Time travel for musicians - from the Medieval to the 18th century

What’s your favourite era of music? Is there a style of music that communicates to you more clearly than others? Teachers often refer to different periods of music, but what do we actually mean by Renaissance or Romantic music?

Like art and architecture, music is generally defined as belonging to particular stylistic eras. There are often features in common between these genres - for instance ornate decoration is a characteristic of both Baroque architecture and music. But there are also other terms too, which describe particular styles of music, as much as the period of history in which they were composed. At the most basic level, musical eras are divided up into periods of time, as follows:

• Medieval up to around 1400

• Renaissance 1400-1600

• Baroque 1600-1750

• Classical 1750-1820

• Romantic 1820-1900

• Modern/Contemporary 1900 onwards

While these dates are a useful guide, music doesn’t necessarily fit neatly into them, as we’ll see. Some composers were rule breakers, ahead of their time - think of Carlo Gesualdo, composing extraordinary harmonies in the Renaissance, some of which still feel extreme today. In contrast, we have composers like Elgar whose music is firmly rooted in the Romantic style, even though he was writing at the same time as modernists like Schoenberg. As a result the boundaries become rather blurred, so the dates above are a rough guideline rather than strict rules.

Having a sound knowledge of these different periods of music will undoubtedly help you understand the repertoire you play more easily - a composer’s intentions often become clearer when we understand the context in which they were writing. Of course there are some periods in which our instrument, the recorder, barely featured at all. That’s not to say we won’t play music from the Classical and Romantic periods, but in order to do so, we have to be prepared to borrow repertoire from other instruments.

In this blog post, I’m going to focus on three periods of music, returning to later eras in a future post. My original intention was to cover the whole of western classical music, but I quickly realised doing so would result in something worthy of an entire book, rather than a single blog post! Let’s make a start with the earliest years of formal music making…

Medieval Music

Humans have been making music in one way or another since our species first evolved. Initially we used our voices, but instruments made from animal bones have been found from 60,000 years ago. By the start of the Medieval period, music had become intrinsically linked with the church and it was here that vocal music first flourished. This earliest music can be described as monophony - that is a single line of plainsong, sung in unison. Over time this expanded into organum, where two lines were sung in parallel, a fourth or fifth apart - the simplest form of harmony.

But music wasn’t purely used in religious settings. Troubadors travelled throughout Europe, singing secular songs, often about courtly love. These musicians would have accompanied their singing with instruments such as the lute, dulcimer, vielle, psaltery and hurdy-gurdy. Wind instruments, such as the recorder and flute, were also common, as well as simple brass instruments and percussion.

An Ars Subtilior manuscript

Gradually polyphonic music developed during the Medieval period - the use of multiple lines working independently of each other - by composers such as Machaut and Perotin. Later still, in southern France, music of even greater complexity evolved - Ars Subtilior. This was mostly secular vocal music, with enormous rhythmic complexity - some of it unmatched until the 20th century.

A selection of Medieval composers

Hildegard of Bingen, Léonin, Pérotin, Guillaume de Machaut, Francesco Landini, John Dunstable.

A musical Renaissance

By the time we reach the Renaissance, music was an important feature of all parts of life, appearing in religious, civic and courtly settings.

Early in the Renaissance, the church was still the most significant setting for music and many composers wrote motets and masses for this purpose, usually based around Latin texts. Polyphonic music had now become the norm, with parts moving independently of each other, and lots of imitation between the voices.

A Renaissance printed part book

The advent of printing allowed music to be published at an ever greater rate, with much of it aimed at amateur musicians. Secular vocal music, such as chansons and madrigals, and instrumental music too, was published in partbooks which could be used in a domestic setting. Before this music had to be copied by hand, a very time-consuming and expensive process, and the advent of printing allowed music to be disseminated much more widely and speedily.

Many different forms of instrumental music developed during this period, including forms such as the toccata, prelude, ricercar and canzona, as well as many types of music for dancing. The Canzona gradually evolved into the sonata, a form which composes continue to us to this day. I’ve written a blog all about the evolution from the canzona to the sonata which you can read here.

Madrigals became one of the most popular types of secular vocal music during the Renaissance, and composers typically used word painting to depict the text they were setting. For instance, in Thomas Weelkes’ As Vesta was from Latmos Hill Descending when the text talks of running down the hill we hear the notes in scurrying downward runs.

Renaissance instruments

A bass viol or viola da gamba

The Renaissance saw many developments in musical instruments. The viol family became very became very popular and a huge repertoire of music developed for this family of instruments. Viols (not to be confused with the violin family, which we’ll look at later) have sloping shoulders and a flat back, with six strings (occasionally seven for the bass viol) and frets on the fingerboard to help the player with intonation. Like the recorder, they come in several sizes, from treble down to bass and consort music was composed for endless combinations of treble, tenor and bass viols. This consort repertoire included standalone pieces, such as Fantasias, but dance music too became very popular. Many composers wrote sets of dances, often pairing the Pavan with a faster dance such as the Galliard. I’ve written in more detail about Renaissance dance music here if you’d like to learn more about this topic.

Wind instruments were also popular in the Renaissance, such as the recorder and flute, and they were sometimes combined with strings in broken consorts. Music formed a large part of life in the royal court, in religious, domestic and ceremonial settings. Henry VIII in particular employed a large number of musicians, including a court recorder consort based around the Bassano family.

Precursors to many of today’s instruments developed during the Renaissance, including the violin, lute, guitar, curtal (predecessor to the bassoon) and sackbut (an early form of trombone). These presented composers with an ever greater array of musical colours to explore, although the precise instrumentation was rarely specified in the music. Of course this gives us carte blanche as recorder players to explore any type of music from this period!

The following video features a consort of sackbuts and cornetts. The cornett uses a cupped mouthpiece, much like the trumpet, while the body is made of leather-covered wood and fingered much like a recorder.

Harmony and ornamentation

Although complex polyphonic writing was common during the Renaissance, composers still used simple major and minor harmonies, saving dissonances for special effects and moments of high tension. One harmonic curiosity existed in English music of this period - the use of false relations. This is a simultaneous clash of major and minor harmonies, often at the end of phrases, as rising and falling melodic minor scales meet with each other, as you can hear in the video below. These piquant harmonies are particularly prevalent in the music of composers such as Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.

Another innovation during the Renaissance was the development of ornamentation, in the form of divisions. In contrast to the free trills and embellishments we encounter in Baroque music, Renaissance ornamentation is more structured, with melodic lines being mathematically divided into smaller note values. Sylvestro Ganassi wrote a very detailed treatise teaching the art of divisions, Opera intitulata Fontegara (pictured below), and performers of the day would have been well versed in adding such decorations to the music spontaneously.

The cover of Ganassi’s Opera intitulata Fontegara

A selection of Renaissance composers

Guillaume Dufay, Johannes Ockeghem, Jacob Obrecht, John Taverner, Claudin de Sermisy, Tielman Susato, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Orlando de Lassus, Andrea & Giovanni Gabrieli, William Byrd, Maddalena Casulana, Anthony Holborne, Elway Bevin, Thomas Morley, Peter Philips, William Brade, Claudio Monteverdi, Thomas Lupo, John Wilbye, Giovanni Coperario, Thomas Weelkes, Michael East, Samuel Scheidt, John Dowland.

The Baroque - a musical pearl

Next we come to a period beloved by recorder players - the Baroque. The word itself comes from the Portuguese barocco - an oddly shaped pearl - which hints at the ornamental character of music from this period, stretching from Monteverdi to Bach.

While Baroque music had distinct national styles, these became ever more fluid as people travelled more widely. 17th century London, for instance, was a tremendously popular location for musicians, and became a melting pot of composers from all over Europe. The type of music a composer wrote was often dictated by their employer and location. For instance, J.S.Bach wrote lots of sacred music because he was employed by the church, while Henry Purcell wrote many works for the London theatre scene.

A movement from Telemann’s Methodical Sonatas, showing a simple melodic line and how it could be ornamented. Click on the image to see it enlarged.

Ornamentation developed from the divisions of the Renaissance, into much freer but equally florid decorations, including the trills we perhaps most closely associate with Baroque music. Again, several composers (Quantz perhaps being the most famous) wrote treatises on the art of ornamentation, while others composed music with sample ornamentation as didactic resources - for instance, Telemann’s Methodical Sonatas.

In contrast to the Renaissance, polyphony became less important and the concept of a melody with an accompaniment became more prevalent. This was the period where basso continuo developed - a style of accompaniment usually played by a sustaining bass instrument, such as the cello, with a keyboard instrument (harpsichord or organ) providing the harmonies. Rather than prescribing precise notes for the keyboard player, composers simply indicated the harmonies they desired with numbers – figured bass – written above or beneath the bassline. This is a type of shorthand, which may seem impenetrable at first glance, but allows immense freedom for the harpsichordist. With practice a skilled continuo player can interpret the numbers very quickly and add lots of character to the music.

An extract from a recorder sonata by Francesco Mancini, with figured bass above the bassline

The idea of writing for specific instruments became much more common, allowing composers the ability to create carefully planned contrasts of musical colour. That said, it was also common for publishers to suggest a sonata could be played on a variety of instruments (flute, oboe or recorder, for instance) - no doubt a ploy to sell more copies of the music! Baroque composers began to write solo and trio sonatas for specific instruments and continuo, and it was during this period that the concept of a Concerto for soloist and orchestra evolved. The solo parts in concerti were often highly virtuosic – a feature that was retained and expanded during the Classical and Romantic periods.

Another huge development during the Baroque was opera. The genre evolved a long way during the period, from the free flowing writing of Monteverdi to Handel’s very formal Italian operas of the late Baroque. Opera featured two distinct types of music - recitative and arias. Recitative was a musical imitation of speech, usually for a singer with basso continuo accompaniment, and its purpose was to move the storyline forward. In contrast, the aria was a moment for an operatic character to express how they were feeling about what had just happened. These usually had an orchestral accompaniment and gave singers a chance to demonstrate their enormous virtuosity. At this time it was common for men to take all of the leading roles, even playing female characters. The highest, dramatic roles were most often given to men with castrato voices, with best castrati, such as Farinelli and Senesino, commanding huge fees and mass adulation – the equivalent of a modern day Hollywood star. Lower voices tended to be used for comic roles.

Dance music also continued to thrive during the Baroque, although the dances themselves evolved. Out went the Pavan and Galliard, and in came the Gavotte and Minuet. If dance music of this period particularly interests you I’ve written a blog all about the dances which you can find here.

Baroque performance practice

In common with music of the Renaissance, most Baroque composers gave very little information in their music regarding the way it should be played. Performers of the day would have been taught what was expected of them in terms of articulation, phrasing, dynamics and more. But for those wishing to learn more, numerous treatises were published during this era to help performers. For recorder players, the notable sources of advice are by Ganassi and Dalla Casa in the Renaissance, with Hotteterre and Quantz during the Baroque. But if you’re interested in looking for advice from either period, I can recommend this article which shares a comprehensive list of historical treatises.

Instrumental evolution

There were continued developments in musical instruments during the Baroque period, with composers taking advantage of these innovations. The Baroque orchestra was based around an ensemble of strings, as are today’s orchestras, usually with harpsichord continuo adding colour and texture, as well as filling out the harmonies. The instruments used were almost all members of the violin family - violins, violas and cellos. Sometimes you’d have an instrument doubling the cello line an octave lower - either a double bass (with four strings, like the cello) or violone (which had up to six strings). The popularity of the viol family gradually waned during the Baroque, and Purcell’s astonishing Fantasias (composed at the tender age of 21) are some of the last consort works for viols. The bass viol or viola da gamba persisted though, often used in chamber music as both a continuo or solo instrument.

Baroque violin

The violin family became the most important string instruments of the Baroque. Compared to the viol, they have rounded shoulders, a curved back and f-shaped tone holes in the front of the instrument. Both the viol and violin were strung with gut strings (today’s violins use metal strings), so they produce a softer, less strident tone than their modern counterparts. The Italian city of Cremona became a hugely important hub for luthiers (makers of violins, violas and cellos) during the Baroque, with the most talented makers creating instruments which are still in use today. Violins by Stradivari, Amati and Guarneri are played today by the world’s top virtuosos, although many have been modified and strengthened to suit the greater technical demands of 19th century repertoire.

A Baroque oboe, with fewer keys than its modern counterpart

Woodwind instruments were often added to orchestras to create extra colour - perhaps a bassoon doubling the bassline and oboe, recorder and flute player higher lines. It was common for Baroque woodwind players to be multi-instrumentalists, playing oboe, flute and recorder in the same work, switching between movements. It was only in the Classical period that it became the norm to specialise on a single woodwind instrument.

Some composers also add brass instruments into the mix from time to time - notably the trumpet and horn. At this point they were made from simple lengths of bent and coiled metal, with no valves or pistons, so players had to use their embouchure (shaping the lips and surrounding muscles) to play different pitches in the instrument’s native harmonic series. This also meant each instrument could only play in one key. If a composer chose to use the horn or trumpet in a movement with a different key signature, the player would need to remove a section of tubing, replacing it with one of a different length to make the instrument longer or shorter, thus changing its native key.

A Baroque trumpet

Composers of the Baroque

Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Johann Christoph Pezel, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Matthew Locke, Henry Purcell, Arcangelo Corelli, Jean-Baptiste Loeillet, Johann Mattheson, Georg Philipp Telemann, James Paisible, Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Friedric Handel, Domenico & Alessandro Scarlatti, Johann Joachim Quantz.

If you want to explore the music from these periods for yourself, clicking on the composer links will take you to some of my favourites from the consort music I’ve shared with you over the last five years.

So there I’ll pause our exploration of the many musical periods - the remaining eras will follow in a future blog. We stop at the recorder’s high point, with the prospect of more than 150 years to be spent in the shadows. However, a second heyday is still to come, about which more very soon!

The art of listening

Photo by Rupam Dutta

I’ve written before about the act of listening, while playing music and as an audience member. My blog post from 2021, The Importance of Awareness, focused mostly on paying greater attention to the musical world around you as a participant, from the physicality of your technique, to the creative use of expression in your playing and awareness of those with whom you are playing in an ensemble.

Today we’re going to widen our listening to the work of other composers and performers.

For most people listening is an activity we do for pleasure - perhaps we allow the music to wash over us as a way of relaxing, or maybe we’re inspired by the virtuosity of professional performers. As a performer and teacher, I’m very accustomed to listening to music in a critical way. That might be in a pupil’s lesson, picking up on both the positive and negative elements of their playing and musicianship. Or it could be while I’m listening to a recording or live performance, noting the way the musicians interpret the music, or how the composer has chosen to structure it. During my student years we spent a lot of time listening in an intentional and active way, because this is a great way to learn how music is composed.

Passive listening can be a wonderful thing, but opening your ears in a more active way can teach you a huge amount - it’s this we’ll be looking at today.

“Music is organised sound”. Edgar Varèse, composer

All the music we play and listen to has a high level of organisation - it’s this that helps us understand it as a listener, whether we do so instinctively or through an understanding of the composer’s methods. But have you given much thought to exactly how a composer organises the notes to create a coherent structure, ensuring the music is satisfying and logical? Perhaps not, especially if you’ve never had a formal musical training. Let’s break these building blocks down into what are often known as the seven ‘elements of music’ - timbre, rhythm, tempo, dynamics, melody, harmony, and texture.

Timbre

This word describes the tone colour or quality of sound in music. Sometimes a composer will choose a particular instrument to play a melody, or perhaps combine several different instruments to create a specific type of tone colour. Each instrument produces its own individual tone colour - the clarity of a recorder, the warmth of the low notes on a violin, the power of a trumpet or perhaps the focused tone of an oboe. Some instruments can also create changes of sound via specific techniques - for instance, a violinist can pluck the strings as well as bowing them, and brass players can insert different types of mute into the bell of their instrument to modify the tone.

Rhythm

This is the way the spacing of beats and silences are organised. Time signatures and barlines govern the way the beats are grouped, and the composer chooses his or her desired combination of long and short notes. The speed of the beat or pulse is often related to the human heart beat, especially in early music. The type of rhythms used can also vary enormously, depending on the style of music - for instance, jazz will commonly have more syncopated or swung rhythms than other styles. Composers will often use repetitive rhythm patterns to create a coherent structure in the music.

Tempo

This is the speed at which music is played or sung - often indicated with a metronome mark, which describes the number of beats per minute. Tempo follows a sliding scale, from very slow to very fast and doesn’t need to be the same throughout a single piece of music. Some composers use lots of subtle tempo changes to create a feeling of ebb and flow in their music.

Dynamics

The volume of sound produced by instruments or voices, from soft to loud. Sudden or gradual changes of dynamic can create depth and variety in music, as well as enhancing the way it makes us feel as we listen. Dynamics are usually indicated with combinations of the letters - p (an abbreviation for piano - the Italian word for soft), f (forte/loud) and m (mezzo/moderately). The words crescendo and diminuendo (growing and diminishing respectively) are used to indicate gradual changes of dynamic.

Melody

Put simply, this is the tune. Melodies are created from combinations of scale and arpeggios and are often the element you recall long after you’ve heard a new piece - think of that earworm which can get stuck in your head for hours or days! A melody might be a short motif, or a longer, more expansive phrase. Melodies can be made of conjunct notes (stepwise - like a scale) or disjunct (notes which leap around by larger intervals) and this can entirely change the character.

Harmony

These are the notes which sound simultaneously with a melody, often enriching it and perhaps changing the way we perceive it. Harmonies can be consonant (pleasant combinations of sound, such as the notes from a single arpeggio) or dissonant (clashing, discordant notes which create a sense of tension). Harmony has changed over the centuries, from simple octaves in medieval music, to rich chromatic chords in the works of Romantic composers.

Texture

This is the way the music is constructed, combining one or more melodic lines and the accompanying parts together. Density of texture can vary enormously, from sparse to rich. One extreme might be a single line, played or sung alone (monophonic - literally one sound). A choir singing a hymn tune would be described as homophonic, because they are all largely singing together in chords. In contrast, a canon or fugue would be described as polyphonic (many sounds) because the voices are playing and moving independently of each other.

Whether you want or need to know the technical terms for all these characteristics will depend on the depth of knowledge you desire. But just recognising the differences will bring you a greater understanding of the music, both as a listener and as a player.

I’m going to share some pieces of music with you to illustrate many of these characteristics. I’ll include recordings, as well as links to the scores so you can follow along with them. We all learn in different ways. For those who learn aurally, hearing the music may illustrate my points well enough, but if you find it easier to pick up new concepts through visual cues, having the scores may help reinforce your learning.

The music I share below covers a wide range of repertoire. We’ll begin in the recorder player’s familiar territory of the Renaissance and Baroque. Other pieces venture beyond the recorder’s home sound world, but I hope you’ll still find them interesting and inspiring. Even if you play mostly early music, it’s a good idea to widen your musical horizons from time to time as a means of opening one’s ears to fresh ideas.

With each piece I’ll highlight one or more of the elements of music to listen out for - you may make some surprising discoveries.

Bach Chorale - Jesu meine freude

We’ll begin with texture and this is a good example of homophonic music. From the score you can see that the voices move together most of the time, shifting to a new harmony or chord on each beat - I’ve highlighted this vertical movement with red lines in the first two bars. This creates quite a dense texture, with sound levels remaining the same throughout the piece. While the notes are easy enough to play or sing, such simple music requires excellent ensemble skills to ensure everyone’s rhythms match exactly.

Byrd - Fantasia à 4

At the opposite textural extreme we have the polyphonic music of the Renaissance, where composers such as Byrd write multiple independent parts, which have a conversation, weaving in and out of each other. In this Fantasia you hear each line begin at different times, but the way they interweave creates a coherent musical whole.

Notice too how on the first page (shown below), all the voices share a single line of melody - sometimes imitating each other, sometimes playing together a beat apart. This melodic shape is highlighted in yellow in the extract below. When Byrd has finished exploring this particular melodic fragment, he moves on and uses a new tune, working with six or seven different themes during the course of this one Fantasia.

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Even Byrd steps away from polyphony at times - notice how all four voices come together for just a few seconds at 1:57 to play chords in rhythmic unison, before breaking away once again into a musical conversation.

Download Byrd’s original score here.

Download and play the music as a recorder consort here.

Mozart - Kyrie from Requiem

Before I move away from polyphonic music, one of the most formal examples of this genre is the fugue. Unlike a Fantasia, which meanders from one melodic idea to another, the fugue has a very precise structure. I plan to explain this in more detail in a future blog post, but this recording of the Kyrie from Mozart’s Requiem illustrates it very well. In the video you can see how Mozart combines two contrasting musical ideas to create a conversation between the voices. The subject (the main melodic theme, highlighted in purple) is a robust and quite angular melody, leaping dramatically, while the countersubject (a melody which works against the subject, highlighted in pink) is much busier, running hurriedly in short bursts of scales, building up the excitement.

Download Mozart’s full score here.

Download and play the music as a recorder consort here

Corelli Concerto Grosso Op.6 No.8

This well known work by Corelli gives us an opportunity to explore harmony and texture.

If you listen to the second movement, which begins 17 seconds into this recording, you’ll hear how the chords perpetually shift between discords and concords - moments where the notes clash with each other to create tension, before the harmony resolves into something less strident. In the extract below I’ve circled all the notes that clash with each other so you can see just how many there are.

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In the following Allegro (which begins at 1:18 in the video) you can hear the texture change from being mostly formed from chords, to something more dynamic. The violins continue to shift between concords and discords (highlighted in the extract below) but the bassline takes on a much more energetic and melodic role, powering the music along through a continuous flow of quavers. As you can see from this extract, this melodic lines uses lots of disjunct movement (notes which jump around rather than moving in scales) which gives the music a lots of energy and drive. Notice how the players also take a creative decision to make the notes quite detached, even though Corelli gives no staccato marks in the music.

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Download Corelli’s Score here.

Download and play the music as a recorder consort here.

Beethoven - Piano Concerto no.4, 2nd movement

Moving away from the recorder’s natural musical territory, we turn to music with a greater range of timbres and textures. In Beethoven’s 4th piano concerto he composes for a typical classical symphony orchestra - strings, woodwind (two each of flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon), two trumpets, two French horns and timpani. This brings him plenty of scope to create interesting combinations of tone colour, but in the 2nd movement he pares the scoring right back to the basics – just solo piano and the string section. This minimalism has a magical simplicity and there’s a real sense of conversation between the soloist and orchestra.

As you can see in the extract of the score below, at first the piano and orchestra don’t play together at all. The strings play a staccato melodic line together in octaves and their phrases are answered by a simple, legato melody in the piano, accompanied with chords. At 2:47 in the video the strings shift to just playing occasional pizzicato (plucked) notes, setting the piano free to explore alone, with more flowing melodic ideas. At 4:27 the orchestra returns, with the cellos and double basses playing a melody in octaves, while the violins sustain a single note. It’s not until 4:41 that the strings finally get to play together in harmony, accompanying the piano for the last few bars of the movement.

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Download the full score here.

Isn’t this a magical effect? Beethoven composed lots of powerful music, which grabs you through its sheer force. But here he goes back to the simplest of elements and I think it’s all the more powerful for this.

Holst - The Planets - Mars, The Bringer of War

This is a piece which probably needs little introduction, but have you ever thought about how Holst creates a sense of Mars as the Bringer of War? Listen carefully and you’ll hear the way he uses many elements of music to do this.

Download the full score here.

First he uses rhythm. Listen to how the repeated rhythm which appears first in the timpani, harp and strings, creates an incessant drive - like an army marching into war. The use of a repeating rhythm like this is called an ostinato and you’ll have heard the device in many other pieces of music - Ravel’s Bolero, for instance, where the side drum plays the same repeating rhythm throughout the work.

It’s not just Holst’s use of an ostinato that creates this war-like feel. His choice of time signature is unsettling because we generally prefer rhythms which feel balanced and symmetrical -  after all we have two of most of most parts of our body - eyes, ears, lungs, feet, hands. By having a time signature of 5/4, the two halves of the bar feel unbalanced - three beats followed by two - so this immediately creates a sense of tension.

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Now listen to the harmony Holst uses - rather than being straightforwardly major or minor, there are many more discords, once again creating a sense of tension. Later in the movement, the focus move onto a sinister melody in the lower instruments (3:37 in the video). But if you listen carefully you can still hear the side drum and trumpets nagging away with little snippets of the original ostinato rhythm - highlighted in red boxes below.

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Andy Williams - Music to Watch Girls By

After all that tension, let’s move onto something complete different, and much sunnier too. Even if 1960s pop music isn’t your thing, there’s plenty to listen out for - in particular the use of melody in this classic sung by Andy Williams.

The main melody of the song is undeniably catchy - one of the character traits of any good pop song. But listen more carefully, beyond Williams’ vocals. Did you notice that 27 seconds into the song, the backing singers and brass section echo snippets of that same melody between the song’s phrases? At 1:06 we have another classic feature of pop songs - a sudden and pretty un-subtle key change as the music is abruptly pulled up a semitone from G minor to A flat minor.

This leads us into the central instrumental section (at 1:07) where the brass play the melody, but did you notice what the violins were doing at the same time? Listen carefully and you’ll hear they have a long, sinuous melody of their own, which slinks around above the brass. This is called a countermelody, as it works against the main tune. Can you follow the violins without getting distracted by the main theme? This can be tricky to do, but it’s a useful exercise as it’ll help you learn to pick out different melodies and rhythms in the music you play.

Sergei Prokofiev - Peter and the Wolf

For my final piece of music I’m going to talk about the concept of programme music. Most of the repertoire we play as recorder players is absolute music - that’s music which is abstract rather than descriptive. But sometimes we want to paint an aural picture, describing an event, scene or emotion. We probably overlook the programme music we encounter most frequently - the incidental music accompanying films and TV shows. Rather than existing as standalone concert items (although sometimes composers create concert suites from their music to make this possible), film soundtracks are there to support the visual images we’re watching and amplify the emotions the director is trying to convey.

For instance, Alfred Hitchcock originally intended the iconic shower scene in Psycho to be unscored, but his composer, Bernard Herrmann, persuade him to try it with the score he’d written to accompany it. The shrieking violins undoubtedly add to the horror of the scene, although in reality we see almost no blood and the violent sound effects were actually created by stabbing a melon! If you want to compare the moment with and without music you can see both versions here.

Often a composer will use a specific theme in programme music to help illustrate a person, place or idea - known as a leitmotif. Wagner was perhaps the greatest proponent of this technique, using over sixty distinct musical themes to depict people, places, objects and event concepts in The Ring - a cycle of four operas. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to listen to sixteen hours of opera - I have something more compact to illustrate the same point!

In Peter and the Wolf, a musical retelling of a Russian folk tale, Prokofiev not only uses a particular melody for each character in the story, but he also pairs these tunes with a specific instrument - for instance a high, twittering flute to depict the bird. Each time a character appears in the story we hear their theme and instrument, but Prokofiev also modifies these melodies to illustrate the activities of the characters. When the cat (depicted by the clarinet) climbs a tree (12:38 in the video), the clarinet line scampers higher and higher, to help us envisage the character jumping upwards from branch to branch, as you can see in the extract below. Likewise, at 26:26 the end the duck’s theme is heard with an ethereal string accompaniment, as we hear her calling from inside the wolf, having been swallowed alive.

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Download the score here.

Now it’s your turn…

I hope some of the pieces I’ve talked about have perhaps opened your eyes and ears to new musical horizons and some of the tools composers use to write music. Now it’s your turn to do a little homework…

Next time you listen to a piece of music take a few moments to ask yourself some questions about what you’re hearing. Try to be as descriptive as possible with your answers to these questions. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the technical terms, but just having to use descriptive language of one type or another to identify what you’re hearing can be educational.

Here are some ideas to get you started…

Timbre - is the music being played by a monochromatic ensemble or has the composer written a score with lots of variety of tonal colours? For instance, a recorder consort or brass band would count as monochromatic, because all the instruments fundamentally produce the same tone, albeit at a variety of different pitches. In contrast, the instruments in a symphony orchestra produce infinitely varied tones, so composer can create different colours by giving a melody to the oboe, while the strings provide the accompaniment. Ask yourself which instruments you are hearing, distinguishing the flute from a bassoon or the trumpets from the violins.

Dynamics - how would you describe what you are hearing? Is the music quiet and ethereal, or perhaps loud and bombastic? How did the dynamic contrasts change the way you feel about the music?

Tempo - how would you describe the tempo? Is the music slow or fast? Does the speed remain constant (tap or clap along with the music to help you judge this) or is the speed more flexible and changeable?

Rhythm - what sort of rhythms has the composer used? Is the music crisp and staccato, or elegant and flowing? Do you want to march to it, or to sway along to a waltz? How does it make you feel? Don’t be afraid to move your body to the music – this instinctive movement may better help you quantify your response to the rhythm.

Tonality - how does the music make you feel? Music composed in minor keys often has a feeling of melancholy, while major keys can feel brighter and happier. But, as this article suggests, this concept is more common in western music than that of other cultures and there are exceptions to every rule. Think back to Music to Watch Girls By, which we listened to earlier - undoubtedly a joyful, lively song, but in a minor key.

Texture - think about the way the composer has structured the music. How would you describe the texture? You can use simple descriptive words - sparse, dense, lush, smooth, spiky. Also listen out for the way the composer has achieved this - do the voices imitate each other, or are all the parts playing together like a chorale? Or perhaps there’s a solo voice with a melody, which the lines are accompanying?

If you enjoy this exercise and find it helps you become more aware as you listen, you could perhaps get into the habit of making notes about what you’re hearing. Maybe take half an hour each week to listen to a piece of music and write down the things that stand out to you most. Which features appeal to you most? Do you find surprising commonalities between pieces music which, on the surface, seem very different? Does this process help you to understand music better and perhaps like works you might have dismissed before?

Have I made you think differently about music? I know I’ve asked a lot of questions in this blog post, perhaps more than just giving you information to absorb. Yes, there’s undoubtedly a place for mindless enjoyment of music, but understanding can help you appreciate it even more. These listening skills can be applied to any type of music, whether it’s by Handel, Brahms or Jimi Hendrix, and I hope perhaps I’ve helped you explore your musical world in a new way. If you’ve had a real ‘Eureka’ moment as a result of this, I’d love you to share it in the comments below. We all come to music from different places and I’d love to hear about your own individual musical discoveries this week.

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 and were broadcast at 6am each day. Each one lasts less than two minutes, but it’s amazing how much you can 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.

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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.

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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.

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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!