Music in the world of podcasting

I don’t know about you, but when I’m on the road I often listen to podcasts rather than music to speed me on my way. What began as niche format around 2006, when the first Apple iPod was released, has become a mainstream form of media. Most broadcasters now also share their radio programmes in podcast format, and if you’re willing to spend time searching, there are individuals creating podcasts about a vast array of subjects.

The recorder has yet to feature in many podcasts but, if you’re interested in a variety of music there are plenty of shows that might pique your interest. While the Score Lines blog takes a break, I thought I’d bring together links to some of my favourites - all of them connected to music. Some of these are shows I’ve discovered via my subscribers, but others were already in my library.

While the podcast came about in response to a specific audio device, most of them can also be found via the providers’ websites so I’ll share those here, so as to open them up to as many people as possible - I realise not everyone uses a smartphone or MP3 player. That said, if you want to search for them in the podcast directory on your own portable device, many of them will be available there too.

Let’s make this an ongoing project which we can all contribute to. If you have a favourite music or recorder related podcast I haven’t mentioned here, please do leave a comment below or drop me an email and I can gradually add them into the list below.

The Recorder Podcast

Created by recorder maker Estelle Langthorne, these short episodes give a glimpse into the way recorders are made and how to get the best out of them. Find the Recorder Podcast at www.recorderpodcast.com.

Available to listen via a browser or via podcast apps.

Key Matters

Many thanks to one of my subscribers who led me to this one in response to my blog post about the theory of key signatures. Each 15 minute episode explores a particular key, talking about the characters of each one and some of the music composed with a given set of sharps or flats.

Find Key Matters here.

How to Play

This was another programme suggested to me by a pupil and each episode brings insights into a piece of music from the performer’s perspective. The mix of music covered is wide, but it includes Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.2 (which features the recorder) and other early music too.

Find How to Play here.

The Gramophone Classical Music Podcast

As you’d expect from a classical music magazine (which has been going for over a century now), the Gramophone podcast covers a wide range of musical styles. Some of them talk about the latest recordings, while others feature interviews with composers and performers, but with episodes stretching all the way back to 2009 you’re bound to find something to pique your interest.

Find the Gramophone Podcast here.

Available to listen via a browser or via podcast apps.

This Cultural Life

Another offering from the BBC, featuring In-depth conversations with creative people from the theatre, visual arts, music, dance, film and more. In it the host, John Wilson, invites his guests to talk about the influences on their own creative work. I particularly enjoyed a recent episode featuring the conductor Antonio Pappano.

Find This Cultural Life here.

Available to listen via a browser or via podcast apps.

Add to Playlist

I mentioned this podcast a few months ago in one of my Score Lines emails after the recorder player and flautist Heidi Fardell appeared on the show. Each programme features a playlist of five pieces of music, chosen by the hosts and guests. Each piece of music has a connection to the previous and following pieces and it never fails to amaze me how they are able to create links between apparently disparate styles of music.

Find Add to Playlist here.

Episode featuring recorder player Heidi Fardell

Available to listen via a browser or via podcast apps.

Desert Island Discs

This is surely the best known music podcast and you’ll never run out of episodes. Devised in 1942 by Roy Plomley, it’s been running ever since and there are now nearly 2500 episodes available to listen to in the archive. Each guest chooses the eight recordings, plus a book and a luxury, that they’d wish to have with them if they were stranded on a desert island and the choices can be very revealing. I bet most people have considered their own hypothetical desert islands discs and in the early days of the Score Lines blog I created my own recorder themed one!

Find the Desert Island Discs podcast here.

Available to listen via a browser or via podcast apps.

Tweet of the Day

Ok, I know I’m stretching things here, but there’s long been a connection between the recorder and birdsong in music, so I hope you’ll forgive me this one. These tiny little podcasts were originally devised in 2013 by Sir David Attenborough in 2013 and were broadcast at 6am each day. Each one lasts less than two minutes, but it’s amazing how much you can marvel at learn about different birdsongs in such a short time!

Find the Tweet of the Day podcast here.

Available to listen via a browser or via podcast apps.

Back to basics - the Key to Music

Having started my series of blogs about the theory of music with time signatures, the next logical step is to look at key signatures and the way composers use them. I know many amateur musicians have no formal training in music theory, so we’ll begin with the absolute basics. You’re welcome to skip ahead through sections you already know, or use them as a refresher.

The geography of key signatures

Let’s begin with the layout of key signatures. In most recorder music we rarely venture beyond three sharps or flats but it does no harm to check out the entire range of keys, especially as they are all interconnected. For starters, the key signature always appears directly after the clef and before the time signature. This pattern of clef then key signature is repeated on every line as a handy reminder.

Key signatures contain either sharps or flats - never a mixture of the two - and they always appear in the same order and layout. For sharps this order is F C G D A E B and for flats it’s B E A D G C F. Knowing this means you never need to think about exactly which sharps or flats are in your key signature. For instance, if there are three sharps they will always be F, C and G - no exceptions.

Perhaps the easiest way to learn this it to remember the following phrase, in which the first letter of each word gives you the order of the sharps:

Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle

To remember the order of the flats, all you need to do is reverse the phrase;

Battles Ends And Down Goes Charles’ Father

Now let’s take a look at the layout of the sharp and flat key signatures in the two clefs we use most when playing the recorder. The sharps and flats are kept close together on the stave and apply to every instance of a note - not just the ones which appear on the same line or space.

Now you know the order of the sharps and flats we need to look at the keys themselves.

Major and minor

As you’re probably aware, every key signature is connected to a major key and a minor key. For instance, a key signature of one sharp could be G major, but it could also be E minor. The latter is often known as the relative minor of G major because it is related by having the same key signature.

We’ll look at the difference between major and minor keys in a moment, but first let’s familiarise ourselves with the pattern of these keys.

You may have heard other musicians talk about a cycle or circle of 5ths without really understanding what this means. This term is often used because each new key signature is five steps away from its neighbours. For instance, if you count up five notes from C (always include the note you’re counting from the note you’re counting to in the five: C-D-E-F-G) you reach the note G. This is the distance between each of the keys when you either add another sharp or reduce the key signature by one flat.

This is most clearly illustrated by looking at it in a circle. The major keys are shown on the outside of the circle and the minor ones inside. By working around from the top of the circle in a clockwise direction, a 5th at a time, you progress from one key signature to another, ultimately returning back to C major. It’s with noting that there’s some duplication at the bottom of the circle, where we reach the really extreme keys. For instance, D flat and C sharp sound the same, but you can have a key signature for either note - one has five flats, the other has seven sharps.

As recorder players, we’re unlikely to be worried by G flat major too often, but it’s useful to be aware of the existence of these extreme keys and to understand how they relate to each other. I would still recommend you practise scales in some of the more extreme keys to gain a fluency with the less commonly found sharps and flats. That way, when you encounter a stray D flat somewhere you won’t be thrown by it and have to stop and think about where to find it. Earlier this year I wrote a blog post about using scales and arpeggios in your practice - if you haven’t already read it, you can find it here.

Identifying your keys

It’s all very well knowing you’ve got four sharps to play in your music, but next you need to know the name of that key. Again, there’s a quick and easy way to work this out without having to memorise every single one. Let’s look at the major keys first:

For sharp major keys, the name of the key is a semitone above the last sharp of the key signature. So if you have four sharps, the last one is D sharp and therefore you’re in E major.  Likewise, if the last sharp in your key signature is E sharp, the key is F sharp major.

For flat major keys, it’s even simpler - the name of the key is the penultimate flat of the key signature. Therefore, if you have two flats (B and E) you are in B flat major and if there are five flats (BEADG) you’re in D flat major. Admittedly this solution doesn’t work for F major, which only had one flat, but it’s one of the most common keys in recorder music so I dare say you’ll probably remember that one!

OK, that’s the major keys dealt with, but how to identify your minor keys? If your piece is in a minor key, there are will almost certainly be extra accidentals (usually sharps or naturals) dotted around in the music. We’ll look at the reason for these later. These should immediately alert you to the fact that the music is in a minor key, and you’ll probably be able to hear the different character of the music too. To figure out which key it is, use the rules I mentioned above to identify which major key is associated with that key signature. From there it’s an easy enough step to work out the related minor key, which is three semitones lower. So if the major key is G major, those three semitones are G to F sharp, F sharp to F natural and F natural to E. Your related minor key is E minor.

So you can see these rules in action, here are all the key signatures together:

Quick refresher - tones and semitones

Before we go on to look at major and minor keys in more detail it’s worth having a quick recap on tones and semitones. In western music the semitone is the smallest distance between two neighbouring notes - the equivalent of moving between neighbouring black and white keys on the piano. From a non-keyboard player’s perspective, a semitone is the distance between a natural note and its flat or sharp neighbour - e.g. D to D sharp.

A tone is a step wider - two semitones - as you can see from the keyboard illustration below. Semitones are shown in red, while tones are shown in blue.

These two intervals are the building blocks for all major and minor scales, creating the sounds we hear in major and minor keys. It’s important to understand the distinction between these if we’re going to understand the difference between the different types of scales.

Shades of major and minor

We often talk about music being in major or minor keys but have you thought about the difference between the two? We’ll get into the technical differences in a moment, but the most important distinction is the way they make the music feel. One of the ear tests often given in music grade exams is making the distinction between major and minor when listening to music, and teachers often ask students to decide if the music makes them feel happy (major) or sad (minor). This is, of course, a huge oversimplification - there are plenty of sonorous, serious pieces of music in major keys, or lively dances in minor keys. Perhaps a better distinction might be to think of music in a minor key as having a ‘darker’ sonority and major as being ‘brighter’. Let’s have a listen to some examples:

One of the most joyful and energetic examples of recorder music in a major key is Vivaldi’s Concerto, RV443, played here on the descant recorder by Lucie Horsch.

In contrast, the Welsh traditional lullaby Suo Gan is very poignant and thoughtful, but is still unmistakably in a major key.

And now two examples of music in a minor key. The first movement of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto is in D minor but is still full of life and energy, yet it definitely has a darker feel.

Perhaps one of the archetypal pieces of minor key music is Elgar’s melancholic Cello Concerto, composed soon after the end of World War I. The opening is heart wrenchingly sad, but even here there are moments of vivacity in the scherzo.

What’s the difference?

While we respond differently to music in major and minor tonalities, it’s also useful to understand the technical distinction. The key difference is the distance between the first and third notes of the scales, although as we will see there are other distinctions too. In a major scale, the distance between notes 1 and 3 is a major third. By contrast, in a minor scale the interval (distance) between these same notes is a minor third.

A minor third is made up of three semitones, while a major third is a semitone wider. Why not play the two examples below and hear the difference for yourself?

Of course there are other differences too, so let’s take a moment to look at the make up of major and minor scales.

Major scales

Major scales come in just one variety and the notes are the same whether the scale is ascending or descending. As you can see from the red boxes in the example below, each major scale contains two intervals of a semitone - between notes 3 and 4, and again between notes 7 and 8.

Minor scales

The minor scale has three different sub-species, as you can see below. The natural minor includes just the notes contained within the key signature. A natural minor scale is fundamentally the Aeolian Mode, but modes are a rabbit hole I’ll save for a future occasion or you might still be reading at midnight!

Like the major scale, the natural minor contains two semitones, but this time they occur between notes 2 and 3 and again between notes 5 and 6.

The Harmonic Minor scale tends to be the one most people learn first, although it’s used less than the other two in western classical music. When children begin preparing for grade exams they have to learn scales and arpeggios from memory and I think many teachers start with harmonic minors simply because they’re easier to memorise. This is practical solution, even if melodic minors are arguably more practical use in the music we tend to play every day.

As you can see in the example below, in a harmonic minor scale note 7 is raised by a semitone - in this case the F becomes an F sharp. This creates a semitone between note 7 and the key note, which creates a clear sense of pulling one’s ear towards the scale’s final destination.

The addition of this accidental also creates another interesting interval, marked here with blue circles - is an augmented second. This stretched shape in the musical line creates a more exotic feel - much like the melodic shapes you’d hear in the tune from a snake charmer’s flute.

If you want to hear the harmonic minor scale in use, Gustav Holst’s Beni Mora contains oodles of them from the outset. It was inspired by the music he heard on a visit to Algeria and instantaneously feels exotic to western ears, despite its orchestral soundworld.

Finally, we have the Melodic minor scale which is the variety we meet most often in the music we play. As you can see in the example below, both the 6th and 7th notes are raised by a semitone on the way upwards, and lowered back to their native pitch as the scale descends again. This means the semitones occur in different places on ascent and descent, but the effect is a very easy ‘melodic’ sound.

The Overture to Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni is a beautiful example of minor scales in action, definitely rooted in the dark, melancholic toneworld of the minor key. In this recording, 33 seconds in we hear small sections of melodic minor scales (listen out for those exotic augmented seconds) and and 1 minute and 12 seconds there are chains of melodic minor scales, rising and falling in the flutes.

A Baroque quirk

Having talked about minor key signatures and the way minor scales are constructed I should perhaps mention one small glitch in the system. This occurs specifically in minor keys with flats in the key signature and mostly in Baroque music. As we’ve seen already, in a melodic minor scale (the type which occurs most frequently in Baroque music) about 50% of the time the 6th note of the scale is raised by a semitone. Therefore from the perspective of someone writing out music, or engraving plates for printing, there will be lots of occasions when you have to insert an accidental. Because of this it’s not unusual to find music from this period where the final flat of the key signature (looking at it from our 21st century perspective) is omitted.

For example, this extract from Barsanti’s G minor recorder sonata has only one flat in the key signature. Had the E flat been included, the engraver would have then needed to add flat accidentals for all the notes circled in red. Of course, the other side of the coin is that he or she then needed to add E flats in for all the notes circled in blue! One could argue for or against this Baroque practice, but it’s important to know about its existence when trying to understand the key your music is written in.

View fullsize

The false relation

No, this isn’t one of those family friends you always called ‘uncle’ when you were a child, even though he was really nothing of the sort! Instead it’s the name for a harmonic curiosity that crops up in early music; in particular repertoire from 16th and early 17th century England. You’ll often find it in music by Tallis and Byrd but Henry Purcell had a penchant for this piquant effect too.

You remember I talked earlier about the way a melodic minor scale has raised 6th and 7th notes as it ascends, returning them to their original pitch again as the music descends? Well, occasionally composers created melodic lines which did both at the same time. Sometimes you’ll get a direct clash as the raised 7th and lowered 7th occur simultaneously, creating one of those ‘double take’ moments as you try to figure out if someone played a wrong note. On other occasions it’ll just be a ‘near miss’ and the effect isn’t quite so astringent. There’s nothing to be done here, except to check the score to reassure yourselves that all is well and then simply enjoy the exotic clash in the music!

As you can see in this short extract from Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus, a G sharp and G natural come into direct contact, albeit fleetingly, in bar 37. The music is in A minor, so the tenor line has the raised 7th note of the melodic minor scale (leading upwards to A), while the bass has the G natural which is descending. The fact that the two happen simultaneously creates a beautiful, piquant discord.

View fullsize

Endlessly evolving keys

While I’ve talked here about the relationship between key signatures and scales, in reality it’s unusual for a piece of music to remain in one key throughout. The process of moving between different keys is modulation. In order to explain this fully a knowledge of harmony and cadences is ideally required, but again that’s a large topic for another day.

From a player’s perspective the important thing is to look out for accidentals in your music. Yes, there are certain accidentals you’d expect to find in minor keys (specifically your raised 6th and 7th notes) but if you start to encounter additional sharps or flats it’s likely the music has modulated to a new key. You need to be Hansel, following the breadcrumbs through the forest in Hans Christian Andersen’s children’s tale. Look at the clues in your music - perhaps you’re in G major, but suddenly lots of C sharps begin appearing and the likelihood is the music is moving from G into D major, which has both F and C sharp in the key signature. Or perhaps, in the same G major piece the new accidentals are D sharps. In that case E minor is a more likely destination, with the D sharps being the raised 7th note of the scale.

Music often shifts to keys that are fairly close to home - perhaps the relative minor or just a step or two around the circle of 5ths I talked about earlier. With the tools I’ve given you today you are better equipped to follow the breadcrumbs and figure out where the music has migrated to. Here’s a final example to illustrate my point. In the first page of Telemann’s Recorder Sonata in F major he moves the music through no fewer than four keys. I’ve annotated this extract with different colours to show the important accidentals and the keys the music modulates into. Some of them are fleeting, while others feel more significant. You can click on the music to see it enlarged.

View fullsize

Over to you…

Equipped with this knowledge, you can now take it out into the world and use it to help you understand the music you play in a deeper way. If the concept of identifying modulations seems overwhelming for now, why not simply make a point of looking at the key signatures you encounter to identify where you begin? When faced with a new piece of music, take a moment to decide which key it’s in. The key signature itself is a big clue, and this might be all you need if the music is in a major key. If you spot some accidentals too, see if they fit in the melodic scale of the minor key with the same key signature and be ready for some darker, more melancholic tones.

Did you learn something new today? If the answer is yes, I hope my words have demystified music a little more for you. But if there are still gaps in your knowledge which need filling do leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to help you. This is an ongoing series of blog posts which I hope will collectively help you gain a deeper understanding of the music you play.

The life of a professional recorder player

Many careers have a clear path, through a degree, perhaps some additional training, and then a reasonably predictable trajectory through a fulfilling working life. Being a professional recorder player certainly isn’t such a job! I imagine your connection with the recorder players and teachers you encounter perhaps reveals just one or two facets of our working lives. With this in mind I figured you might find it interesting to come with me and explore what it is I, and others like me, do to earn a living.

Along the way I’ll share some of the decisions I’ve made through my working life - some of them by choice, others triggered by circumstances in my life. It’s been an interesting career so far, with plenty of twists and turns I didn’t foresee when I started out, and I’m incredibly lucky to earn my living doing something I truly love.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.' – Steve Jobs

How does one become a professional musician?

When it comes to training, being a professional recorder player isn’t so different to any other musician. After A levels I had to figure out where I was going to study next. For music there are two options - studying at a university or a conservatoire. After weighing up the choices I chose to go to Triniy College of Music so I could study with Philip Thorby. I took the Graduate Course, which earned me a graduate diploma - the equivalent of an honours degree. At the time there was another option - the Performers Course - which was less academic and based around performance. While it was tempting to spend more time playing, I wanted a degree to allow me more options when I emerged into the world of work. These days all students going through a conservatoire training follow a degree course. This is an undoubtedly a positive development in today’s fluid working environment. I followed my GTCL with a postgraduate year, focused entirely on performance. This was an absolute joy after the long slog of my finals, where I had lots of academic work, including a full length thesis to write. During my postgrad year I also passed my LTCL teaching diploma.

What comes after the degree?

Graduation is a tricky moment for musicians. You’ve received an intensive training, learning to play your instrument to a high level, but that doesn’t necessarily reveal a clear path into working life. For players of orchestral instruments, there’s the possibility of an orchestra post, although few of these are long term salaried jobs today. For a recorder player this isn’t an option unless you happen to double on another baroque wind instrument, which might allow you to follow life as a woodwind player in a period instrument orchestra. Instead, most recorder players have to pursue what’s often called a portfolio career - in other words, a bit of this, a bit of that and a bit of the other!

A performer’s life

Without the possibility of a career as a full time orchestral musician, recorder players have to get creative and find other ways to perform. Occasional orchestral opportunities will arise, particularly in Baroque repertoire. I’ve played the recorder in Handel’s Acis and Galatea, Telemann’s Water Music, Purcell theatre music and many other pieces, but such performances are pretty irregular.

Another occasional pleasure is the experience of performing concertos with an orchestra. I’ve probably performed around twenty different concertos over the years, but for a recorder player, doing so is never going to provide an income large enough to live on. There are many pianists and string players working the concerto circuit, performing all over the world, but our chosen instrument is likely to remain a niche addition to the concert scene by comparison.

The most common route when it comes to performing on the recorder is to join friends and colleagues to form an ensemble. I’ve played with the Parnassian Ensemble for over 25 years now and it’s truly wonderful working with a group of friends I know so well. Finding performing opportunities is always a challenge though, demanding a lot of proactive work to seek out venues and concert series.

As a chamber musician you have two choices. The first is to find and book a venue and promote the concert yourself, hoping you’ll attract a large enough audience to cover your costs and make a surplus to pay all the performers. It can be a nerve wracking experience, but if you know you have a following in the area where you’re playing it can be reasonably successful. The second option is to find promoters and/or venues who have concert series which consistently attract audiences. In this situation the venue or promoter usually pays a fee, so you have a the pleasure of giving a concert without the worry that you’ll walk away empty handed. Unless you’re a big name this sort of performing work is rarely the path to a large income, but it’s tremendously rewarding playing to an appreciative audience. For most recorder professionals this performing work will go hand in hand with other jobs which offer more consistent remuneration.

Those who can, teach

Teaching is by far the most common career path for musicians. I struggled to find a specialist recorder teacher when I needed one as a teenager, so I knew there was scope for me to return to my home patch in Sussex when I graduated to seek work locally, teaching privately and in schools.

It was already clear to me that I wouldn’t be able to teach recorder for the local music service - a situation which has only worsened in many areas over the last three decades, as music services have been pared to the bone by cuts. Instead I set about contacting as many local private schools as I could to ask if they needed a recorder teacher. One came good almost immediately, and many more said they’d keep my details on record in case they needed someone in future. Three months later I got a phone call from the Prebendal School (Chichester’s Cathedral school) whose recorder teacher had been taken seriously ill. They needed someone to teach 29 students immediately. I was delighted to say yes, and that filled out my timetable and finances very nicely just six months after I’d graduated. The original teacher returned part time the following term, after which we shared the work for another year. She then retired and I inherited her remaining students permanently - a post I continued for twenty years.

Over the next twenty years or so I taught the recorder in three or four different schools each week. It was mostly one-to-one teaching, but I also worked in a village state school teaching whole classes. This was a tiny school, so classes rarely exceeded a dozen children, but many recorder teachers will routinely teach classes of up to thirty children. This takes enormous skill and I have huge admiration for teachers who do it well, enabling children to have a great first experience of the recorder.

Instrumental teaching in schools is a very variable thing today. With increasing financial pressures, music has gradually been pushed out of the curriculum in favour of more academic subjects. This is in spite of research proving that learning a musical instrument directly helps children in their other subjects - maths in particular. I’d like to think that as our new Prime Minister is a musician himself (Keir Starmer studied recorder and flute in the junior department of the Guildhall School of Music as a teenager) perhaps his own understanding of music might encourage him to allocate more funds to music teaching. Whether this is even possible in the short term is highly debatable, but I live in hope…

Pupils young and not so young

Over the last thirty years I’ve taught the recorder to pupils from the age of 8 to 80, covering all standards, from complete beginners to those considering becoming fellow professionals one day. These days all my pupils are adults - many of them people who learnt the recorder as a child and have returned to it in adulthood.

Teaching adults demands a different approach to educating children. Children happily try new things without fear of failing - after all one of the key ways we learn is by trying, failing and trying again. Adults come to learning an instrument with the baggage of life experience. We’re usually experts in our own field of work, and to fail at something makes us feel like, well let’s be honest, a failure! Because of this adult learners are often more cautious and less willing to try new things for fear of getting it wrong. If you’ve read some of my other blogs here on learning you’ll know my advice is to have a go and not worry about failure. No human is perfect and, yes, sometimes we all make a hash of things.

Working with groups of adults

Of course recorder education doesn’t come in just one size and the world of amateur music making is a wonderfully varied ecosystem. When I was at school I was the sole serious recorder student so my only opportunity to play in an ensemble then was to join an adult group in Worthing. I was at least three decades younger than any other member of the group, but I loved making music with them and it opened my eyes to the world of adult recorder players.

At 16 I attended the Recorder Summer School for the first time and discovered a thriving community of adult recorder players. I was so excited by the 150 strong massed playing sessions I even sent a postcard to my parents to tell them about it! It was here I first learnt about the Society of Recorder Players and I can draw a direct connection between this experience and the work that occupies much of my working life today. When I graduated I was invited to join the tutoring team at the Recorder Summer School and I’m still there, 31 years later!

One of the most significant elements of my working life today is conducting ensembles and working as musical director for three recorder orchestras. Doing so would have struck me as highly unlikely during my choral conducting classes at Trinity College - I spent most of those feeling utterly terrified. Fortunately, teaching at the summer school put me in front of groups of sympathetic musicians (many of whom still remembered me as a teenage student on the course) who forgave my early technical inadequacies and gave me the time and space to develop my skills.

When I first graduated, this work, conducting and teaching on courses, was largely the province of more mature professionals and for a long while I was significantly younger than most of my fellow tutors. I’m delighted to see this is now changing. Most of the recorder professionals who graduated around the same time as me simply didn’t view working with amateur musicians as a viable career path. This was partly because it was badly paid or done for love rather than income. Over the last twenty years this has gradually changed, and today I’m delighted to see more young professionals getting involved in this rewarding field of music making.

Working with adult amateur musicians is an area of my work which has expanded greatly over the last ten years - largely due to personal circumstances. In 2013 we moved 120 miles to the Hertfordshire/Essex border and, despite my best efforts, I wasn’t able to replace the school teaching I left behind in Sussex. More invitations gradually came in to visit SRP branches, conduct ensembles, teach evening classes and run other workshops. Eventually this part of my working life expanded so much that I came to the conclusion I’d rather be working with adults than teaching children - a decision I’ve never regretted.

Music isn’t the only road…

It’s not uncommon for recently graduated professionals to seek out work completely unrelated to music while they wait for their portfolio to develop. Of course, for some the experience of conservatoire life brings the realisation that they either don’t want the pressures of life as a working musician, or perhaps they see that their playing just isn’t good enough. But for these people, that music training is far from wasted.

This 2013 article in the Guardian describes how music graduates, through their training, acquire skills which are valuable in any number of different careers. Being a musician requires you to be self-reliant and good at working alone, able to use one’s time efficiently, great at working in a team, proficient at communicating with an audience, taking care of one’s own administrative tasks, developing IT skills and much, much more. Ok, we might not be much use at removing a brain tumour or plumbing in a central heating system, but the skills we do have can be applied to a huge range of jobs!

I was lucky enough to pick up sufficient teaching work fairly quickly, so my only non-teaching or performing job for a long while was working the occasional day in our local music shop. When we relocated in 2013 I was left with a large hole in my income, so I took on a job at our local National Trust property - Hatfield Forest.

Standing in the car park (often in a gale or pouring rain) welcoming visitors doesn’t sound scintillating, but it frequently demanded good people skills (especially when faced with irate visitors who couldn’t find a parking space) and I really enjoyed my eight years there as a Visitor Welcome Assistant. I met so many interesting people (not to mention making a fuss of the dogs who were taking their humans for a walk!) and made lots of friends along the way. Working outdoors was so far removed from my musical work, but I wouldn’t turn the clock back and change that career choice. Ultimately I handed my notice in with the National Trust, not because I didn’t want to work there any more, but because my musical life had once again taken a different direction and I was struggling to find time for a day off each week.

Musical entrepreneurship

If there’s a skill that’s required of all recorder professionals, it’s the ability to think creatively and laterally. Yes, teaching and performing are often the staples of our careers, but there are plenty of other creative outlets for our skills if we look hard enough. I’ve come to realise this ever more in recent years and, if you’ve visited my website before, you’ll perhaps have sampled the fruit of my creative efforts.

Build it and they will come?

When I first graduated I was delighted if someone invited me to work for them - perhaps doing one-to-one teaching, or tutoring on a course. The thought of branching out and setting up events for myself didn’t even occur to me. Why would I want to take the financial risk if someone else was willing to deal with the admin and pay me a fee?

The first project that really opened my eyes to the entrepreneurial possibilities was Bravo Bonsor! - a CD recording I masterminded with the support of the SRP in 2012. Brian Bonsor was a big influence on me, encouraging me to work with amateur musicians and inviting me to teach at the Recorder Summer School, so when the SRP asked me to oversee a project to create a CD of his music I was thrilled. Little did I realise it would take over my life for a whole year!

For this project I took on many different tasks. These included choosing the music, selecting a suitable group of musicians to play it, writing the programme notes for the CD insert booklet, shooting the album artwork and finding a venue and an engineer to record and press the CDs. Then we just had to rehearse the music and record it all over the space of two weekends, approve the final edit and the begin selling the CDs! In reality I could have passed some of the tasks on to others, but I was totally committed to the project and relished the way it stretched my administrative and musical skills. I learnt so much from the experience and, over a decade later, it’s still a highlight of my career to date.

The skills I gained through that project have been instrumental in much of the work I’ve taken on over the last few years. In 2016 I set up the Mellow Tones Recorder Orchestra, an eight foot recorder orchestra (tenor recorders and lower) which meets four times a year. I had no idea how many people might join, but today between 40 and 50 enthusiastic musicians attend each rehearsal. This gave me the confidence to dip my toe into administrating recorder courses and workshops of my own, and today I work as administrator and tutor for three residential courses.

Two of these courses are ones where I took over the administration from other people, but the third evolved because a venue which had employed me to tutor courses for many years closed permanently. It seemed a shame for the course to disappear entirely, so I took a leap of faith and set about figuring out what was required to make it happen without outside help.

At music college there’s no module teaching the skills needed to organise events - finding venues, setting budgets, advertising, devising timetables etc. Fortunately, years spent teaching on other courses, observing and learning how they were run, along with a decent slice of common sense, served me well. I’ve discovered I really enjoy the process of putting these administrative jigsaws together, even if there are moments when I feel like tearing my hair out!

Of course, the move from hired tutor to course administrator/director isn’t without its nerve shredding moments. Covid 19 proved a particularly worrying time. At one point in 2020 I was faced with the possibility of having to cancel one course while still being liable for the venue costs alongside refunding the people who’d booked - an eye watering potential loss of around £12,000. Ultimately the Covid regulations came to my rescue, preventing conference centres reopening until after my course was due to run - phew!

That terrifying prospect aside, I’ve always been cautious when planning budgets in case events aren’t fully booked. Yes, the moment when you open bookings for a course always brings a nervous buzz (“What if no one wants to come?”) but I’m lucky enough to have built up a supportive community of musicians who attend them. I’ll never take this for granted and it’s thanks to people like you that I’m able to do this work.

Putting pen to paper

It’s not uncommon for musicians to compose and arrange for their chosen instrument, and I think this is particularly prevalent among recorder professionals. Having composed your piece the next step is to find a publisher…. or perhaps set up your own publishing house instead!

For a long while music was mostly printed by big publishing houses - Schott, Universal, Faber, OUP and the like. These are companies with large overheads and they’re happy to publish works that’ll sell millions of copies. But the cost/benefit balance doesn’t work so well when you’re talking about an edition which might only sell a handful of copies each year. Sadly a lot of recorder music falls into this latter category. In the 1980s small, homespun publishing houses began to spring up - Oriel Library was the first one I became aware of. These editions were often handwritten (beautifully so in the case of Oriel Library) and then copied. Because the company’s overheads were low the music was often modestly priced and they were in a much better position to take a risks publishing pieces which might only sell in small numbers.

With the advent of computer programmes to typeset music (Sibelius being perhaps the best known) several recorder players began creating their own editions - names such as the Clark Collection, Hawthorns Music, Willobie Press and Mayhill Editon. The recorder world is now probably one of the most abundant in terms of small publishing houses and I feel sure our repertoire of both original music and arrangements has benefitted in terms of quantity and variety. When Ruth and Jeremy Burbidge bought Recorder MusicMail in the early 1990s they too created their own publishing house (Peacock Press). As larger publishers have chosen to drop recorder pieces from their catalogues they’ve often been saved from oblivion and subsumed into Peacock Press. Without this flourishing DIY publishing market who knows what gems we might have lost from our repertoire forever?

While I’ve never had any skill for composing, I’ve enjoyed arranging music for recorders since I was a student. A number of my arrangements have been published over the years by several of our DIY recorder publishers and more recently I’ve begun to offer PDF download editions via my own website. This work will never make me rich, but opens up my arrangements for others to use them, as well as being another small contribution to my financial bottom line.

Words as well as music

I may have no compositional talents, but one thing I do particularly love is the written word - as you may have realised from my lengthy blogs!

As part of my preparation for the occasional recorder technique workshops I run, I created a comprehensive handout for my students as a reminder of everything we covered during the day. A few years ago I realised this handout might form the basis for a book so I could share my knowledge more widely. This began life as an ebook which could be downloaded from my website for a small sum, but I soon received requests for a printed version too. Such a volume is never going to be a bestseller, so I took the self publishing route, typesetting the text myself and getting them printed by Blurb and, more recently, Mixam. I take copies with me to recorder events as well as selling them via my website.

Passive sources of income like this are a really useful boost for any musician, and without too much day to day work I receive a small but steady stream of income from my book. The only demands on me now are trips to the post box to dispatch them and occasionally ordering more books from the printer. I’ve sold around 1000 copies over the last decade, in ebook and print format, so I think my book has more than repaid me for the work it took to create it!

Finding one’s feet in IT

Our world has changed enormously in my lifetime. We’ve gone from being an analogue society, with much of our working lives based around paper, to one where it’s almost impossible to avoid at least a degree of interaction with IT. This has opened up many new avenues of possibility, but that same technology can also be a hard task master. Email, for instance, is a wonderful communication tool but the endless flow of inbound messages can be overwhelming at times.

The internet has opened up many new ways to reach the recorder community with our musical offerings - websites, email, social media and other electronic channels such as YouTube. The recording world has been particularly deeply affected. Not so long ago people purchased CDs to listen to the music they loved, but today streaming is the dominant force. This makes it much easier and cost effective for the listener to explore fresh music, but for performers the income derived from recordings has slumped to a pittance - fractions of a penny per track streamed on most platforms. By comparison, the sale of a CD may typically net the performer around 10% of the sale price - still a small sum but a huge amount more than streaming. Ultimately, recording and selling albums of music isn’t a route to huge wealth for most classical musicians, but it nonetheless remains an important way to gain visibility and allows us to leave our own small musical legacy.

Music on video - learning to master the algorithm

Beyond traditional audio formats we have the world of online video streaming - YouTube being the most familiar. Many musicians have taken this route to build a stronger connection with their audience and in the recorder world Sarah Jeffery is probably the best known personality. Her Team Recorder YouTube channel is now eight years old, with over 200,000 followers - an amazing achievement for what many would deem to be a niche, minority instrument. Don’t let Sarah’s relaxed and informal demeanour fool you though - achieving and maintaining such a following while not compromising one’s principles takes a huge amount of work!

Running a successful YouTube channel can create a useful amount of income but with it comes a fine balancing act. YouTube’s financial rewards are greatest when you produce content that draws lots of views for the advertisers. That’s fine if you can create the right sort of content on a regular basis, but taking a break or changing the type of material you share can impact your income. Another YouTuber I follow, sing-songwriter Mary Spender, has talked about how the type of videos she enjoys making most aren’t necessarily the ones that generate the greatest income. Continually churning out exactly the same thing may be financially rewarding, but this has to be balanced against retaining your own enthusiasm for the project and not burning out while trying to meet your audience’s demands for a never ending flow of new material.

I see this exact effect on much a smaller basis with my own electronic offerings. I find it fascinating to track which of my videos and blogs attract lots of clicks and downloads. I now know that smaller scale Baroque consorts are usually most popular, while the larger pieces or repertoire outside the recorder’s natural territory get less traction. Yes, I could keep churning out more and more of the same, but I know some of my audience enjoy those more unusual items and I want help them too. It’s also important that I retain my own level of interest if I’m to continue doing my job as well as you expect.

Problem solving and lateral thinking

'When you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it.' – Theodore Roosevelt

From a personal perspective, I never planned on creating my own digital resources but a certain virus pandemic led me to this route. In the course of a couple of weeks in March 2020 my entire working life was cancelled and I suddenly had lots of free time, but what to do with it?

Looking back, I never considered that IT might be a part of my working life when I was studying. During my college years the only computers I’d ever used were prehistoric ones at school where you loaded programmes via a cassette tape, and the marginally less ancient BBC machines we had in the Trinity College computer suite. My experience of them was unremittingly awful, and by the time I graduated I had absolutely zero interest in anything IT related. When my partner bought his first PC in the mid-1990s I tentatively began to explore the world of computers. I’ve never taken any sort of course in computing, but I have a curious mind and a willingness to try new things, so I’ve picked up skills piecemeal as I’ve needed them.

Over the years I learnt enough about word processing and music typesetting to keep up with my work, and later I began to create simple websites for my projects. I still have zero coding skills, but thankfully there are tools which allow me to drag and drop text and photos into ready made templates to create clean, easy to use webpages.

After a few weeks of pandemic restrictions I’d explored every inch of our village and the countryside surrounding it with my camera and, like most recorder players, was missing my musical activities. I’d seen a few playalong resources online, but felt I could offer something different if I could find a way of doing it. I enjoy exploring new technology, so I did some research to find the right solution. This proved to be the Acapella app on my iPhone and, after lots of experimentation, I found a way to create my multitrack videos, including a view of me conducting to help those who needed it.

But where to share my offerings? I certainly didn’t want to step on Sarah’s toes on YouTube. My solution was to create a page on my website and I used Facebook to encourage people to visit….

Around this time I’d started an ongoing conversation with David DuChemin, a Canadian photographer whose work and teaching I love. I mentioned my new musical project and he suggested that using social media to publicise it was a flawed plan - only a tiny proportion of your followers ever see what you’re sharing because of the algorithms in use. What I needed was an email newsletter so I could contact my audience directly. As you’ll have realised by now I like a challenge - I thrive on solving problems - so this was just another project to run with. I had no idea how best to create a mailing list so I jumped onto the internet and found out! David was incredibly generous with his advice too and the result is the Score Lines emails I send out every two weeks, which continue to this day - yet another element of my portfolio career.

Of course, arranging music and creating videos kept me busy and brought the feel-good factor because I was helping others, but it wasn’t necessarily going to help my newly Covid-impoverished financial situation. I was left with a conundrum - should I give them away free, charge per download or find another route entirely? I was conscious that many people were in a similar financial situation to me, so I finally opted for a donation system. Those who wanted to use my consort music and videos could do so free of charge, but for those who saw value in them and could afford to do so, they had the option to make a donation toward them.

Back in 2008 writer and editor Kevin Kelly said the following in a blog post:

“To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.”

His logic was that if each of your 1000 true fans spent $100 on your concerts/music/art each year you’d earn a comfortable living. Even that level of income is a mere pipe dream for most grass roots music professionals, but I can see the sense in his words. With the donation system I chose for my consort videos I’ve seen this in action firsthand. They are downloaded by hundreds of people each month, but the income I receive from the few who really see value in them and choose to donate brings in sufficient income to allow me to keep creating more of them. Did I make the right choice on this back in 2020? Without a time machine I’ll never know, but I stand by that decision. Either way, those first few videos changed my working life forever and for that I’m grateful - a positive outcome from something as destructive as a pandemic.

Always moving forward…

Life should never be a static thing and the most recent addition to my working portfolio has been this Score Lines blog. As the Covid virus began to recede I assumed use of my consort music and videos would probably wane because recorder players could once again get together with friends to play in person. Having built up a small but loyal audience (heading towards 1900 at the time of writing), I wanted to continue that connection, offering something they would hopefully find useful in the long term. I’ve always loved sculpting the written word, so sharing my knowledge in text format was a logical way to go. Every two weeks I enjoy a this wordsmithing and I hope the result is something you find enjoyable and educational too. Coming up with a continued and varied selection of topics certainly challenges my curious mind and I think I’ve probably learned as much as any of my readers along the way!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So there you have a glimpse into the world of this particular professional recorder player. Such is the nature of the world that each and every musician you encounter will likely have a different combination of jobs contributing to their career. Some are more musically or financially rewarding than others, but together they make up our working lives. There’s never a dull moment as a professional musician. One’s income can be unpredictable and it’s rarely the career to follow if you wish to be rich, but the counterpoint to that is that it’s tremendously varied and immensely rewarding. Let’s face it, given the choice between the myriad of tasks I do and a job spent in an office 9-5 every day there’s simply no competition!

Musical evolution - from the canzona to the sonata

With music, developments usually come through evolution rather than revolution – as in nature, changes happen gradually over time. Musical forms slowly mutate, sometimes changing their names and definitions along the way. Today I’m going to explore two types of music we often encounter as recorder players - the canzona and sonata - looking at the connections between them. In previous blogs where I’ve delved into dance forms we’ve stuck with one period of music, but the canzona and sonata will transport us from the Renaissance right up to the present day.

The Canzona

The Canzona (or Canzon) first emerged in the late 16th century as an instrumental complement to the vocal chanson. Its evolution began in Italy, where Frescobaldi composed lots of them for keyboard instruments and the Gabrielis (Andrea and Giovanni) were writing them for ensembles. Gradually the canzona spread across Europe and ultimately became popular with composers of other nationalities. 

In its simplest form the canzona is a single movement, opening with a musical theme which the composer then varies and develops. This is often achieved by creating imitation between the parts – a technique later used in the fugue in a more precisely structured way. The extract below, from Giovanni Gabrieli’s Canzon Seconda, does exactly this, with the same melodic idea appearing in all four voices in turn, before the composer moves on to other themes. The rhythmic pattern he uses at the beginning is also very typical of canzonas from this period – a long note followed by two short ones.

Play along with Gabrieli Canzon Seconda with my consort video.

As the canzona evolved, composers began to add short sections with different time signatures and tempi to add variety, but these remained interconnected sections rather than separate movements. Most canzonas begin in duple (2) time, with later contrasting sections in triple (3) time. There’s often a mathematical relationship between the tempo of these contrasting sections – something I know many musicians find hard to calculate. I explored this topic in one of my earlier blogs, so if you’ve ever found yourself perplexed by the change from two to three you can find it here!

An extract of a Canzon by Frescobaldi, with linked sections in different time signatures and tempi:

Composers rarely specified the exact instrumentation for their canzonas during this period, opting instead for non-specific part names such as cantus, altus, tenore and bassus. This means they can be freely played on any instruments whose range matches that of the music and we should feel no compunction about playing them on recorders! In 1608 the entrepreneur Alessandro Reverii published a collection in Venice titled Canzoni per sonare con ogni sorte di stromenti, containing music by twelve different composers. The very title of this collection gives carte blanch for them to be played on wind, brass or string instruments and no doubt helped with sales too!

That said, some works do request specific instruments, including some of Giovanni Gabrieli’s later works. His Sonate pian’e forte (1597) specifies it’s to be played by two choirs of instruments – a cornetto and three trombones in one, balanced by a viola and three trombones in the second. This particular piece is notable for other reasons too. One is his use of dynamic markings (as you can see in the extract below) - a real rarity at this time. The second is title - Sonate. In spite of the name, it’s still fundamentally a canzona, rather than a sonata as we would understand it today, but it shows the direction in which music was moving. It’s worth remembering too that the word sonata derives from the Latin word sonare (to sound), implying it’s a work to be played on an instrument rather than sung.

Gabrieli Sonate pian’ e forte

Evolution of the sonata

View fullsize

The title page of Castello’s Sonate concertate in stil moderno per sonar

Gradually, in the middle of the 17th century composers began to separate the canzona's interlinked sections into distinct movements to create the sonata, and this became the dominant form of chamber music during the Baroque period. This change didn’t happen overnight, as you can hear from the recording of Dario Castello’s Sonata Prima below. Despite the name, the contrasting musical sections are still linked to each other in a single movement. This particular work comes from a collection titled Sonate concertate in stil moderno per sonar - Castello’s way of showing that he was exploring newer styles of writing. As a listener it definitely feels modern compared to the music of Gabrieli, but it’s still more closely related to the canzona than the sonatas of Handel and Telemann.

As the contrasting sections broke apart to form distinct movements, some of them would still retain the canzona’s imitative style. This is particularly true of faster movements, where you’ll often hear melodic material shared between the solo and continuo parts.

This little known Sonata in G by Andrew Parcham shows the further evolution of the form. Again, some of the contrasting musical sections run from one to another seamlessly, but there are also places when you sense the transition towards something with clearly separate movements.

Download the music for Andrew Parcham’s Sonata in G here.

When we finally arrive at the high Baroque the sonata emerges in two distinct forms - the Sonata da camera (chamber sonata) and the Sonata da chiesa (church sonata).

The Sonata da Camera has four movements: Slow-Fast-Slow-Fast - a format Telemann uses in many of his recorder sonatas. His Sonata in C from Der Getreue Musikmeister is a good example of the da Camera sonata:

The Sonata da Chiesa on the other hand, has just three movements: Fast-Slow-Fast. In this Bach Sonata for organ the da Chiesa format seems particularly appropriate, given it’s most likely to be played in a church. However, Bach also composed plenty of four movement da Camera sonatas too.

Ultimately the da Camera/da Chiesa concept is something of an academic distinction because a sonata can have any number of movements. Here are two more examples, starting with a Vivaldi flute sonata which has three movements but completely ignores the Fast-Slow-Fast rule!

View fullsize

And then there are sonatas like Handel’s Recorder Sonata in C major, which has five movements. These almost adheres to the da Camera, Slow-Fast-Slow-Fast principle, but then he sneaks in a Gavotte just before the final movement to show that rules are intended to be broken! Technically a piece made up of dance movements is a Suite rather than a Sonata, but it wasn’t uncommon for composers to blur the lines between the two.

Once the Baroque sonata had arrived, rules began to form regarding how it was composed. Usually a Sonata featured one or more solo instruments (as we saw in my recent blog post about trio and quartet sonatas) accompanied by a basso continuo team. This team often comprised of cello or viola da gamba plus harpsichord, but could be varied to use the organ as well as other plucked instruments, such as a lute or theorbo.

The form of the individual movements tends to fall into two categories. Many are through-composed, meaning they have just one continuous section, often using a musical theme which evolves through the movement. The other common format is Binary form which, as the name suggests, is made up of two sections (A and B), each of which is repeated - as you can hear in the first movement of Telemann’s Recorder Sonata in F:

Later sonatas

The sonata continued to evolve through the Classical and Romantic periods - a time when the recorder was sadly all but dormant. The first movement of the Classical sonata evolved from the simplicity of Baroque binary movements into the more complex Sonata Form, which followed an expanded ternary (ABA) structural pattern.

The two sections of the earlier binary form are now combined into one opening section as two contrasting musical themes, each in a different key. This opening section of a sonata form movement is called the Exposition. This is a followed by the Development, where the themes are added to and expanded upon, followed by a Recapitulation, which returns to some of the earlier musical ideas to round off the movement. Sonata form also became the dominant form for the opening movement of many works in the Classical and Romantic periods, including concertos, symphonies and chamber music (e.g. string quartets).

This Sonata Form movement is often the centre of gravity for Classical or Romantic sonatas as it tends to be the longest movement. It was usually followed by three other movements - traditionally a slow movement, a Minuet or Scherzo and culminated with a lively finale of some sort.

The Sonata in the 20th century and beyond

Sadly the recorder missed out on Classical and Romantic sonatas, but many contemporary composers since the recorder’s revival in the early twentieth century have chosen to write sonatas for the instrument. York Bowen (1884-1961) chose to write his Sonatina (a small sonata) in a positively Romantic style, while Lennox Berkeley went for a more contemporary feel. Composed in 1939, this work is one of the first sonatas written for the recorder after its revival.

During its evolution from the renaissance canzona, to the endless variety of modern sonatas, this musical form has undoubtedly covered a lot of ground.

Do you have favourite sonatas you return to regularly, either as a player or listener, for the recorder or any other instrument? Why not share your favourites with us in the comments below - it’ll be fascinating to learn which canzonas and sonatas make it into your personal playlists!

Trios for four

Following on from my exploration of Italian recorder sonatas earlier this year, we’re expanding our horizons today to the Baroque Trio Sonata. All of them feature the recorder, but I’ve opened up my research to include other instruments too, so you’ll have the pleasure of enjoying many different musical colours.

What is a trio sonata?

Before I share my favourite pieces from this genre of chamber music, let’s explore the basic concept of a trio sonata…

The form originated in the early 17th century as a sonata for two instruments and basso continuo, often in several movements, and remained popular throughout the Baroque era. Not content with following the popular pattern, Bach also used the term for a series of organ pieces where all three lines are played by one musician on two organ manuals and pedals. Having recently arranged one of these for two recorders and continuo, the very idea of one human playing three such complex lines at once is simply mind boggling!

Returning to the standard trio sonata format, from the name you’d expect them to be played by three musicians, wouldn’t you? But counterintuitively this isn’t generally the case. Yes, a trio sonata encompasses three melodic lines, but they’re normally played by at least four musicians. Take a look at this extract from a Telemann Trio Sonata (one we’ll encounter again later):

View fullsize

There are three melodic lines - two for recorder, flute or violin (offering a piece of music for multiple instruments was common in the Baroque and a cunning way to sell more copies) and a third for an instrument in bass clef. This bass line would be performed by the continuo team of at least two musicians. The first would be a sustaining instrument - normally a cello or viola da gamba, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t use a wind instrument such as a bassoon.

Now look a few bars into the piece and you’ll see some numbers above the bass line. These are called figured bass and are intended for a harmonic instrument - usually some sort of keyboard, such as a harpsichord, spinet or organ. These figures tell the keyboard player which chords to play above the bassline to complete the harmony. Beyond the actual harmonies, the keyboard player has total freedom - they can play chords of just two or three notes, or create something more dramatic or melodic from them.

This short extract from a modern edition of a Handel Trio Sonata includes an extra stave above the bass line. Here the editor has created a suggested realisation of the figured bass. This is useful for keyboard players who can’t interpret figured bass on the spot, but there’s no reason why a performer has to stick rigidly to these exact notes.

As you’ll see and hear in some of the recordings I’ve selected, it’s entirely possible to expand the continuo team further still, with plucked string instruments, such as a lute, guitar or theorbo (a deeper member of the lute family), adding even more colour and texture to the performance.

Now let’s explore some of my favourite trio sonatas featuring the recorder. I’ve spent a long time seeking out some beautiful performances of these works, which I hope you’ll enjoy. Where possible I’ve also included a link to CDs including these performances (many of them are available via streaming services too), along with links to a playlist of the complete album on YouTube where it’s available. I’ve included a link to the IMSLP page for each sonata too, so you can play them if you wish to. There are usually several editions to choose from for each sonata, including facsimiles of the original 18th century publications for some of them, giving you a glimpse of the composer’s original intentions.

George Frideric Handel - Sonata in F major

Baroque Trio Sonatas performed by Opus 4 Paula Records PACD64

Baroque Trio Sonatas complete playlist

Download the music from IMSLP

Play the Handel Trio Sonata in F with my Trio ‘minus one’ consort video

Handel wrote six wonderful solo sonatas for the recorder, composed after his move to London, and these are familiar to most recorder players. This charming trio sonata comes from earlier in his career, while he was still living in Italy, and is the only one he composed for two recorders.

Handel was a great recycler of good musical Iines and you may well experience a sense of déjà vu listening to the third movement of the sonata. As you can see below, the opening arpeggio patterns (and the harmonies too) are replicated almost exactly in his fourth recorder sonata, also in F major. But in this later solo sonata he uses them more concisely - no doubt with the benefit of several more years of composing experience.

View fullsize

Trio Sonata in F

View fullsize

Solo Sonata in F

Georg Philipp Telemann - Sonata in C major

Telemann Chamber Music performed by Passacaglia Barn Cottage Records

Telemann Chamber Music complete playlist

Download the music from IMSLP

Play the Telemann Trio Sonata in C with my Trio ‘minus one’ consort video

Telemann was a talented multi-instrumentalist, playing the recorder, flute, oboe, violin, viola da gamba, double bass and more instruments besides. He had a natural instinct when composing for the recorder and his music is justly beloved by those of us who play the instrument. This Trio Sonata is one of his finest, often affectionately known as ‘The Girlfriends’ on account of the movement names.

Telemann composed four trio sonatas for two recorders but this is undoubtedly the most imaginative. In it he depicts notable women from history through music, from Xantippe, the nagging wife of Socrates, to Clelia, a Roman woman who swam the River Tiber to escape captivity, and Dido, Queen of Carthage. In common with Telemann’s other recorder music, this sonata lies beautifully under the fingers (as you’d expect from someone who evidently played the instrument so well) and it’s a joy to play this exceptional music.

Henry Purcell - Three Parts Upon a Ground

Live performance by Mélanie Flahaut, Jean-François Novelli et Jean Tubéry (recorders), François Joubert-Caillet (viola da gamba), Matthias Spaeter (theorbo) & Philippe Grisvard (harpsichord)

Download the music from IMSLP

This is the only work I’ve chosen which wasn’t originally composed for the recorder. Technically this piece for three violins and continuo isn’t a trio sonata, as it’s just a single movement, but the music is so fantastic I couldn’t in all conscience omit it from my list. Originally written in D major, it works very well on recorders when transposed a minor third higher into F major, and this recording is just fabulous.

The entire piece is based upon this repeating six note ground bass:

Unlike many works written around a ground bass, Purcell allows the continuo team to stray from this to become equal melodic partners from time to time. He also changes the time signature time mid-flow, from compound to simple time and back again - another unusual characteristic compared to most pieces of this type. This time change is followed by a section where the third recorder part pairs up with the bassline in canon, while the upper two voices play an entirely different canon against them. Before a final, energetic dash for the finishing line the continuo team strike up their own melodic line, while the recorder parts play the original ground bass - truly turning things upside down!

Daniel Purcell - Sonata in G minor

A Noble Entertainment - Music from Queen Anne’s London performed by The Parnassian Ensemble. Avie AV2094

A Noble Entertainment complete playlist

Download the music from IMSLP

Daniel Purcell tends to be hidden in the shadow of Henry, who was either his older brother or maybe a cousin. Perhaps that shouldn’t be the case as he wrote some great music which is sadly neglected today. Having joined the choir of the Chapel Royal at the age of 14, Daniel spent time as organist at Magdalen College, Oxford before returning to London to work in the theatre, where he composed incidental music for over forty plays.

London had a thriving music scene in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, with composers arriving from all over Europe to live and work here. If you’re interested in exploring this musical melting pot do listen to the complete album (playlist link above) as it includes music from many composers who may be unfamiliar to you.

Johann Friedrich Fasch - Sonata in G major for flute & two recorders

Live performance by Yu Ma (flute), Yi-Chang Liang & Zeng Yixing (recorders), Chia-Hua Chiang (cello), Asako Ueda (guitar) & Machiko Suto (harpsichord)

Download the music from IMSLP

Here we expand the concept of a trio sonata, adding a flute to two recorders to create a quartet sonata. In this work Fasch mostly pairs the recorders, using them to complement the flute line, both in tone colour and texture. Fasch was a German violinist and composer, well respected and performed widely in his day but little known today - Telemann performed a cycle of his church cantatas in Hamburg in 1733 and Bach arranged one of his trio sonatas for organ. I talked earlier about the flexibility of the basso continuo team and this performance is a good example. As well as cello and harpsichord, a baroque guitar has been added to expand and add variety to the texture.

Johann Joachim Quantz - Sonata in C major

Quantz: Musique de Chambre à la Cour de Dresde performed by Ensemble Baroque le Rondeau & Jean-Pierre Boullet Syrius SYR 141335

Quantz Chamber Music complete playlist

Download the music from IMSLP

It was quite unusual at this time to write music for recorder and flute together, but as the previous sonata demonstrated, not totally unheard of. Quantz was an important character in the late Baroque, working as a composer, performer, and flute maker at the court of Frederick the Great. We know he taught the flute to the monarch so perhaps he composed this sonata to play with his pupil?

Quantz’s working life straddles the transition between the Baroque and Classical periods and his music is known to have been admired by Bach, Haydn and Mozart. You can hear the subtle evolution of musical style, especially in this Larghetto, where he effortlessly creates long, expressive musical lines. In this recording the continuo team brings a lighter touch, swapping cello and harpsichord for bassoon and lute - a beautiful but unusual combination.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Sonata in F for bass recorder and viola

Rococo performed by Dorothee Oberlinger & Ensemble 1700 Deutsche HM 88875134062

Download the music from IMSLP

If you think of the bass recorder as being the lowest instrument of a recorder quartet, often saddled with dull, repetitive music, think again! In this sonata it features as an equal with the viola, with musical lines every bit as challenging as those we play on smaller recorders. Carl Philipp Emanuel was the fifth son of JS Bach, born in 1714. The latest of the composers I’m featuring today, he began writing at a time when music was transitioning to the more expressive and turbulent style of the Classical period - clearly evident in this trio sonata.

The combination of bass recorder and viola is a curious but beautiful one - soulful and mellow. It requires a sensitive continuo team to allow the subtle melodic lines to sing, but Dorothee Oberlinger and Ensemble 1700 bring so much character to this performance and it’s a joyful experience for one’s ears!

Antonio Vivaldi - Sonata in A minor RV86 recorder and bassoon

Vivaldi: Gods, Emperors and Angels performed by Sara Deborah Struntz (violin), Pamela Thorby (recorder), Peter Whelan (bassoon), La Serenissima, Adrian Chandler (violin/director) Avie AV2201

Vivaldi : Gods, Emperors and Angels complete playlist

Download the music from IMSLP

We’re perhaps most familiar with Vivaldi as a composer of concertos (literally hundreds of them, including a number for recorder) but he wrote many different genres of music, including a number of trio sonatas. This example for recorder and bassoon is an astonishing work, demanding huge virtuosity from both players. The bassoon and recorder are equal partners, but each has a distinct character. The recorder often has singing, melodic lines, while Vivaldi exploits the bassoon’s more percussive articulation to create some sparkling and, at times, explosive contrasts. Having played the baroque bassoon (albeit it in a pretty average way) for a number of years I’m in awe of the way Peter Whelan negotiates this incredibly difficult music. In this Largo he provides an arpeggiated moto perpetuo counterpoint to Pamela Thorby’s beautifully ornamented and lyrical melodic line. Do explore the whole sonata (playlist linked above) and you’ll be equally astonished by the other movements!

Georg Philipp Telemann - Quartet in D minor from Tafelmusik

Telemann: Tafelmusik, performed by Florilegium & Walter van Hauwe Channel CCS19198

Telemann Tafelmusik complete playlist

Download the music from IMSLP

I finish today with perhaps one of the finest pieces of this type - another larger scale composition. Telemann published his collection Tafelmusik in 1733 - one of the last examples of this genre of music. Tafelmusik was initially published under the title of Musique de table (table music) and such collections were intended as an accompaniment for formal dinners at weddings and other events. Publishing it cost an exorbitant amount, so to offset the expense Telemann found more than 200 people who were willing to help fund it in advance. In return their names, addresses and social status were included in the first edition. Both Handel and Quantz were among these initial subscribers.

The music itself is very varied, opening with an overture for orchestra, followed by solo and trio sonatas, a concerto and this quartet. In a mirror image of the Fasch Sonata we heard earlier, Telemann chooses to use a solo recorder (this part can also be played on bassoon) with two flutes. The music may have been conceived as a diversion for an audience whose focus would perhaps have been less than 100%, but it’s far from trivial, conjuring up a host of colours, textures and characters. In this movement alone the music veers between a boisterous Allegro and music of a more lilting nature, making effective use of the tonal differences between the recorder and flutes. I encourage you to listen to the whole collection (see above for link to complete playlist) - it really is a musical tour de force!

~ ~ ~

If you’ve never explored the Trio Sonata genre before I hope my recommendations have opened your eyes to fresh musical horizons. But if you’re already an aficionado of this delightful chamber music perhaps you’ve discovered something unfamiliar to expand your repertoire? Do remember, if you want to try playing this repertoire with friends you don’t necessarily need a tame cellist or harpsichordist. Many of the bass lines will fit on a bass recorder (with just the odd low note shifted an octave higher) and even playing just the three melodic lines will give you a taster of their musical charm. There’s also no reason why you shouldn’t offer the score to a sensitive pianist and they can give the editor’s continuo realisation a whirl. Incidentally, if you use Apple Music, I’ve created a playlist there containing many of these recordings which you can find here.

If I’ve omitted your favourite trio sonata from my list why not tell us about it in the comments below, perhaps linking to your favourite recording of the work? This is a rich and varied repertoire and I’d love us to explore it further together as a community!