what a weekend. police band concert on friday evening, playing and emceeing is very hard work. went down really well and was an enjoyable evening.

skiing on saturday at the stubaier gletscher (pictures to follow). “junge solisten am podium” by the innStrumenti chamber orchestra was the evening’s entertainment on saturday.

sunday was a lazy day, spent most of the afternoon playing around with the latest, greatest version of lilypond. the evening was spent at a concert by the kammerchor walther von der vogelweide, conducted by claudio büchler, also the conductor of the uni orchestra.

this was quickly done in the improvised kitchen studio before dinner:

fruit and veg, originally uploaded by tiamak.

the tomatoes and the garlic in the basket have been surprising me every day with the simple colours, so i decided to knock together a quick studio in the kitchen. a large cardboard back-wall made from a weetabix box, lit by an overpowered sb-900, another sb-900 with a dome diffuser off to the right, kindly held by eva. not perfect, but not too shabby for a job knocked together in 3 minutes…

the picture at the top was taken during a short break from transcribing music. the sun hit the glasses just right on my laptop case, and luckily i had my camera sat next to me.

fantastic program selection and very well played. mr. fritzsch conducted everything by heart, which is a fairly amazing feat if you take a look at the score to the alpensinfone. all in all, it was a very impressive concert and i’m looking forward to future concerts conducted by mr. fritzsch.

second stop of the evening (after grabbing a pizza) was the ambient art lounge, organised by harry triendl. the concept is intriguing, it’s basically a semi-organised jam-session for electronic music. i think the most interesting part of this concept is that ambient music is generally created in a studio and heavily tweaked and refined. getting a group of people together with a set of rules (my favourite: tolerable volume. ) can result in chaos, or as shown yesterday, in some very enjoyable ambient music.

we caught the tail-end of an art installation by urbeil consisting of soundscapes supporting a critical text dealing with the andreas hofer cult and emancipation. (a different form of dealing with andreas hofer’s historical image can be found in an earlier posting).

the idea behind the jam session, as far as i can tell, is that everyone is allowed to bring their equipment and set up before the session starts. everyone gets piped into the master mix and can take part however they want. this singer laid vocals over the soundscapes being created by the guitarists on stage. sounded cool, but the lighting also made for quite cool photo-opps.

pictures

nikon d90, 50mm f/1.8 and 24mm f/2.8 primes running at ISO 1600 in manual mode. i love these two lenses for low-light photography. i had a flash with me, but decided not to use it, as i wasn’t sure what the etiquette was. pictures were post-processed in DxO to get rid of the noise, slightly adjust the black point and improve the contrast (which is already good straight out of the camera). i’m fairly happy with the results, even though one or two pictures could do with some slightly different enhancements.

here’s the slideshow:

alternatively a standard HTML album:

Ambient Art Lounge #16

Ambient Art Lounge #16 at the Live-stage Innsbruck.
Official Page

there was much criticism before the celebrations—andreas hofer is considered by some as an extremist and terrorist. more recently, there was a terrorist movement in south tyrol aiming to “reunite” trentino and south tyrol with austria. the south tyrolean “Schützen” (translates loosely as riflemen—they’re voluntary groups of traditional riflemen who see it as their job to uphold traditional values, whatever they may be) especially support reunification and the political left-wing consider them extreme right-wing. as the tyrolean (both south and north) schützen made the main body of the parade, some politicians and media claimed that the whole parade was a celebration of right-wing ethos.

as an active participant in the parade yesterday (as a musician), my feeling was that there was a political undercurrent to the parade and of course, some people, albeit a small minority, took the political element to extremes. however, the general feeling of the whole event was a celebration of tyrolean tradition.

according to the organizers, there were 26,000 participants; police reports state there were over 70,000 spectators. the weather was perfect, and the centre of innsbruck was packed with people. the whole spectacle lasted about 5 hours. anyone watching the event in town or on TV definitely saw a lot more than we did. we met at 10:15 in the tivoli football stadium where the organizers staged about 10,000 of the participants. this is a panorama of some of the participants waiting in the stadium:

10,000 people, maybe more…

the parade was supposed to start at 11:00, for some reason, the organizers had forgotten that politicians like to talk, so it didn’t start until 12:00… this meant that we had a lot of time to waste in the stadium; some people spent the time drinking:

Beer carrier

others sleeping:

Sleeping trombonist

the staging had been calculated to the minute and the stadium slowly emptied:

Lonesome musician

what the austrian army (who’d calculated they could get the whole parade finished by 14:00) hadn’t considered was that sorting out 10,000 non-military personnel would take longer than expected. the parade also didn’t move through town as quickly as anticipated, so we didn’t leave the stadium until 13:50. we had to march for about 20 minutes to actually reach the official starting point of the parade. marching through town with all of the spectators cheering was quite an experience.

pictures

i didn’t have a chance to take pictures while we were marching, but i did manage to get a load of character pictures of people in our band while we were waiting in the stadium. we have some fantastic faces:

Andreas Kiechl

Catharina Moritz

Clemens UnsinnLord Nonsense himself…

Cornelia Senoner

here’s the whole album:

Landesfestumzug Innsbruck, 20/09/2009

Speckbacher Stadtmusik at the Landesfestumzug in Innsbruck.

erntedankfest

the bus picked us up in kufstein, where it wasn’t quite raining. the bus trip, was as always, good fun:

Norbert

Wattenmit einem Tennisschläger

stefan, our tubist, did a great job of running us out to vienna in pouring rain. his driving skills were put to a serious test in vienna when the gps nav system sent him through a series of extremely narrow and winding little lanes. it was an impressive show of skill.

Stefan

Sauwetter

thankfully, hannes wasn’t allowed to drive (note the beer can and the funky hat):

Hannesals Busfahrer

numerous stops along the way:

Mondsee

Pinkelpause

we finally got to vienna and quickly got changed in the hostel (student accommodation) we were staying in. the heldenplatz in vienna is ideally located for a big festival, between the imperial palace:

Marketenderinnenvor der Hofburg

and the viennese town hall (in the background):

Mario

the concert on saturday evening didn’t go too well—the combination of numerous beers and a long bus trip took their toll on some musicians. this is the only picture of the concert itself:

Arminbei "Evergreens"

afterwards, we cleared our stuff back into the bus and went looking for fun and drinks after an impromptu photo-shoot-out in front of the imperial palace:

Ende vom Konzert

Güntervor der Hofburg (und Geli)

sunday morning, everyone was up bright and early and not too hungover, which was surprising. we caught the tram into the centre of town, günter & i amused some of the passengers by getting 19 tickets out of a coin-operated machine using the change the girls had taken through selling schnapps the evening before. the concert on sunday was a lot better than saturday, there are even pictures, thanks to our friendly sound engineer benjamin whom i gave my camera to:

Unterm Konzert

PosaunenSimon, Michael, Günter

there was even a friendly rat who decided to help us out by conducting:

Die Sendung mit der Maus

after the concert, we grabbed a bite to eat and left for home. numerous stops were needed along the way:

Markus

we eventually got home in the early evening after a seriously enjoyable weekend in vienna. a big thankyou to günter, michael & mario for all the organizational work and a big round of applause for stefan for the fantastic drive.

pictures

travelling with bands always give great opportunities for pictures. this weekend was no exception.

if i had to pick five favourite pics from last weekend, it would probably be these ones (in no particular order):

Vorbereitungen

Evavor der Hofburg

Mario

Bianca

Biancaund ihr Spiegelbild

here’s the whole album, all 98 pics:

Conradler in Wien, 12-13/09/09

Trip to the Austrian Bauernbund Harvest festival with the Conradler (www.conradler.com). Serious fun and games and two concerts as well.

Lineup

Rundgemälde-Suitefür Blechbläser von Florian Bramböck

Trumpets:

• Florian Klingler
• Manfred Lugger
• Markus Kuen
• Raimund Walder
• Josef Seeber

Horns:

• Silvia Klingler
• Karin Albrecht

Trombones/Tuba:

• Otto Hornek
• Lukas Klingler
• Bernhard Großlercher (also Euphonium)
• Fabian Kerber
• Werner Kreidl (Tuba)

Percussion:

• Michael Oberaigner
• Christian Norz
• Karl Mair

Program

Bernhard, Lukas, Otto & Charlie

The program was varied, ranging from Renaissance to Jazz, and very entertaining. The highlights were Florian Bramböck’s Rundgemälde-Suite, which was premiered, and a suite from Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, arranged by Otto Hornek for the BCT. The full program they played:

• Giles Farnaby, Mal Sims
• Diego Ortiz, Tres Recercadas
• Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Psalm 91
• Florian Bramböck, Rundgemälde-Suite

• Carl Orff, Suite aus Carmina Burana
• Gordon Langford, London Miniatures
• Traditional, Auf Tirolerischen Almen
• Heiner Wiberny, Ulla in Afrika

Sadly, they only got to play one encore, but the audience seemed a bit zoned-out after Brass Machine, which was a fantastic way to end the evening.

Pictures

Yesterday before heading out to the concert, I stumbled across a post by Zack Arias where he showed some experimental multiple exposures he took during a concert. I tried that trick as well and came up with some interesting results:

Posaunenmontage

Schattenspiele

bct Montage 2

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for, the link to the whole album:

Brass Connection Tirol, 26.08.09

Brass Connection Tirol at the Kitzbüheler Sommerkonzerte. Premiere performance of Florian Bramböck's Rundgemälde-Suite

Günter Auer advertising for Tiscover…

so, five years after going there w/simon, sarah & theresa, i finally made it back to prague. i love that place. the innsbruck police band was invited to FESTPOL 2009. sadly, we didn’t have too much spare time away from group activities, so i’m going to have to go back again.

the best pictures i took are on my phanfare page

so, today is unofficial bruckner day. more information about bruckner can be found on wikipedia, of course. and if anyone has some bruckner lying around on cds or lps at home, drop him in your playlist for today. you shouldn’t be dissapointed. and if you are, you don’t deserve to own those cds, so drop them in the post to me…
now off to work and to blast my ears out comfortably with bruckner. enjoy.
[the picture to the right, btw, is of bruckners gravestone. bruckner himself is buried in the crypt in the abbey of st. florian near ansfelden under his favourite organ – where he can also hear the organ being played. we went there a few years ago with the orchestra when we performed his te deum in vienna. more pics of bruckner's church, organ and resting place here.]

it ended up at about 4 beers each and a long chat starting from trombonisms via girls/women to real music. and what makes music music.
trombonists, at least in most [traditional and semi-traditional] music around here, are accompanists. that gets boring very very quickly – think “um-taCK-um-taCK” times lots for about 2 hours and you get where i’m at. boring is not a Good Thing™. Bad Things™ tend to get you to thinking about how to make them better.
i had the horrible luck (actually, i did enjoy it at times) of playing 1^st trombone in a czech-style band for 1.5 years as well as 1^st trombone in a very traditional band here in innsbruck for almost 4 years. in this period – more in the small band than in the normal band – i was confronted with lots and lots and LOTS of accompaniment in marches and polkas and other stuff.
this got me to thinking. polkas and marches have the same accompaniment: “um-taCK-um-taCK”, repeated until the euphoniums and trumpets get bored and the trombonists’ lips fall off their faces. the tuba player’s job isn’t much better, by the way; he gets to play “BUM-breathe-BUM-breathe” until he either faints, falls off his chair or goes to sleep feeling bored (while still playing). in order to avoid the tubists’ fate (which the trombonists suffer too, just backwards) i got to thinking while playing.
while in a cd rehearsal session one weekend i got given THE pointer to what i was trying to work out for myself. marches and polkas are played differently, even though they’re structurally the same. it’s a similar difference to pop and swing. the notation is the same, but the playing is different. and you can’t notate the difference, because it’s a feeling rather than a fixed rule. this got me to thinking even more. and more. and then some more.
then i moved on, music-wise. i left both bands in innsbruck – due to unresolvable personal differences – and joined the band i’m in now. one of the best moves i’ve ever made, to tell the truth.
the band i’m currently in also has a czech-style band as a sub-ensemble and i’ve had the pleasure of playing with them a few times. it was in this “little” band that i actually realised what the past two years of musical crap had done for me. i had learnt to accompany. especially this czech/alpine style of music.
yesterday i finally got IT. this “IT” is something i think i’ve always felt if not known. yesterday night talking with mike was the first time that i got it conciously though. and this is something most people get wrong. music is NOT about the melody. music is the WHOLE product. accompaniment is just part of the music. most people when playing accompaniment tend to approach it like thus, “oh, it’s only accompaniment, it doesn’t matter what it sounds like.”
that DOES NOT work. music is everything. the guys/gals playing melody are doing their best they can to create music from their melody. who am i as an accompanist (which i too often am) to ruin their efforts by ONLY playing notes? if they can make music from a melody, who’s to say that i can’t make music from accompanying notes?
nobody.
that’s right, NOBODY is forbidding me to play music. even if i’m only playing the offbeats. i can play crap and kill my chops. or i can play music, make something special for the melody players and the audience and kill my chops. or i can jump up and down on my trombone and throw it on the scrap heap and ignore everything and everyone that/who makes music.
i prefer the second option, obviously.
music, as i’ve said above, consists of two parts. there’s melody and there’s accompaniment. without melody, no music. without accompaniment, boring music. and that’s the trick: if you can make music out of the accompaniment, the guys/gals playing melody have a much easier job. and the sum of the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
that for me is what music is all about. and i’m happy to sit back on my bloody boring instrument and play hard (attack-wise) offbeats for the rest of my life (ok, that’s a lie, i like a challenge now and then too) as long as i’m making music and helping to create something which will move people. a trombone is one of the most beautiful instruments out there, and if i have to play accompaniment to play it, i’m going to make something beautiful out of it to the best of my abilities.
this entry might not make it far on the net, but it might touch some people in just the right way. if it does touch you, then you’ve got what i’m trying to tell you… if not, go and LISTEN to some music and ignore the melody. LISTEN to the rest of the music and then sit back and silently applaud those people who are willingly sitting in the background making music for you to listen to. it’s hard, but it’s worth it. if you really want to, applaud them properly and give them standing ovations…
that for me is MUSIC. a bass player who has one note per bar for the whole piece but puts his/her whole musical ability into those 50-odd notes. a musician who has one bar of music in a whole piece and makes the most of that one bar. anybody who can create goosebumps in an audience, no matter what they’re playing. THAT is music.
and if i have to complete the definition in the title, this is it:

#define music goosebumps;

These final days of 2005 must have been an anxious time for trombonists. Just before Christmas, a spate of reports appeared which suggested a looming risk to the reputation of their chosen instrument. One in the Times, which some still regard as a newspaper of record, was typical. The Christmas Day edition of Doctor Who, it warned, would feature the doctor saving the world from “a sinister band of masked alien Santa Clauses armed with lethal trombones”. Why on earth, real-life trombonists may well have wondered, was Russell T Davies, the creator of the new Dr Who and the writer of this episode, picking on them? Why couldn’t the alien miscreants be armed with trumpets, or violins, or possibly that epitome of the innocuous, the harp?

carry on reading here… [guardian online have taken the article offline, so the rest of the article is now in the expanded entry.

One sometimes detects among trombonists a sense that the world is doing them down. In a book called The Orchestra, Danny Danziger reports the musings of a professional trombonist called Colin Busby: “In the hands of the right person, the trombone is a super instrument. In the hands of a bad person, it’s the laughable instrument that people have joked about for years.”

Why is it joked about? And why was it picked on for Dr Who? Perhaps because there’s sometimes an air of comic menace about it, due less to the sound it makes than to its appearance. The trombone is in essence the equivalent if a trumpet, but serving the lower registers, and that’s why it looks as it does. The trumpet is a dapper affair, which gets its effects from a deft depressing of valves on the top. The trombone depends on a slide; to vary the sound you have to push the thing out and pull it back, a somewhat cumbersome spectacle, and one which can sometimes even suggest an attempt to invade the territory of neighbouring performers. In the kind of confined space in which players are sometimes required to operate, especially when playing jazz in a pub with a very small stage, there must sometimes be fears, as the slide protrudes towards the players in front, that by the end of the night the trombonist might have qualified for an Asbo.

None of this is to diminish the instrument’s high significance both in classical music and jazz. In his Treatise on Modern Orchestration, Hector Berlioz described it as “the true chief of wind instruments designated as epic. It possesses both nobilty and grandeur in an eminent degree. It has all the deep and powerful accents of high musical poetry, from the calm and imposing sounds of religion to the wild clamour of the orgy.”

Yet Berlioz, like Busby, knew how much depended on the way it was played – even more so after the series of concerts he conducted in Germany the following year. At Mannheim the trombonist’s struggles during rehearsals with the orgy scene at the end of Harold in Italy persuaded the composer to ditch that final movement when the work was played in the concert hall.

There must also, I suspect, be some feeling of grievance among trombonists that they’ve never got as rich a share of the standard solo repertoire as their trumpeter colleagues. Berlioz himself gave them some fine exposure in his Symphonie Funebre et Triomphale, yet he never honoured them as he did that other sometimes disparaged breed, the players of the viola, in Harold in Italy, with a concerto all of their own. And a list in Robin Gregory’s book The Trombone shows very few great composers trying to repair this neglect. There is one by Rimsky-Korsakov, another (too late for the book) by Mark-Anthony Turnage, but few of the other names in this catalogue make one long to get hold of the music.

As it transpired, the Christmas Day Dr Who was not the further dent in their image trombonists must have feared. Once we’d witnessed huge alien ships hovering like clouds from Hemel Hempstead, though rather more solid, over the House of Commons, and everyone in the world with an A-positive blood group poised on the top of high buildings and ready to jump, and a Punch and Judy parliament of Sycoraxes baying for earthling blood, death-dealing trombones (some of which didn’t look at all like trombones) seemed the least of the doctor’s worries. And just possibly (let us end the year on a positive note) the evening’s pre-teen audience may have started to look on trombones in a new, more exciting light. If in 10 years’ time the doors of our music colleges are being besieged by hordes of young people set on a life of tromboning, we may well have Russell T Davies to thank for it.

“In my opinion, the trombone is the true head of the family of wind instruments, which I have named the ‘epic’ one. It possesses nobility and grandeur to the highest degree; it has all the serious and powerful tones of sublime musical poetry, from religious, calm and imposing accents to savage, orgiastic outburst. Directed by the will of the master, the trombones can chant like a choir of priests, threaten, utter gloomy sighs, a mournful lament, or a bright hymn of glory; they can break forth into awe-inspiring cries and awaken the dead or doom the living with their fearful voices.”

i don’t really know what to add to that, so i’ll sign off again. more updates to follow during this coming week.

a few days later i had to play in a trombone quartet. it was only a few pieces, but the ppl i got to play with. wow. i didn’t think anything of it on that evening, but the next morning i realised that by rights i shouldn’t be allowed to play with three professional trombonists… the best thing was i got to play bass trombone, and my teacher – a bass trombonist – played 3rd. i really enjoy playing in quartets because you’re so much closer to the music and really have to pay attention. good fun and the guy we were playing for (on the occasion of his 70th b’day) was happy.
bigband has started up again too. i’m looking forward to our concert in january – we have some fantastic pieces we’re working on with some great bass trombone parts.
i’m on a short playing break now though – nasty cold – and then all hell breaks loose at the beginning of november with the autumn/winter concerts coming up. december will be fun as well – albeit a little bit cold when we go carolling. i’m looking forward to probably the last playing commitment this year though: weihnachtsblasen in hall with the trombone quartet. last year was a long haul, but highly enjoyable. i hope this year will be as well.
back to work… more updates soon.