50: Valved vs. Natural-- which way for Baroque pieces?

 

Especially concerning Baroque music, there’s a trend to be “historically informed”—that is, to play the music with the tempo, tunings, and instruments that would have existed at the time, rather than with their modern equivalents: catgut (actually sheep intestine—nothing to do with cats) strings rather than steel, bows that curve outward rather than inward, tuned a half step flat, without vibrato, faster, and with smaller ensembles.

But there’s another key difference, and the best way to show it is with a video recording.

First, here’s the (historically-informed) Netherlands Bach Society: Bach - Jauchzet, frohlocket! from Christmas Oratorio BWV 248 - Sato | Netherlands Bach Society

Compare that with the (modern) WDR Sinfonieorchester: Bach - Jauchzet, frohlocket (Christmas Oratorio) | WDR Rundfunkchor | WDR Sinfonieorchester - YouTube

Specifically, look at these 2 frames:

NBS:


WDR:

The clearest difference between these two images is the subject of this article: the type of trumpet being used.

The NBS uses what are called “natural” trumpets. The WDR uses modern trumpets, which, in contrast to naturals, are “valved.”

The natural trumpets used by the NBS are played by blowing in the same way, but pitches are selected with the mouth (in common with valved), but with open finger holes (like on a recorder), not with keys (like on a clarinet) or piston valves (like on the modern trumpets of the WDR).

Ultra-purists would say that even the NBS’s “natural” trumpets aren’t natural enough because of the existence of the finger holes. In the strictest sense, natural instruments have one fixed length of tubing, and the only way to change the pitch is by adjustment of the embouchure, that is, the position of the lips and tongue on the mouthpiece, and how open or closed the throat and nasal passages are. Natural instruments, since they have a fixed length of tubing, can only produce notes from the overtone series that corresponds to that length. The lower you go, the wider the gaps between available notes, and the higher you go, the more likely you’ll be to be flat or sharp, “in between” two possibly desired pitches.

That was the great breakthrough with valved instruments—through the addition of valves (or those finger holes in modern “natural” instruments) the effective lengths of the air columns can be varied, so, in contrast to true naturals, you do have true on-demand access to in-tune notes anywhere in the chromatic scale, without in any way modifying the structure of your instrument (with crooks or other extensions) or changing instruments all together.

The debate between the pro-natural and pro-valved camps boils down to this:

1.       Bach and his contemporaries, and not even Beethoven until technically the Ninth, did not have access to valved instruments, so we should play the music like they would have heard it and as they wrote it, but

2.       If you want the music to be heard by the greatest possible audience, then you need to make it easier to perform, and there are simply a lot more valved instruments around nowadays than natural ones, and

3.       Valved instruments have the advantage of being able to play every note in tune because valving means you can adjust the internal length of the instrument ad hoc, whereas natural ones, by definition, can’t do that, so anything sounds better and more in tune if you go valved over natural and

4.       Unless he explicitly says so (by marking some part “obligato”), Bach actually allowed this kind of substitution—whatever was available was OK—so why would that not extend to the modern day? but

5.       Valved instruments are more powerful and concentrated than the natural instruments Bach had; natural instruments can already overpower a string section and/or chorus, so imagine what valved instruments would do to the balance of an ensemble, and so

6.       Both sides argue they like their sound better than the other’s

Take time to listen to both natural and valved recordings—a valved recording of the beginning of the Christmas Oratorio with video was surprisingly hard to find— (ideally live, or with headphones and/or a great stereo system), and use that time to think and form your own personal judgments about whether you prefer the natural sound or the valved sound

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

35: Figured Bass

Image
  There’s a system of notating harmonies that’s rather unique to the Baroque era, but which is so frequently used there, and so important to it, that no discussion of theory would ever be complete if we did not cover it. This is the notation of figured bass: “figured,” in the sense of using figures (numbers) to notate the bass. Figured bass was, in a sense, its own notation completely separate from the five lines and four spaces of the staff, which was nearly exclusively the purview of cellists, bassists, harpsichords, and organists.  Figured bass, fair warning, can be intimidating at first. But, just as with anything else we’ve covered so far, the more you practice reading it, the better you’ll get.  In this system, we use numbers to indicate intervals above the bass. We stack them, and this is how we build chords. If you can’t stack them, nowadays, it’s perfectly fine to use slashes and write the numbers horizontally.  Let’s start with the easiest figured bass nota...
Read more

58: Swell pedals and swell shades

There’s one pedal that we haven’t discussed on the organ because it isn’t one of the “note” pedals—in fact, it’s the only one that doesn’t have a pitch. Instead, the missing pedal is the swell pedal. Look at the body of the organ (the assembly of where all the pipes are, as opposed to the “console”, where the organist sits and plays the instrument—these may or may not be physically close to each other), and you’ll probably see what kind of look like plantation shutters. (If you know where my parish is, then this feature of the organ is very clearly visible on ours. Your local organ might not be so obvious.) These shutters, called “swell shutters/shades,” show or hide the pipes of the organ. Organs have instantaneous dynamic control—the amount of pressure you put on a key dictates how much air flows through the pipes, just like a piano allows you to adjust dynamics on the fly by changing the amount of pressure with which the hammer hits the string(s) given the pressure on the key. Thes...
Read more

54: Trills in the Baroque vs. Classical Periods

Image
Baroque music is known for its incredibly technical and ornamented style. The most common and fundamental of those ornaments is our focus today: the trill. Most simply, a trill is a very fast, repeated alternation of two notes. In the vast majority of cases, those notes are adjacent, but that is not a requirement. Given how fast and common they are, regardless of what you play—whether it’s a string, wind, or keyboard instrument, or your voice—they have a reputation for being quite tiring to play. The period matters when considering a trill. Classical and later composers treat trills, in a sense, in the opposite manner than Baroque composers do. Let me show you two examples: First, the Baroque way of thinking. This is a PAC:   and especially in the Baroque era, when the plucked harpsichord dominated over the hammered piano, it was hard to sustain sounds for long since the sound of the plucking decays quickly. The trill was developed in response, out of a need both to ornam...
Read more