On 24 Aug 2007 at 16:33, Daniel Wolf wrote: > I have a general aesthetic question for people involved in bands. Is > there a rationale beyond the pedagogical for wanting band scores to > meet some prescribed contemporary and standardized instrumentation? > Might there not be some legitimate musical reasons for omitting > certain instruments or requiring others, or for allowing or > disallowing optional doublings or playing cue note? If someone has > articulated a case for a particular standard for band instrumentation, > I'd certainly be interested in reading it.
I'll let the band folks answer the question you asked, but something similar did occur to me, stemming from the discussion of instrumentation on the list last night that followed my post. I was impressed with the *sound* of the music, based on the sightread recordings, which are really quite delightful. Their instrumentation is listed on the recording page: 1 Db Piccolo 1 Eb Clarinet 6 Bb Clarinet 1 Eb Cornet 4 Bb Cornet 4 Eb Horn 4 Trombone 1 Euphonium 1 Tuba 3 Percussion ...and that is definitely an odd one, from *my* experience with band music (I was librarian for my high school band and had to prepare lots of old music for performance by our modern band instrumentation, which meant adapting parts with clefs and key signatures, mostly, though, the horn players had to learn to transpose at sight when there were on Eb horn parts). I am mostly unfamiliar with the European and British band traditions, and the recordings I heard of this group sounded notably *Italian* to me. I was most surprised at the small number cornets, and noted that in some of the recordings, clarinets on descant parts completely covered up melody lines in the lower range of the cornet parts. Obviously, balances are going to be hard to get right in a sightreading session, but this was a very common texture for trios, for instance, with descant clarinets and cornet in a relatively low range (the first octave above middle C). It seemed that perhaps there were too many clarinets relative to the cornets. On the other hand, it could very well have been a artifact of microphone placement -- you can't really tell what live balances sound like from an MP3! In any event, what exact tradition is that instrumentation in? It's not at all the same as what I saw in all the marches that my high school band played (usually in original editions), though I guess they were mostly later (Sousa, Fillmore, etc.) and reflected a different tradition. I think efforts should be made by modern performers to play this repertory as close as possible to the original instrumentation. That would mean: 1 Db Piccolo - C Piccolo 1 Eb Clarinet 6 Bb Clarinet 1 Eb Cornet - ? 4 Bb Cornet - Trumpets if you don't have cornets 4 Eb Horn - F Horn 4 Trombone 1 Euphonium 1 Tuba 3 Percussion Naturally, replacing cornets with trumpets is a *major* change in sound, and F Horns are very different from Eb horns. And, yes, Db picc is very different from C, but in a band texture, not so much that it would matter a lot compared to simply not performing it. Performing the original instrumentation with the nearest corresponding instruments seems to me to be better than wholesale adding a bunch of parts and lines that don't exist in the original. Of course, if you're using this music in school band (and it's perfectly suitable for it, indeed, I would say quite excellent educationally in terms of musical style and balance of technical/rhythmic challenges), you'd need to adapt so that everyone has something to play. But to me, for more professional-level bands (which to me includes university bands), I think I'd go with an approach similar to modern orchestras, which, for instance, cut their string sections for Mozart in comparison to Brahms. But that doesn't seem to be often done. The difference here is one of what your editions provides and what each individual ensemble with choose to perform with. I would think the edition should include all the parts for a modern band, which would allow any organization to play it, but that the more advanced groups should choose to replicate the original instrumentation as closely as possible. This would mean identifying the added parts in some way (probably in the score would suffice). Am I misinterpreting the discussion here? Is my position basically what all y'all were advocating? Or do even university-level and professional bands seldom/never adapt their instrumentation to the music they are playing? -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
