A couple of observations.
One - on those recordings, if you check the later set of recordings,
(the last two sets were done in the last two weeks) you'll see the
instrumentation shift a bit, as different players become available, I
suppose (a few more clarinets, mainly). This type of instrumentation,
on these Fulton recordings, is nearly the minimum required. It is a lot
of fun to play in a group like that. I'm surprised by large number (4)
of trombones, actually.
You are exactly right, to a point. When playing works of the early and
mid-nineteenth century, historical modern performances can and should
try to reproduce the instrumentation of the time, and some colleges and
whatever pro performances occur, will do that, time to time.
But the tradition of band music, (the changing personnel on these
recordings even gives us a hint), is pretty much 'whoever shows up gets
to play', so it is also quite 'authentic' to play these marches and
later works with small groups, large groups, or whatever is around, and
try to make the balance work with whatever you have.
I'll go out on a limb and say that _generally_ Fulton, Sousa, and modern
university and pro bands play/played pieces like marches with whomever
they have/had present at the time. The instrumentation varied for
Sousa, certainly, over the years, and I imagine he did much re-scoring
of even his more serious works and transcriptions to suit his changing
band, rather than send players off-stage or see them sit idle.
This is the blessing and curse of the bands, as we have been discussing.
Raymond Horton
David W. Fenton wrote:
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?
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