The use of the horn in the late orchestral works by Robert Schumann
(2023)
author(s): Márton Kóródi
published in: KC Research Portal
When I played a Schumann piece, Genoveva Overture, for the first time, I was wondering, because there were Ventilhorn and Waldhorn parts. I could not imagine what his idea was when he wrote for four horns, but still used two different kinds of the same instrument. Did he want to express something with this set-up? Beside this, I did not understand why he, and other romantic composers, use so much transposition when they had already a completely chromatic instrument.
As I started to get to know and play the natural horn, it was getting clearer what his intention could have been. Why he used an ‘ancient’ instrument, though he could compose for four chromatic horns. This made me even more interested, and I also got more questions and hypotheses about the topic, for what I wanted to find an answer.
In my research, I tried to get to know the use of the horn in the middle of the 19th century. I wanted to get familiar with the contemporaries’ imagination about the old and new instrument, and with the way how they used them. Then, with this knowledge, I analysed Schumann’s orchestral works, especially the horn parts, and tried to find out if the results are matching with the background research.
My aim was too, show the horn players, that the romantic horn playing is not only about the ‘holy’ valve horn, but something more complex and colourful.
The Voice of the Chalumeau
(2018)
author(s): Sandra Perez Romero
published in: KC Research Portal
Name: Sandra P. Pérez Romero
Main Subject: Historical Clarinet
Research Supervisor: Inês de Avena Braga
Title of Research: The Voice of the Chalumeau: A historical study of music for various sizes of chalumeaux and voice in the Holy Roman Empire and the Republic of Venice 1703-1767
Research Question: What was the importance of the chalumeau in XVIII century vocal music in the Holy Roman Empire and the Republic of Venice?
Summary of Results:
The chalumeau is a single reed woodwind instrument whose development lies between the recorder and the clarinet. It was used extensively as an obbligato instrument in vocal repertoire throughout the eighteenth century, when it was a highly popular instrument in the major courts in Europe. The vocal repertoire that included chalumeau from this time period – as this work aimed to illustrate – is quite large and diverse. It accounts for several hundreds of pieces and it encompasses a wide range of genres, all with unique instrumentation. The development of the repertoire for chalumeau was directly linked to three Holy Roman Emperors and the political milieu in the Hofkapelle in Vienna during the first half of the eighteenth century. Besides Vienna, the chalumeau was extremely popular in other courts such as Dresden, Hamburg and Darmstadt; the latter proved to be an extremely fertile land for chalumeau writing with Johann Christoph Graupner, who included parts for different sizes of chalumeaux in more than eighty cantatas. Other prolific composers for chalumeau include Atilio Ariosti, the brothers Giovanni and Antonio Maria Bononcini, Antonio Caldara, Francesco Bartolomeo Conti, Johann Joseph Fux, Johann Adolph Hasse, Johann David Heinichen, Giovanni Alberto Ristori, Johann Franz Strall, Georg Philipp Telemann, Antonio Vivaldi, among others. After a thorough search through RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales) and other online library catalogues, a total of 203 vocal works that include one or more parts for chalumeaux is presented in this thesis. Performance practice and general considerations on the style of this repertoire are addressed as well, with emphasis on the genres of Cantata, Opera, Oratorio and Serenata, but also Antiphonies, Hymns, Litanies, Masses, Psalms and other sacred works that employed the instrument as well. In addition, this research has resulted in several world premiere recordings of music by Hasse and Caldara. Finally, considerations on the “gloom” color often associated with the chalumeau in secondary sources are contrasted with the descriptions of the instrument in primary sources and the evidence present in the works composed outside Vienna.
Biography:
Sandra Pérez Romero (b.1992) is a Mexican born historical clarinetist. In 2015, she graduated Cum Laude from the Music Bachelor in Universidad Veracruzana (Mexico), under the supervision of Juan Manuel Solís (clarinet) and Ricardo Miranda (Musicology). She has collaborated with several orchestras in Mexico both as an active member and as a soloist and she has participated in clarinet and chamber music festivals in North America and Europe.
Can one wade twice into the same Seine?
(2015)
author(s): Assi Karttunen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
In 2013, the Elysian Fields working group received a grant for two concerts based on the concept of a musician’s relationship to a specific city. The idea was to reveal the musician’s living relationship to history in the context of three European towns; Amsterdam, Paris and Helsinki.
I belonged to the group planning the Paris concert, and therefore my article deals with the musicians’ working process and the phases of the practising/rehearsing in preparation for this event, which was staged in January 2015. The Elysian ensemble comprised: Varpu Haavisto, viola da gamba; Essi Iso-Oja, harp; Assi Karttunen, harpsichord, Katja Vaahtera, soprano; and Hannu Vasara, violin.
During the artistic process, the chosen material is shaped, crystallized, constituted and transformed. All of these forms of working are referred to as ‘processing’, where the word is used to describe otherwise invisible stages of working through which the collected material starts to give birth to relevant sets of themes that emerge from the music and its performance practices. During a musician’s decades of processing, the encountered ’alien’ musics and cultures are appropriated and incorporated into his or her own musical identity.
It is typical that in the practising/rehearsal period, the arising themes begin to grow connections to each other as well as outwards to the ’world’. These connections and relationships, their mutual dynamics and causalities, may be explored and analysed. The multidisciplinary and multistage processing and analysis of the material (finding, collecting, producing, practising/rehearsing, delivering and performing) could be called artistic research or practice-based research.
For a musician, Paris is like a university of the mind from which one can never graduate.