A Minute with Miles

It’s often easier to say what classical music is not, than to say what it is.

A “brass quintet” consists of two trumpets, French horn, trombone, and tuba. I attended a concert by a brass quintet the other day, and I was struck by a big difference, visually, between a brass quintet concert and, say, a string quartet concert. When you watch a string quartet, you see lots of movement – arms, hands, fingers, instruments. But at a brass quintet concert the only thing you see moving much at all is the slide of the trombone. And the reason is that most of what brass players do is done with the lips, and it’s invisible to us. The trumpet, horn, and tuba usually just have three or four keys, or valves, and even with just one key depressed the player can play a whole series of different notes just by varying lip shape and air pressure. It’s also just with the lips and air pressure, invisibly, that brass players change volume and tone color. So, lots going on in brass playing, but not always a lot to see.

A while back I spent a minute offering a few suggestions of what to say after a concert when the concert was really pretty bad, but the performer is someone you know and you have to say something. In the unfortunate event that you’ve already used up your store of useful phrases, I thought I’d suggest a few more.

He may not be well know to the general public today, but, yet Philippe Gaubert was one of the most famous and important French musicians of the first half of the twentieth century.

I don’t suppose you have a pair of four-hundred-year-old pliers in your kitchen tool drawer, or a screwdriver made in the 1700s? No, probably not. Tools don’t tend to last that long. The tools of string players, though, are an entirely different story.

Wars rage and diseases spread, all over the world, and I play music. Sometimes I feel like Nero – fiddling while Rome burns. Then again…

Leonard Bernstein's life was, more dramatically and certainly more publicly than most, a life of dualities.

The guitar, the lute, and the viola da gamba all have frets. Have you ever wondered why?

There are many great creative artists, including great composers, who have been mediocre human beings, not to mention any number who have been downright reprehensible human beings, or human beings whose private views we would find reprehensible if only we knew what they were.

The guitar, the lute, and the viola da gamba all have frets. Have you ever wondered why?