A Golden Age of Brass
Pub. in Newsweek April 20, 1981.  Written by Annalyn Swan

Back when music was still the pleasure of princes and the province of religion, people could not get enough of the brilliant sound of brass.  Henry VIII employed fourteen trumpeters to herald his royal progress.  Cornetti (a cross between woodwind instruments and brass) and sackbuts (early trombones) accompanied courtly revels throughout Europe.  On major feast days, Giovanni Gabrieli filled Venice's basilica of San Marco with the magnificent sound of antiphonal brass choirs; a century later Bach wrote some of the most stirring passages in his B Minor Mass for solo trumpet.

But after Bach, the great tradition of brass went into decline.  Compared with the increasingly popular string and woodwind instruments, the brass instruments of the day were crude.  The trumpet was not chromatic--it could play only certain notes in any scale; the French horn was little more than a hunting horn.  Classical composers preferred the sound of the strings, and brass was mostly relegated to the back of the orchestra--even after modern valved, or chromatic, instruments became standard in the late nineteenth century.  The distinctive sound of brass came to be associated more with oom-pah-pah village and military bands than with the concert stage.

Challenging: No longer.  In what promises to be the beginning of a new golden age of brass, the flourish of classical brass can be heard once more.   Dozens of brass chamber-music groups, mainly quintets with a combination of trumpets, trombone, French horn and tuba (or second trombone), are challenging the dominance of the string quartet.  And composers have begun to write again for brass-in part because small ensembles will program adventurous fare more frequently than orchestras, but also because of the general excellence of brass players today.   "In America, because of jazz and college bands, kids get exposed to brass instrument," says trombonist Robert Biddlecome of the American Brass Quintet.   "The playing, and even the instruments themselves, are the best in the world, and that attracts composers."

One of the found fathers of the back-to-brass movement is the American Brass.  Now celebrating its twentieth-anniversary season, the group was originally formed to teach schoolchildren about brass instruments.  Gradually its members became serious about making chamber music together.  As they discovered, they faced some formidable prejudices.  Local organizations were loath to book them because they had never heard of brass groups before.  Critics were equally skeptical.  "From the first, the constant criticism was, 'Why have a brass quintet when there is no literature for it?'," says trumpeter Raymond Mase.  To deflect such criticism, American Brass at first played mostly early music and modern works commissioned specifically for it.

'Purists':  Although the group has relaxed a bit since then, its members remain the high priests of brass.  "We pride ourselves on being purists," says Mase.  "We want to be the Juilliard of brass groups."   They are celebrated champions of new music: among their many recordings is a marvelous sampler of American music by Charles Ives, Alvin Brehm and others (Nonesuch).   A recent "Retrospective of Premieres" at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York did justice to the group's stature as contemporary interpreters.  Throughout an evening of rigorously difficult music--from Charles Whittenberg's "Triptych for Brass Quintet" (1962), a tour de force of tricky rhythms and highly colored effects, to Elliott Carter's 1974 "Brass Quintet," in which the instruments duel and dance with explosive energy--the group displayed superb tonal command of their unwieldy instruments and the sort of balancing of voices and split-second timing that are the hallmarks of a good string quartet.

The Canadian Brass, by contrast, is the court jester of the profession.  On the theory that two hours of nonstop brass playing can be deadly, its members laugh and banter between numbers and they program lots of light goodies such as Fats Waller songs.   They cheerfully pilfer music--from Bach (the "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" for organ) to Puccini ("Madame Butterfly").  Their forays can border on the tasteless.  While their "Village Band" and "Mostly Fats" albums (RCA) are fun, their "Unexplored Territory" (MMG), with electric guitar and piano, careens from watered-down blues to souped-up Satie.

At the same time, the Canadian Brass--now eleven years old--has done more to popularize brass playing than any other group.  National celebrities in Canada, its members left orchestra positions in 1977 to work full time as a quintet; since then they have been on the road eight months a year, traveling as far as Saudi Arabia and China.  Their concerts are undeniably entertaining.  At a recent appearance in New York's Avery Fisher Hall with the Northwood Symphonette of Michigan, they raced effortlessly through the fugal intricacies of Villa-Lobos's "Bachianas Brasileiras No. 1," arranged for brass quintet and strings, and presented Lukas Foss's fetching "Night Music" for brass and chamber ensemble, inspired by the killing of John Lennon.  As icing, they whipped up a swinging version of Waller's "Handful of Keys", that sounded like authentic barrelhouse.