Always something new

Next week my sister Barbara, who teaches piano at the University of Oklahoma, and I are performing at the IDRS (International Double Reed Society) conference in Ithaca NY, and we have been exploring ways of rehearsing long distance. We tried rehearsing using skype, but that wasn't satisfactory because the transmissions are not simultaneous both ways. So while she played the piano part, I recorded it (via skype) onto minidisc. Then I edited it and could use the recording to play along with. Skype distorts rhythms here and there, and makes it a bit of an adventure to play along with the recording. While it is better than nothing, the technique was just serviceable. Then she tried recording the piano part via another third party software, and posting the sound file to me via the .mac service. That recording had lots of distortion in it whenever she hit a big chord after a rest. It was less satisfactory than the skype recording. Then yesterday I sent her some sound files of the different movements of the Bruns piece. I learned how to record straight into the Garage Band program on the mac, edit it, and then via a series of conversions, compressions, exports, and imports, posted it in a folder on the .mac in reasonable file sizes. Then Barbara could save my recordings into iTunes and play them through her stereo in Oklahoma, playing along with her piano part. The learning curve was a little long, but since we have very little actual rehearsal time together, we will be glad we did it.

While I was working on all of this, my practice room became invaded by bees! I kept chasing them out, but knew something was up, as they kept coming out from behind the steam radiator vent covers. This morning I looked online about swarms of bees in house walls and read the sobering news about getting rid of bee colonies in walls. Then I went outside and saw where the bees are going in and out through a gap between the bricks at the outside corner of the dining room. I went back inside and put my ear to the interior wall opposite that spot, and heard a beehive's worth of activity. Stuffing a rag into the gap in the bricks outside confirmed that we have either an established colony or they are setting up house. I called a beekeeper and he is coming to look at our valuable but uninvited guests this afternoon. If it is an established hive, it will probably involve opening up walls and maybe the dining room ceiling to get the hive out. They say you have to do that, otherwise the honey attracts other bee colonies as well as insects and rodents. When a comb is chewed into by insects or other animals, it leaks honey and creates a big mess, so it needs to be taken out. We may soon have a few more holes in our walls!

This project was not included in my sabbatical proposal to the Philharmonic.

WHAT CONTRA FOR THE BRAHMS REQUIEM

Yesterday as we were rehearsing and then performing the Brahms Requiem, I was wondering what the contra players who originally encountered this piece were playing on. The Requiem was written in 1868, and there had just been a 25-year period between 1842, when Glinka wrote Russlan and Ludmilla, and 1867 when Verdi wrote Don Carlo, when no orchestral composer that I can document wrote for the contrabassoon. I think that the instrument was so primitive and so weak tone-wise, that composers quit writing for it. But during this time, all kinds of double reed contrabass instruments were being built. All manner of shapes and sizes, as well as materials were tried. The Requiem was one of the first pieces to be written which included the contra again, after this 25 year hiatus. But it was written a full 11 years before Heckel devised the configuration of the contra that we are familiar with. The experiments were still going on! So we can only guess what kind of instruments were used for the performances in the first decade or two of the Requiem's existence. Brahms was not shy about what he asked the contra to do in this piece, so I can only guess what the players went through to execute the part to their satisfaction.


(Picture to the left) The contrabassoon in this display case was built by Bradka, near Vienna, between 1850 and 1880, and it is on display in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It is a very sophisticated version of one of the old designs, which is essentially a giant bassoon with a big looping crook. It has beautifully crafted keywork. Click on these pictures for larger images.


The instrument on the right in this picture is a Contrabassophon, a contra design which did not survive. It was built around 1850 near Koblenz, and has a larger bore than even a modern contrabassoon. On the left is a Tritonikon, a metal double reed instrument which plays in the same register as the contrabassoon. These are in the Brussels Musical Instrument Museum. The feature of the contrabassophon is that Haseneier, who built it, re-configured the joints of the contra, and built it in what is called a four-fold wrap. This pointed the way for Stritter and Heckel to use the four-fold wrap for their redesigns of the 1870's, which Heckel patented in 1879, and which became the contra as we knew it for the next 120 years.

My apologies for the poor quality of the photographs! Instrument museums generally have terrible lighting and lots of glare from all the spotlights and glass, and one cannot get a picture of an entire instrument except to stand some distance back from the glass case.