Produced by Philip Hobbs Recorded at St George's, Brandon Hill, Bristol from July 16th-18th 2007 Engineered by Philip Hobbs Post Production by Julia Thomas at Finesplice, UK Sleeve design by John Haxby ‘
Trumpet Masque' (or ‘Mask') refers to the genre of entertainment which became established in the pageantry of the Renaissance and settled as a court genre in England in the Jacobean heyday of Ben Johnson and Inigo Jones. For our purposes, it is a convenient metaphor for our own ‘masquing' of these works using modern
trumpets and a large concert grand piano - without the lyric poetry and elaborate sets of the court but at least some of its intrigue! Here, these two instruments unashamedly dance galliards, sing motets, navigate tientos, canzonas and variations, embolden chorales and gallivant with sonatas. Claiming this territory through our own allusions and emblems is where our ‘masque' begins. The sixteen composers here - active from 1600 to 1700 - represent a gradual cultural revolution in
music, abandoning the cosmic order for new adventures in expressing human emotion. Whether for court, the church or the newly-devised opera, these ‘art-works' establish deliberate identities, however fleeting and artificial, which allow them to assume a personal character, almost as important as the creator of them. By doing so, a musical ‘ conceit' is explored not just by illuminating or representing nature but by deviating from it with disguise, rhetorical gestures, quixotic asides and inference. Over the century, these references and vocabularies for musical expression proliferated, while at the same time the performer's own powers of re-invention added more possibilities for subterfuge to this musical masquerade. Now you could express yourself fully, because you did not have to be yourself. The 17th century was a golden age for
trumpet players, their high stock long-established in renaissance guilds whose special sovereign patronage proudly set them apart from the ‘hoi polloi' of minstrelsy. Whilst their
music was largely confined to the theatres of battle (or imitation thereof) and ceremonial routine, as the century progressed ‘la tromba' appeared increasingly as a versatile protagonist in instrumental art
music. Notably in the interchangeable genres of sonata, sinfonia and concerto, historians draw on Italian
trumpet and string pieces from the 1670s as the prototype for the concerto grosso, which dominated the grand instrumental scene until the rise of the symphony, with Haydn and others, just under a century later. Virtuoso obbligato
trumpet parts also began to illuminate vocal works both in church and on stage by the end of the 1600s. The
trumpet's closest melodic forbear is the cornetto, a brass instrument in all but material (wood - often plum, pear or maple) which sits as primus inter pares among sackbuts (an ancestor of the trombone) in sacred and secular ‘brass' ensembles from all over Europe. Its dexterity, using both single, soft-tongued articulation and rapier ‘double tonguing', is surprisingly similar to many modern styles of
trumpet playing; to play embellishments or long vocalised lines on the modern
trumpet, with an ear for the conventions of the cornetto, places old and new in gentle relief. As far as the ‘pure' old
trumpet is concerned (a long metal tube in all but name), every genre in the 17th century draws regularly and creatively on the metaphor of the
trumpet's ‘ fanfare', either to initiate a strong intervallic idea (and, later, to define tonality) or simply to declaim a bold one. The modern
trumpet - or ‘
trumpets' as six different types are employed here - thus bridges the divide between its sibling relations of the ‘natural' valveless
trumpet and the cornetto, in drawing technical and musical inspiration from both. The piano, on the other hand, can play at anything: orchestra, vocal duettist, consortier, organist, virginalist, percussive or legato brass - and moreover add a new d...
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