Older Than Thou

| Feb 6, 2017 |

My favorite trumpet player in the world is Allan Dean. He is a consummate musician and is comfortable playing basically any type of music—Renaissance music (on the cornetto and other instruments), Baroque music, orchestral music, chamber music, and jazz. Everything that he does sounds natural, relaxed, and “right.” You never hear the player, only the music. In an age of so many players playing so many notes, he can say so much with so little.

Being an extremely versatile player, Alan disapproves of musical rigidity. A number of years ago he attended a Renaissance / Baroque conference, and afterward he told me how opinionated the experts were about authentic performance practice. Allan called their dogmatism “Older than thou.”

In my own career, I first got my real dose of authentic performance practice when I did a teaching exchange with Edward Tarr during the winter of 1984, with Ed subbing for me at the University of Southern California while I taught for him at the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Switzerland. Many of the students knew more than I did about Baroque music and how to phrase in an authentic style, so it was a tremendous learning experience for me. Many of the things I learned during that semester I still apply to classical, romantic, and modern music, as well as to Renaissance and Baroque music.

Still, the question of authentic performance practice isn’t a simple one. Several years before I went to Basel, I was at a chamber music festival where a featured artist was the great flute soloist Ransom Wilson. At dinner one evening, he told a group of us about a Baroque music recording he had done in which he had used modern phrasing concepts. He made the point that such a choice was not, after all, a question of morality or ethics. At the time his argument made perfect sense to me. But these days I’m a little more confused about the issue, as I believe that one of the great joys and perhaps even responsibilities in life is always to be a student and always to learn. And in this case, perhaps being a student means trying to learn new ways of phrasing old music.

For a long time I’ve wondered why it’s better to phrase Renaissance and Baroque music in an authentic style as opposed to a modern style. Saying that an authentic style is more “academically correct” is just not convincing enough for me. So here are a couple of reasons why I think it’s important to learn about phrasing in an authentic style:

1. Surprising as it might sound, phrasing in an authentic way makes the music swing. So much of old music is dance music, and when it is played with even articulation (ta ta ta ta ta) as opposed to uneven articulation (ti ri ti ri ti), the music sounds stiff. The same thing applies to jazz: if all the notes are played evenly, the music (to quote Allan Dean again) “swings like a rusty gate.”

2. If played in an authentic style, the music sounds much more contemporary than if played in a modern style. (How’s that for irony?) There is quite a bit of dissonance in Renaissance and Baroque music, and old phrasing brings out that dissonance, while modern phrasing hides it. Thinking about this difference has also made me realize that, in general, brass players tend to make phrasing choices based on melody rather than on harmony.

The problem today is that we have a tendency to play a series of notes the same way, no matter when the piece was written. For example, if you compare the opening phrase of the Vivaldi Concerto for two Trumpets with the end of the Finale in the Pulcinella Suite, the notes are the same. And yet even though these two pieces were written centuries apart, most trumpet players use the same articulation.

Think of it this way: A trumpet player who used Baroque phrasing in Stravinsky’s Firebird would be laughed of the stage; yet that same player, performing a section from the Bach B minor Mass in the style of Stravinsky, might be thought of as brilliant. (I know that from personal experience.) Or imagine Harry James playing a Chet Baker phrase, or Chet Baker playing a Harry James phrase; they could play the notes, but it certainly wouldn’t be authentic. (There’s that word again.)

So, while I don’t want to join the “Older than thou” group, I do think it’s fun and instructive to dig deeper into whatever style of music we’re performing. And who knows, in doing so our playing and our thinking might just might end up being “Younger than  thou.”