The Concert Band's Book

Christmas Curtain Raiser

2009-12-09T18:04:00.000-08:00

Traditional carol mash-up by Sinfonia alumnus Ross Hasting, "Christmas Curtain Raiser" (Alfred Publ 1971) rendered here by the Heritage High School Concert Band (aka the Marching Mountaineers)

Maurice Ravel plays his Bolero

2009-04-03T06:56:00.001-07:00

Maurice Ravel plays his orchestral piece Bolero. From a piano roll in the 1920's. The photograph is also from the 1920s; Ravel is playing the piano along with Éva Gauthier, on the far right is George Gershwin.

Moanin'

2008-05-29T05:46:00.001-07:00

In the jazzier genre, here's the Belmont Sr. Secondary Jazz Band "A"; what I really like about this clip is the infectious joy of the performance. The kids take a chance on taking a rollicking favourite, and making it their own, right down to the "Play that Funky Music" intro, it is their music, their sound played their way.

Which is the only way we can play it. I think it was Joe Walsh (of the Eagles) who said there was no sin in stealing licks from other players because you cannot recreate their sound. Even if we have the same gear strung in the same way, we won't have the same feel, we will have our own, it will be our music whether or not we consciously try to copy the past. John Cage proved as well how you cannot even copy your own performance; the wire-recordings of the most expert players do not line up.

This particular moment of play, it's yours, you own it, the moment already has your stamp on it; you might as well roll it out your own way. It may be a Mingus romp an Amparito Roca or a Star Spangled Banner or Steve Reich's 6 players: you are going to be yourself out there, so you can be all timid and standing self-conscious in someone's shadow, or you can go out there and boldly be who you are.

"If we're gonna die out there, Benny, let's die doin' our own stuff." (Gene Krupa)

Amazon: Charles Mingus

The Folk Song Suite

2008-05-02T19:33:00.001-07:00

Encapsulating the mood, the emotion of the time, and setting it forth right there in the concert venue, that's what we do, and last time we looked at the strange attractors of nostalgia and patriotism as the domain for a concert band's command. Here today I'm digging a little deeper, off into a topic that occurs over and over with our music, the whole sense of the deeper meaning of a repetoire piece, in this case Ralph Vaughn Williams' military band tapestry called the Folk Song Suite.

Today's film sets this so-typically-English tune where we normally encounter it, as a statement in nostalgic patriotism, an opus from over 'ome, the iconic epitome of England. That's how many approach the work, as a stately grand and respectful thing, woven from ancient quaint folk songs.

The real story, on the other hand, is quite different. To begin with, these are not just any folk songs; most are old baudy ballads, barrack-room tunes of lusty wenches and trickster maidens and the soldiers who woo both!

You see, in the historical perspective, we have Vaughn Williams as a soon-to-retire commander of a post-war peacetime army band, which is to say a squad of bored young men lead by a man with little or nothing to lose.

"But if you come round to my mummy's house, when the moon shines bright and clearly,
I will come down and let you in, and my mummy shall not hear me.

So I went down to her mummy's house, when the moon shone bright and clearly,
She did come down and let me in, and I lay in her arms till morning."

Ok, hardly competitors to Salt'n'Peppa lyrics, but remember, only the soldiers know the real lyrics of the tunes -- to the bystanding public, it is a quaint english ditty they may have heard hummed by grand-dad at work in the garden. We also have Lazarus and Dives which is the familiar barracks tales of Officers vs Enlisted Men where only one of them is going to find St. Peter's favour, There is the Green Bushes which one might parallel to Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree from WWII swing-era, John Barleycorn, a song about beer and the sad-sack Baffled Knight slyly outwitted by the maid of his (lusty) dreams. For the lonely-hearts, My Bonny Boy could well be the lament of the sweethearts left behind, or those yet to be. If you ask me, it's Soldier-Boy material all the way,

Amazon: Ralph Vaughn Williams

A Place To Stand

2008-04-25T16:09:00.000-07:00

What do we do? Up there, on a daïs or a bandshell, in step behind the flags. what is our purpose? Yeah, I'm in a philosophical mood, but bear with me just a bit.

We know a concert band provides a soundtrack music to real life. Unlike a bar-band or a dance-band, we're not about people paying us to make their customers spend more on beer, we're out there, nearly invisible, out in among the everyday. We illuminate sermons, we set the flow in VIP visitations and set the frame of the public moment in a parade or to cheer the hometeam in a ballpark or as the orchestra to the ballet of a fireworks display. We deal out sound-emotion, binding waves of co-compassion, and that leads me to a topic of patriotic anthems and iconic tunes like Dolores Claman's "A Place To Stand".

This song was originally commissioned to illuminate a film by the same name shown at the Ontario Pavillion at Expo-67 in Montreal. Everyone here remembers it, not necessarily enough to sing along, but it gets instant recognition. The song is iconic.

And it also is, well, kinda ... quaint; we have band members who cringe when it bubbles up in the playlist and it's for fixing that sentiment that I wanted to post about this tune.

You see, it's simple and plain, but not at all a boring song; it's only kitch or cliché if we play it as such. But we aren't required to kitch it up: If we get inside any tune, when we get inside the head of the composer and discover their intent, when we find the meaning and purpose of the work, the band can re-invent it, and reinvigorate the spirit of the thing. Far from boring, patriotic icons can become a rich vehicle for expression because of the cliché.

Like this tune. On the surface, a government commission, yes, by a jingle-writer true, and for a blatent tourism commercial yes, but ...

This was one of the most popular displays at Expo-67, with huge line-ups and many repeat visitors

The film was an Academy Award winning short film

It's innovative technique of the multi-panel live action montage won the praise of Norman Jewison (who subsequently used the method in the Thomas Crown Affair) and blew the socks off Steve McQueen; there's even homage to this film today in every episode of 24!

That's pretty cool, really. That's something of A Place To Stand in itself: This short tourism flick and the chart-topping jingle were crowning moments that Ontario film-art on The Map! The song and film actually lived their kitchy message!

The song has since been covered by Jim Carey and the Barenaked Ladies yes, that's something of itself, and it must have hit a nerve because was a hit: it sold 50,000 copies and still makes the news.

But here's something else to ponder in our play. Think about the set and setting of this work: This was 1967, a very different and very optimistic time, Lester Pearson and the days of Penny Lane and Happy Together, and here, drawing us a sound portrait of those times, we have the same composer who later writes our National alter-anthem, the ubiquitous theme to Hockey Night In Canada

Rising prices, global warming ... Dolores Claman has left us a flashback time machine to snap us back to those innocent times, and all you and I need do is power it up!

Orpheus In The Underworld

2008-04-05T09:56:00.001-07:00

Not many concert band pieces have challenged the law, but this is the rebel history of Offenbach's "Orphee aux Enfers", premiered in 1858 as the world's first full-length Operetta in defiance of French laws prohibiting works of this length. Defiant too in the shockingly burlesque Galope Infernal which you and I have come to know as the raunchy raucus Can-Can. It even has the relentless throbbing in-your-face two-chord backgrounds later put to similar use by Neil Young and Johnny Rotten :)

Pure Punk for Then People.

This is opéra bouffe, a great comic romp. Our generation probably knows the whole overture more from the Bugs Bunny cartoons, and that's really not very far from the composer's intent, although perhaps tamed down a little, divesting the work from those numerous bits of contextual digitus impudicus-ness to the operetta. To start with, this is a comic send up of the whole 'noble simplicity' of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and the performance is punctuated with jabs at famous performers and politicians alike.

Amazon: Orpheus in the Underworld

Easter Parade

2008-03-23T06:31:00.000-07:00

A 1935 recording of Leo Reisman's Orchestra "Stop Press" version of Irving Berlin's elegant society jazzband number from the 1933 review "As Thousands Cheer". Berlin's tune was later cemented into our collective psyche by the silver screen duet with Fred Astaire and Judy Garland in their first and only film together ... "Easter Parade!" (of course! :)

And if the high-society groove isn't your scene, you can croon it smooth like Bing, or you can jazz it up or not. Its still a hit. Happy Easter!

Amazon: Easter Parade

Amparito Roca

2008-03-22T15:34:00.000-07:00

We're some days into a chilly spring today, and with half our band away to warm and exotic places, I had traveling shoes in mind. So we're off on the wings of the music, and nothing really trips us off to Spain like Jaime Teixidor's 1925 pasodoble, the always popular Amparito Roca.

The pasodoble! It's so flexible, so fluid and maleable, I had real trouble today choosing the definitive performance. It's a two-step proud bravado march, a tune to take to the streets, a fanfare to usher in your toreadors, or as your prelude to the kill ...

or, if you prefer, as captured here above, as a romantic dance for two :) Your choice.

Amazon: Amparito Roca

MacNamara's Band

2008-03-18T18:42:00.001-07:00

A bit of fun to pipe you out of St.Patrick's season, a vintage sing-along cartoon that wades through some other tributes to the annual stereotype festival before it settles into a bouncing-shamrock rendition of Shamus O'Connor's war-time hit.

And what a hit it was too, solid gold for Bing Crosby back in 1945, you can hear (and sing along) that one over at Brownie-locks.

Apropos to our band-book, this song is (a tad satirically) about a community band, from the famed St. Mary's Fife and Drum Band out of Limerick, the four featured McNamara brothers emigrated to the US in the 1900's to form an ex-pat musical unit immortalized here by Bing's hit, and which, after some lyric edits and clensings, begat today's rollicking repertoire anthem to St.Patrick's.

Amazon: MacNamara's Band

Irish Tune Redux

2008-03-17T13:29:00.001-07:00

Ok, I couldn't leave you hanging on that last rendition without resolving the cadence into the real thing, and here it is, with Anthony Parnther teasing the Derry air out of the Tennessee Brass.

It's perfect for St. Pat's, it's the perfect Irish song and here's why: It's the juiciest tune in the repetoire! First off, it is an Irish tune, an ancient Irish tune, so it has that bit of street cred to start, but before you get any farther than the name, you're already embroiled in a particularly Irish problem wincing between the Derry's and the Londonderry's. Who says concert band music isn't political.

Only, it gets better. This tune, this ancient tune, was absconded with by the English who loved to put things into their collections, and it was through such a collection of quaint barbarisms that the tune caught the imagination of the very brilliant, and very strange, Percy Grainger. The ultimate Irish tune, unforgettably arranged by an Australian composer who, in addition to stacks of scores, also bequeathed to his namesake museum several whips and some blood-soaked underwear. Who says concert band music isn't colourful!

And thoroughly modern, Percy was conceived of his mother's affair with a statue of a Greek god, studied composition with Grieg, wrote chance music 40 years before Cage, composed unplayable works for player piano way before Nancarrow, was a personal friend of Duke Ellington and pioneered beat-less free music and tone clusters, plus, decades before Liberace, Percy was an astounding superstar celebrity pianist married before 25,000 in the Hollywood Bowl!

Amazon: Irish Tune from County Derry / Percy Grainger

Irish Tune (from County Derry)

2008-03-17T06:38:00.001-07:00

Seeing as it's St.Patrick's day, and in recognition both of how one of the all-time repetoire favourites is Percy Aldrich Grainger's beautiful Irish Tune from County Derry and how concert bands so rarely include vocalists, here's a special Irish treat, Grainger's Irish Tune lovingly rendered here by the fabulous Leprechaun Brothers! Top o' th' Mornin' to you.

Amazon: The Muppet Show

Be Thou My Vision

2008-03-16T13:02:00.001-07:00

"Riches I heed not
Nor man's empty praise"

For a Sunday aprè St.Pat's, a common Irish hymn, rendered here in Russell Powell's first ever arrangement and I hope he kept doing those because it is the making of this music ourselves that is the thing. It is in the here are we together where the mystic magic lurks and taunts us to unlock it, and no amount of post-production edits and 'corrections' can really change that. Music is fundamental to the human species, and like our other staples of fresh air and sunshine, for all its flickrs and faulters, standing before any widest-screen surround-sound plasma is still a plastic flower by comparison.

Amazon: Be Thou My Vision

Colonel Bogey March

2008-03-15T21:04:00.001-07:00

Wikipedia tells us the Col. Bogey is the number one all-time top money-making march, and maybe only narrowly since the author had to slip out of the barracks on the sly and publish it nom-de-plume to keep his royalties. You can read all about it over there on the wiki page, fascinating story.

But I think the REAL story here is that here we have this one scratchy take by the famous Yorkshire Black Dyke Mills band, conducted by Arthur Pierce I'm not exactly sure when (it is similar in spirit and quality of sound to a Henri Miro I've heard from 1920) and the really wonderful thing to note for our opener-post here in the band-book is that here's that march then, and if you flip over to www.blackdykeband.co.uk you'll see that same band today, an unbroken tradition of over a 150 years.

And that, as they say, is what being a community bandsman is all about! It's a thread that weaves through time. From a small private corporation band (many corporations had concert bands back then) to an outfit fit to cut a disk for Paul McCartney and sit in sessions with Peter Gabriel!

Bet you a quid they still kick up a mean Col. Bogey too.

Amazon: Black Dyke Band - Colonel Bogey's March