals. Did you notice that 27 seconds into the song, the backing singers and brass section echo snippets of that same melody between the song’s phrases? At 1:06 we have another classic feature of pop songs - a sudden and pretty un-subtle key change as the music is abruptly pulled up a semitone from G minor to A flat minor.

This leads us into the central instrumental section (at 1:07) where the brass play the melody, but did you notice what the violins were doing at the same time? Listen carefully and you’ll hear they have a long, sinuous melody of their own, which slinks around above the brass. This is called a countermelody, as it works against the main tune. Can you follow the violins without getting distracted by the main theme? This can be tricky to do, but it’s a useful exercise as it’ll help you learn to pick out different melodies and rhythms in the music you play.

Sergei Prokofiev - Peter and the Wolf

For my final piece of music I’m going to talk about the concept of programme music. Most of the repertoire we play as recorder players is absolute music - that’s music which is abstract rather than descriptive. But sometimes we want to paint an aural picture, describing an event, scene or emotion. We probably overlook the programme music we encounter most frequently - the incidental music accompanying films and TV shows. Rather than existing as standalone concert items (although sometimes composers create concert suites from their music to make this possible), film soundtracks are there to support the visual images we’re watching and amplify the emotions the director is trying to convey.

For instance, Alfred Hitchcock originally intended the iconic shower scene in Psycho to be unscored, but his composer, Bernard Herrmann, persuade him to try it with the score he’d written to accompany it. The shrieking violins undoubtedly add to the horror of the scene, although in reality we see almost no blood and the violent sound effects were actually created by stabbing a melon! If you want to compare the moment with and without music you can see both versions here.

Often a composer will use a specific theme in programme music to help illustrate a person, place or idea - known as a leitmotif. Wagner was perhaps the greatest proponent of this technique, using over sixty distinct musical themes to depict people, places, objects and event concepts in The Ring - a cycle of four operas. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to listen to sixteen hours of opera - I have something more compact to illustrate the same point!

In Peter and the Wolf, a musical retelling of a Russian folk tale, Prokofiev not only uses a particular melody for each character in the story, but he also pairs these tunes with a specific instrument - for instance a high, twittering flute to depict the bird. Each time a character appears in the story we hear their theme and instrument, but Prokofiev also modifies these melodies to illustrate the activities of the characters. When the cat (depicted by the clarinet) climbs a tree (12:38 in the video), the clarinet line scampers higher and higher, to help us envisage the character jumping upwards from branch to branch, as you can see in the extract below. Likewise, at 26:26 the end the duck’s theme is heard with an ethereal string accompaniment, as we hear her calling from inside the wolf, having been swallowed alive.

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Download the score here.

Now it’s your turn…

I hope some of the pieces I’ve talked about have perhaps opened your eyes and ears to new musical horizons and some of the tools composers use to write music. Now it’s your turn to do a little homework…

Next time you listen to a piece of music take a few moments to ask yourself some questions about what you’re hearing. Try to be as descriptive as possible with your answers to these questions. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the technical terms, but just having to use descriptive language of one type or another to identify what you’re hearing can be educational.

Here are some ideas to get you started…

Timbre - is the music being played by a monochromatic ensemble or has the composer written a score with lots of variety of tonal colours? For instance, a recorder consort or brass band would count as monochromatic, because all the instruments fundamentally produce the same tone, albeit at a variety of different pitches. In contrast, the instruments in a symphony orchestra produce infinitely varied tones, so composer can create different colours by giving a melody to the oboe, while the strings provide the accompaniment. Ask yourself which instruments you are hearing, distinguishing the flute from a bassoon or the trumpets from the violins.

Dynamics - how would you describe what you are hearing? Is the music quiet and ethereal, or perhaps loud and bombastic? How did the dynamic contrasts change the way you feel about the music?

Tempo - how would you describe the tempo? Is the music slow or fast? Does the speed remain constant (tap or clap along with the music to help you judge this) or is the speed more flexible and changeable?

Rhythm - what sort of rhythms has the composer used? Is the music crisp and staccato, or elegant and flowing? Do you want to march to it, or to sway along to a waltz? How does it make you feel? Don’t be afraid to move your body to the music – this instinctive movement may better help you quantify your response to the rhythm.

Tonality - how does the music make you feel? Music composed in minor keys often has a feeling of melancholy, while major keys can feel brighter and happier. But, as this article suggests, this concept is more common in western music than that of other cultures and there are exceptions to every rule. Think back to Music to Watch Girls By, which we listened to earlier - undoubtedly a joyful, lively song, but in a minor key.

Texture - think about the way the composer has structured the music. How would you describe the texture? You can use simple descriptive words - sparse, dense, lush, smooth, spiky. Also listen out for the way the composer has achieved this - do the voices imitate each other, or are all the parts playing together like a chorale? Or perhaps there’s a solo voice with a melody, which the lines are accompanying?

If you enjoy this exercise and find it helps you become more aware as you listen, you could perhaps get into the habit of making notes about what you’re hearing. Maybe take half an hour each week to listen to a piece of music and write down the things that stand out to you most. Which features appeal to you most? Do you find surprising commonalities between pieces music which, on the surface, seem very different? Does this process help you to understand music better and perhaps like works you might have dismissed before?

Have I made you think differently about music? I know I’ve asked a lot of questions in this blog post, perhaps more than just giving you information to absorb. Yes, there’s undoubtedly a place for mindless enjoyment of music, but understanding can help you appreciate it even more. These listening skills can be applied to any type of music, whether it’s by Handel, Brahms or Jimi Hendrix, and I hope perhaps I’ve helped you explore your musical world in a new way. If you’ve had a real ‘Eureka’ moment as a result of this, I’d love you to share it in the comments below. We all come to music from different places and I’d love to hear about your own individual musical discoveries this week.

Music in the world of podcasting

I don’t know about you, but when I’m on the road I often listen to podcasts rather than music to speed me on my way. What began as niche format around 2006, when the first Apple iPod was released, has become a mainstream form of media. Most broadcasters now also share their radio programmes in podcast format, and if you’re willing to spend time searching, there are individuals creating podcasts about a vast array of subjects.

The recorder has yet to feature in many podcasts but, if you’re interested in a variety of music there are plenty of shows that might pique your interest. While the Score Lines blog takes a break, I thought I’d bring together links to some of my favourites - all of them connected to music. Some of these are shows I’ve discovered via my subscribers, but others were already in my library.

While the podcast came about in response to a specific audio device, most of them can also be found via the providers’ websites so I’ll share those here, so as to open them up to as many people as possible - I realise not everyone uses a smartphone or MP3 player. That said, if you want to search for them in the podcast directory on your own portable device, many of them will be available there too.

Let’s make this an ongoing project which we can all contribute to. If you have a favourite music or recorder related podcast I haven’t mentioned here, please do leave a comment below or drop me an email and I can gradually add them into the list below.

The Recorder Podcast

Created by recorder maker Estelle Langthorne, these short episodes give a glimpse into the way recorders are made and how to get the best out of them. Find the Recorder Podcast at www.recorderpodcast.com.

Available to listen via a browser or via podcast apps.

Key Matters

Many thanks to one of my subscribers who led me to this one in response to my blog post about the theory of key signatures. Each 15 minute episode explores a particular key, talking about the characters of each one and some of the music composed with a given set of sharps or flats.

Find Key Matters here.

How to Play

This was another programme suggested to me by a pupil and each episode brings insights into a piece of music from the performer’s perspective. The mix of music covered is wide, but it includes Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.2 (which features the recorder) and other early music too.

Find How to Play here.

The Gramophone Classical Music Podcast

As you’d expect from a classical music magazine (which has been going for over a century now), the Gramophone podcast covers a wide range of musical styles. Some of them talk about the latest recordings, while others feature interviews with composers and performers, but with episodes stretching all the way back to 2009 you’re bound to find something to pique your interest.

Find the Gramophone Podcast here.

Available to listen via a browser or via podcast apps.

This Cultural Life

Another offering from the BBC, featuring In-depth conversations with creative people from the theatre, visual arts, music, dance, film and more. In it the host, John Wilson, invites his guests to talk about the influences on their own creative work. I particularly enjoyed a recent episode featuring the conductor Antonio Pappano.

Find This Cultural Life here.

Available to listen via a browser or via podcast apps.

Add to Playlist

I mentioned this podcast a few months ago in one of my Score Lines emails after the recorder player and flautist Heidi Fardell appeared on the show. Each programme features a playlist of five pieces of music, chosen by the hosts and guests. Each piece of music has a connection to the previous and following pieces and it never fails to amaze me how they are able to create links between apparently disparate styles of music.

Find Add to Playlist here.

Episode featuring recorder player Heidi Fardell

Available to listen via a browser or via podcast apps.

Desert Island Discs

This is surely the best known music podcast and you’ll never run out of episodes. Devised in 1942 by Roy Plomley, it’s been running ever since and there are now nearly 2500 episodes available to listen to in the archive. Each guest chooses the eight recordings, plus a book and a luxury, that they’d wish to have with them if they were stranded on a desert island and the choices can be very revealing. I bet most people have considered their own hypothetical desert islands discs and in the early days of the Score Lines blog I created my own recorder themed one!

Find the Desert Island Discs podcast here.

Available to listen via a browser or via podcast apps.

Tweet of the Day

Ok, I know I’m stretching things here, but there’s long been a connection between the recorder and birdsong in music, so I hope you’ll forgive me this one. These tiny little podcasts were originally devised in 2013 by Sir David Attenborough and were broadcast at 6am each day. Each one lasts less than two minutes, but it’s amazing how much you can learn about different birdsongs in such a short time!

Find the Tweet of the Day podcast here.

Available to listen via a browser or via podcast apps.