Ravel Trumpet Excerpt

[Elly Garnand]

Nowthat my rants (about the disproportion of trumpet-degreed players to jobs and the sorry state many orchestras find themselves in) have somewhat subsided, I want to look more closely at this process that classical trumpeters so often endure.

The key piece of advice is to be a great trumpeter. You have to put on your Rocky Balboa. You will have to perspire, weep, and bleed your way into an orchestra. And this is good. It is a huge opportunity to grow as human beings and as musicians.

Your audition preparation has to rest on a foundation of years of preparation of the top 50 or so audition pieces (list at the bottom of this post). But especial attention should be on the top 10 excerpts, with even deeper foundation built up for the top 5 excerpts. You should work on the top five excerpts every day, religiously. The other excerpts should be given proportionately less attention the further down the list. Again, this is the FOUNDATION before the specific preparation for an audition.

When you prepare for a specific audition, keep in mind that this is like the Olympics for trumpeters. That being said, each trumpeter will have her own method of preparation. Here are my helpful tips:

In May of 2005, I hosted a trumpet conference that featured the former principal trumpet of the Chicago Symphony, the great, Adolph Herseth. It was a three-day event that not only showcased him in recital with none-other than Doc Severinsen, but featured him in a number of educational settings. What follows is an article written by a former student, Jerod Sommerfeldt, and myself that appeared in the September 2005 ITG Journal.

Perhaps the most touching moment of the festival, aside from the emotional standing ovation he received at the opening convocation, was seeing Mr. Adolph Herseth on stage, listening to recordings of himself playing most of the well-known trumpet excerpts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, while his own parts were displayed on a large screen behind him, in a PowerPoint presentation.

Some of the excerpts that were discussed were Bach, Brandenburg Concerto no. 2; Mahler, Symphony no. 5; Mussorgsky/Ravel, Pictures at an Exhibition; Hummel, Concerto in E; Stravinsky, Song of the Nightingale; Bartok, Concerto for Orchestra; Scriabin, Poem of Ecstasy; and Strauss, Also Sprach Zarathustra.

With this in mind, we created these transposed excerpts to help save some time and effort. There are 26 excerpts in the first batch, all include the complete part transposed for a variety of suitable trumpets to make your life easy. You can buy them indiviudally for $4.99 each of pay $39.99 to get all 26. A huge discount!

qPress is dedicated to making quality music for trumpet available as pdf downloads. We work with the best publishers in the world to bring classic literature to your computer, and nurture relationships with composers to help them bring new trumpet repertoire to market.

00:00:00

John Banther: I'm John Banther, and this is Classical Breakdown.

From WETA Classical in Washington, we are your guide to classical music. In this episode, I'm joined by WETA Classical's resident saxophone player, Rich Kleinfeldt. Rich was a saxophone soloist and Master of Ceremonies with United States Army Band for 13 years, and he's a co- founding member of the acclaimed Washington Saxophone Quartet. He tells us all about the saxophone, where it came from and why it was invented, its popularity in a multitude of genres, and even how at one time playing the saxophone could be prescribed by a doctor. Plus stay with us to the end as he plays some of his favorite excerpts on the saxophone.

Thank you so much, Rich, for joining me to talk all about the saxophone, which you may not know, was actually the instrument I really wanted to play when I joined band in sixth grade.

00:00:54

Rich Kleinfeldt: Well, I want to ask you, John, why you didn't. But I can tell you that, as a saxophone player, I was very optimistic and perhaps naive when I began in terms of opportunities and things to play. But playing the tuba was a good choice on your part.

00:01:11

John Banther: Well, actually, I ended up playing the trumpet. I wanted the saxophone, not because of the sounds it made, although I'm sure it sounded nice. I didn't really know, but it was so shiny. It has all these buttons, it comes apart. It has a cool case. I saw all that stuff and I just wanted to have that instead of something else. But our band director yelled, " No more saxophones!" There were too many, this was the nineties, and I settled on trumpet there for a few years.

But it's great to learn more about the saxophone now because we kind of call it the saxophone, but it's also a family of instruments, and it sounds like it had an interesting beginning to it as well. So I guess just to start, where and when did the saxophone come from?

00:01:54

Rich Kleinfeldt: It's named for its inventor, Adolphe Sax. Sax came from a family of people who invented and created instruments. His mother and father were both instrument makers and developers, and Adolphe was very interested in getting involved in that. And he created other horns. There's a horn called the Saxhorn. There's a horn called the Saxotromba, which is sort of a brass instrument with a brass mouthpiece and so forth.

But his idea for the saxophone came out of listening to the brass and the woodwinds and thinking there something that should be there to kind of connect those sounds. And he actually invented the saxophone, unlike other instruments that sort of evolved or developed from earlier versions, like the flute, which is perhaps the oldest of all instruments. The saxophone was invented. It's a hybrid, it has a brass body, and I think you put it very well. Students look at that and they think, " Wow, that's pretty, I want to play that." And it's very popular. And then it has a woodwind mouthpiece like the clarinet.

And so when he invented it was 1840- ish, early 1840s. He grew up in Dinant, which is now in Belgium. He traveled to Paris with this invention and it really caught on. People liked it because it could play loud. It was omnidirectional, in other words, unlike a trumpet where you blow and it goes in that straight direction, the saxophone, you're surrounded by sound. So it was this intriguing thing, but he really had a hard time convincing people that his invention was worthy of being in a band. And there's an interesting story, I'll tell you very briefly.

The story is that there were two bands in the park in Paris, and they had a competition. One band had saxophones and the other didn't. And the band with the saxophones won the competition in part because they were so... It's such a big sound and it filled it out. And Sax was, from then on, liked and very popular. And this was the 1850s, by that time.

00:04:22

John Banther: That's really interesting in that, well, one, it was invented, not developed over time. And the first thought is, " Well, if he invents it, Well, how did it become popular?" He wasn't just going town to town, hawking this saxophone at the flea market or something. So it sounds like it got its first big start after its invention in these type of wind or military bands.

00:04:43

Rich Kleinfeldt: That's right. And I think people don't know this generally, but the Paris Conservatory was a training ground at the time for wind players, for the military band musicians. And so it fit very well with that. But Sax had grander ideas. He wanted it to be part of the orchestra as well. And that's where it didn't really kind of take off. Hector Berlioz was a great advocate of the instrument, but he didn't write any parts for the saxophone in the orchestra, but he did think it would be a good thing. And there were other composers like Camille Saint-Sans, I think...

00:05:31

Rich Kleinfeldt: Yeah, Georges Bizet. Actually, that was a very bold move. Georges Bizet for La Lezione, incidental music for a play. This is 1870, John, and the saxophone was not even proven, and Bizet included it with the orchestra. And it was quite something. It's a beautiful saxophone part.

That's the kind of thing that happened. But then it didn't catch on like Sax had hoped, in part because it became more of a solo instrument than a connection in the orchestra. In the band, it worked very well, but in the orchestra it sort of stuck out a little bit too much.

00:06:12

John Banther: So it sticks out a little too much in the orchestra. But then on the other hand, we get those beautiful sax solos in some of the orchestral works in which it does appear. And so far we've been saying saxophone, but this is a family of instruments. He didn't create just one, but we have several in all these different ranges. How does that all work together?

00:06:33

Rich Kleinfeldt: When he designed them on paper, his idea was to go from very high to very low, much like the human voice. And he wanted the bore of the instrument, the way it was shaped, to be such that when one instrument stopped, the other would take over and it would continue down the range. So the highest instrument, very small, sopranino.

Then the soprano, which we know very well today, Kenny G is a guy who made this instrument extremely popular. The jazz player, Sidney Bechet in the 1920s, the soprano was his chosen instrument.

So the soprano is up there, then the alto.

And then the tenor.

The baritone.

The base, and the contra base.

And so all of those instruments together make up the family of saxophones. And when you go from the lowest note in each instrument, and the highest for that matter, they connect in fifths. So not to be too technical, but it's B flat, E flat, B flat, E flat and that kind of thing. Yeah.

00:08:10

John Banther: Well, for one, I'm going to put some video on the show notes page at classicalbreakdown. org of these various instruments because we've mentioned them. But the most popular are, as you were talking about, soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone. And then the other ones on the higher register, on the lower register. Some of those are extreme and just extraordinary to watch. I think it's the contra base saxophone, there's only three of them even made. I mean, it's just like... It reminds me of Jurassic Park. I think it's Goldblum, he says, " so preoccupied, whether they could, didn't stop to think if they should." With some of these lower and super high ones. But it is a really interesting family. We don't really have something exactly like this, with the other ones.

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