A Talk about Woodwinds

 A few years ago the Jerusalem Municipality organized a short course for retired people (whom they called people in "the third age," a euphemism I'm not fond of) to train them to give lectures to other retired people, the assumption being that people of our age have wisdom to impart. There were about forty people in the course, and most of the subjects of the talks they offered were full of self-help advice. I decided, seeing that I've had a long career, as it were, as a serious amateur musician, to talk about the way music has enriched my life. I eventually gave up on that idea, because it struck me as too boastful: look at me, I play in a wind orchestra! But I found a different way of framing the talk: How and why was the saxophone invented?

I've given the talk twice so far, and I'm slated to give it again in a week or two. Each time I give it, I see ways of improving it. This time I intend to start by telling them about playing clarinet in high school, and why I stopped playing when I went off to college. The main reason was that I knew I wasn't talented and dedicated enough to become a professional musician. Nevertheless, I can still play clarinet with a good tone, and I'll play something on my clarinet to demonstrate.

The first time I tried out the talk, I brought some instruments with me, but I didn't play them enough. My audience expected to hear music. This time I'll prepare songs to play. I still haven't decided just what I'll play. I should probably play something classical on the clarinet first, and then something klezmerish.

After I've demonstrated the clarinet and spoken about it a little, I'll take out my soprano saxophone and talk about the differences between the clarinet and the saxophone and why Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone. The first times I gave the talk, I brought bigger saxes with me, but they're heavy and cumbersome, and the soprano is a more unusual instrument, straight (at least mine is) and not curved like the other instruments in the family. I'll also talk about the family of saxophones.

Then I'll take out the pan pipe that my daughter brought from Peru and talk a little about the ancient history of wind instruments and how they work. Archaeologists have found a bone flute 60,000 years old!

Photograph by Petar Milošević 

Until the 17th century, woodwinds were essentially the same: tubes with holes in them. I'll take out my plastic baroque flute and my Indian bansuri to show that. I'll compare my modern silver flute to the simpler, earlier flutes. I will also make it clear that I'm not saying the modern Western music is better than earlier music or the music of other cultures.Then I'll talk about why instrument builders started adding keys to the flutes, clarinets, oboes, and bassoons they were making. 

First, composers began to write music with accidentals and changes in key. Second, the Industrial Revolution made it possible to build complicated instruments. Third, the manufacture of musical instruments became industrialized. Fourth, larger and larger concert halls were built, along with military parades led by bands - all of which necessitated louder instruments.

There's more to say and more to play. Let's see how the talk goes.

Voices

The other day I saw a great documentary narrated by Branford Marsalis about great tenor saxophonists, but for some reason I can't find it on Youtube again. Never mind. Marsalis spoke about the way Coleman Hawkins essentially invented the tenor as a jazz instrument and played clips of many of great tenor players from Hawkins up to David Murray (it was made in 1992, so maybe other impressive contemporary players would have been included if he'd made it last year).

In the past few years I've mainly been playing baritone sax, partly because if you play the baritone, you can always find an ensemble to play in. I also enjoy playing baritone. I'm not suffering, though sometimes the parts are boring. You hear music differently when you play the bottom notes. 

I do own the other common sizes of saxes, soprano, alto, and tenor, and every now and then I play one of them, to get back in touch with the other horns, but my tenor was giving me trouble. There was a leak in one of the pads, and I couldn't play the low notes at all. I asked a friend of mine, who knows how to repair horns and has a lot of tools, to take a look at my tenor (a well-made Taiwanese Lien-Cheng instrument), and, sure enough, he found and easily fixed the leak, which wasn't where I thought it was. So in the past few days I've been playing tenor for a change. The sound is quite different from the sound of the baritone. Also the transposition to concert pitch is different, so it forces me to make an adjustment.

There are two approaches. Some musicians stick to a single instrument and get deeper and deeper into it. Once, for example, I asked a young tuba player whether he played other brass instruments, and he said there was so much to explore with the tuba, that he saw no need to play any other horn. Other musicians play a lot of different instruments, like, for example, Yusuf Lateef and Eric Dolphy. It's far from uncommon. Many violinists also play viola, classical clarinetists in orchestras also play bass clarinet, and some folk musicians can play guitar, banjo, mandolin, and fiddle. I recently heard a singer who sang with a fine, strong baritone voice and then switched to counter-tenor. Hard to believe the same person was singing.

Every voice expresses a different part of the musician's self.