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Jay Friedman

A few of my favorite things
Reflections - 12/08/2004
Here we go again. Before I get into the main subject this month I want to once more address an aspect of legato. You know when you slur from middle B (4th) to middle Bb (1st), what usually happens is the slide moves as quickly as possible to make sure the slur happens. It's not a really smooth slur and maybe you stick a little tongue in to make sure, but you get the notes. Now I want you to imagine a slight rise in the path the slide and the air must pass over, like the top of a bowling ball, when playing B to Bb. The object of this mental image is to make this slur as smooth as a legato slur, which is much easier to play smoothly than a slur that goes against the grain (slide going up and note going down.) Believe it or not this slur can be one of the best and easiest ones to produce if you try to prolong that moment when the air jumps (or falls off) the D overtone series to the Bb overtone series. Thinking about the slide and air going up over a gentle and therefore elongated slope will give the proper amount of legato to match the smoothest slur you can produce. A big mistake often made is to drop the air in between these notes in order to get the fastest shift possible, which to my mind is "throwing the baby out with the bath water". I'll never apologize for being able to play as smooth or smoother than any other instrument!

OK, now to some of my favorite things. My favorite piece of music to play, bar none, is the Great C major Symphony of Schubert. The unison melody in the first movement is, for me, the single greatest moment in the symphonic literature for the trombone. I just had the experience of playing the Thein/Kruspe trombone in this music, which was a great musical event for me. To play with a sound that was a throwback to the sound common in the late 19th century and possibly earlier, was something very special. Schubert's trombone writing is simply unbelievable. Those of you who have had the experience of performing Schubert's Mass No.6 in Eb have experienced the pleasure of music that fully explores the potential of the trombone, from alto to tenor to bass. My question is; how and where did he develop the concept of his trombone writing, and why didn't other composers continue that tradition?

My next favorite moment for trombones, and this will be a surprise, is the four chromatic chords after the climax in Sibelius's En Saga, (B,Bb,A,G# in the 1st trombone part). Sibelius beautifully marks this passage with no dynamic, but leaves the dynamic to the players to fit in with the tutti passage that has just occurred. I imagine a dynamic of poco forte to have the right mix of fullness and resonance to capture the right mood. Then comes a repeat phrase, exactly the same harmony, but ending in a ppp dynamic. Great trombone writing!

Of course the chorale in Brahms's 1st symphony has to rank as one of the great moments in trombone writing, but I want to mention a few others you might not be familiar with. The low brass passages in Janacek's Slavonic Mass, 1st movement, are great examples of the sonorous use of trombones and tuba. The soli trombone and tuba passages in Dvorak's Golden Spinning Wheel are among the most beautiful in the literature. Have you ever heard or played Nielsen's Saga Traum, one of the nicest excerpts in the literature, a kind of Rhenish without the high Eb's. One of my very favorites is the trumpet and trombone octave legato passage in Delius's Brigg Fair.

Some of my other favorites are; the chorale from the Mahler 2nd, Janacek's Symphonietta, Taras Bulba, the FF chorale from William Schuman's 3rd symphony, the Commenatore scene from Mozart's Don Giovanni, The end of Berg's Lulu (and most of his trombone writing), Dvorak's 4th symphony, 2nd movement, Carnival Overture, Smetana's "Sarka" from Ma Vlast, the moonlight section from the "Moldau", Mahler's 10th symphony, 1st movement.

There must be a whole separate classification for Wagner's trombone writing. An opera such as Lohengrin contains an enormous amount of different sonorities for trombones, from chorale to martial, to ethereal, to pizzicato type accompaniments. If you saw the excellent 6 hour film about Wagner with Richard Burton, you may remember the scene where someone asks him how he writes for so well for the trombone. His reply was "I only write for a trombone when I get an idea for a trombone". This may have some historical basis by the sound of it.

This brings me to a topic that has concerned me for some years. That is the use of the trombone in contemporary music. To put it bluntly, I'm tired of playing percussion parts. The great composers always used the sonority of the trombone no matter how radical the style of the composition. Nowadays it seems like composers see the trombone as a percussive instrument, something to strike, blare and punctuate the orchestral texture. We as trombonists must educate composers, because they obviously haven't studied the masters and their trombone writing. We must teach them to resist the temptation of throwing the trombone section only into the din of the orchestral tutti, because the great composers always made a special place in their music for the sound of the trombone. Even Brahms, as sparingly as he wrote for the trombone, always provided a luminous spotlight in his music for us.
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