A host of Holborne

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Anthony Holborne (c.1545-1602) is a shadowy figure as far as music history is concerned, yet he’s almost certainly a composer whose music you’ve encountered from time to time. This is largely down to a collection of music we’re going to explore together today.

Our knowledge of Holborne’s life is a patchwork of ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybes’. The University of Cambridge alumni database shows an Anthony Holborne enrolled at Christ’s College in 1562 and speculates that it may well be our composer. Three years later, a man of the same name was admitted to the Inner Temple Court, but again the details are sketchy. However, we do know he had a (probably younger) brother, William, as Anthony included several of his sibling’s madrigals in his first publication - the Cittharn Schoole in 1597. We also know that on 14th June 1584 Anthony married Elisabeth Marten at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster - now the parish church of the House of Commons. A posthumous publication describes him as a ‘Gentleman usher’ to Queen Elizabeth I, but once again, it’s not clear quite what the job entailed - he certainly doesn’t appear in any records relating to musical life at the Chapel Royal.

During his latter years he worked in the service of Sir Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, and also enjoyed the patronage of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. We’ll encounter her again later, as we explore Holborne’s music. He was evidently well respected by his peers and the first song from John Dowland’s Second Booke, I saw my lady weepe, is dedicated to Holborne.

Pavans, Galliards, Almains and other short Aeirs, both grave and light, in five parts, for Viols, Violins, or other Musicall Winde Instruments

This is the collection for which Anthony Holborne is best known today. Published in 1599, it contains no fewer than 65 dances and is the the largest published collection of English music to survive from this period.

It’s not clear when Holborne composed these dances, but it’s likely to have happened over a period of several years. Some of the music appears in his Cittharn Schoole, published two years earlier, and several dances also exist in lute tablature. Which version came first is something we can only guess at.

The collection is dedicated to Sir Richard Champernowne (c.1558-1622), who was Member of Parliament for West Looe in Cornwall. Judging by the dedication found in the part books, Holborne was evidently appreciative of his patronage, opening with the following words:

“In a continued observation of your virtuous constancy in the love of Music, I have long and with great increase of reason honoured you most gentle Sir: for, even but part of my poor labours speaking in their kindly voice, from the experience of many years can feelingly witness and sing with what graceful favours they have been nourished at your hands. With this regard, I have distinctively bundled them up into a catalogue volume, accompanied with a more liberal and enlarged choice than hath at any time as yet come to your refined ears: and withal, have now made bold to present them as things not altogether unnecessary to do you pleasing service, but also to live and dwell with you under the protection of your good allowance, and the testimony of my ever-bounden thankfulness.”

Three different types of dance

Holborne’s 1599 collection contains three different types of dance - pavans, galliards and almains. Rather than simply naming the movements by dance type, he gives over half of them more creative names, although it’s clear enough which is which from their time signature. The pavans and galliards tend to appear in pairs, while the almains are grouped together towards the end of the volume, along with some other independent pieces in three-time which may be corantos.

Some of the dances are fairly straightforward examples, suitable for dancing, while others enjoy much more complex rhythms. The galliards can be particularly unpredictable, with never-ending shifts between duple and triple time, sometimes without even any consistency between individual parts. Ask anyone who’s wrestled with the complexities of The Fairie-round and they’ll almost certainly have come adrift at one time or another when rehearsing or performing this music!

Which instruments to choose?

Title page of this collection describes them for ‘viols, violins or other musical wind instruments’, which offers up a huge range of possibilities. Publishers of this period often suggested multiple instruments on title pages as an easy way to make the music appeal to a greater range of buyers. You may wish to play these dances with a recorder consort, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t also join together with friends who play the viol to create a ‘broken’ consort, mixing different instrument families.

While researching this subject I’ve discovered a myriad of recordings. There are performances which stick to one type of instrument, as well as those who mix wind and strings. Some combine bowed string instruments (viols and/or violins) with plucked instruments such as the lute or theorbo. But I’ve also encountered performances on recorders, sackbuts and cornetts, modern brass quintet and even tuba ensemble! If you really want to explore the rhythmic possibilities of this music there’s no reason why you couldn’t add a little percussion too, as you’ll hear in one of two of the recordings below. One thing’s for sure - you can play Holborne’s dances with a recorder consort with a clear conscience!

When it comes to selecting your recorders, the usual instrumentation for these dances is SATTB. However, if you’re short of tenor players, the Quintus line (the middle line of the score) will often fit the treble recorder too, albeit lying rather low in its range. The majority of the Bassus part fits perfectly on a bass recorder, and when the odd note disappears off the bottom of the instrument you can easily hop up to the octave above.

Holborne’s score writing

Partbooks published during Holborne’s life throw up one or two curiosities which are worth noting. The most significant is the way the Altus and Quintus parts of the first eight dances are inverted. As the higher voice, the Altus is the second line for the remainder of the collection, while Quintus occupies line three. All three modern editions I’ve mentioned below rectify this error so the Altus part book is always the second highest and the Quintus the line below. Quite why this quirk exists is unknown. Was it an intentional decision by Holborne, or an error by the typesetter? I doubt we’ll ever know!

Another oddity which always tickles me is Holborne’s selective use of a key signature in No.7 - a Pavan. Curiously, the B flat is only applied to the Quintus and Bassus lines in the 1599 partbooks. Looking through the Pavan, B flats only appear in these parts, so maybe this was the typesetter’s way of conserving time and ink? Once again, we have to fill in the blanks for ourselves in this story as there’s no recorded reason for this particular quirk!

Choosing an edition to play from

There are plenty of editions to be found of individual dances but I’m going to concentrate here on complete editions. There are two complete printed editions I think are worth seeking out, one more recent than the other.

Bernard Thomas’s London Pro Musica edition, LPM AH1

For a long while this was the go-to edition for Holborne, published by Bernard Thomas in 1980. I invested in this hefty box set when I was at music college and we often used it in consort rehearsals. Bernard added time signatures and bar lines, but interestingly chose to keep many of the Galliards in 6/2 rather than writing them in a more familiar 3/2 time signature. This makes hemiolas easier to spot as one voice often has three semibreves together, avoiding the need for tied notes across barlines - as you can see in the example below. It’s a clear edition with lots of detailed background notes.

Using a 6/2 time signature (in No.38 - Galliard) helps make it clearer where the hemiolas occur, as you can see from the three semibreves in the cantus and bassus parts.

Peacock Press Edition, edited by George Simmons and Virginia VanPoole, 2011. Peacock Press PEMS014

A more recent addition to the available modern editions is this one from Peacock Press. You can buy it as a box set, but if you need extra parts in different clefs they’re available individually too. Like the previous edition, this is beautifully clear and well laid out and this is the version I use most often.

These two printed editions aren’t cheap, but there’s a pleasure to be had playing from a well thought out and clear bound copy. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure my set of the Bernard Thomas edition cost me about £30 when I bought it thirty years ago, so the current £40 price tag of either edition makes them look like inflation beaters in today’s financial climate!

Free editions:

If you’re still getting to know Holborne’s music and haven’t decided whether to splash out on a printed edition yet there are also some free download editions you can try.

New unbarred edition: I recently discovered this newish edition, edited by Ben Maloney as part of his degree at the University of York in 2019. Ben went back to the set of partbooks held at Christ Church, Oxford, which have some interesting annotations from the original publisher, to start from scratch. He’s chosen to retain Holborne’s mensuration signs (the predecessor to modern time signatures) and has left the music unbarred. This results in clearer rhythmic patterns, removing the need for ties across barlines. If you’re someone who really finds barlines helpful, Ben has added small dashes to show the start of each ‘bar’ - a handy halfway house to going fully unbarred. You’ll find the score for Ben’s edition here and the parts here.

IMSLP: If you’ve never tried any of Holborne’s music a good place to begin is IMSLP, where both Ulrich Alpers and Daniel Van Gilst have generously made all the dances available in score format. These are a good way to explore and see which ones you like - you can find them here.

Holborne’s 1599 Edition: If you want to go right back to source material, scans of the 1599 partbooks are even available. Reading from original notation isn’t for everyone, but if you enjoy the challenge, or perhaps you’re just curious, I’ve collected the five part books together in one PDF file here.

My Holborne highlights

To complete my look at Holborne’s dances I’ve spent lots of time listening to the many recordings on YouTube. I’ve picked out a selection of my favourite Holborne dances for you to explore, along with a wide variety of different recordings. These include performances on recorders, but you’ll discover some less predictable instrumentation along the way too.

The Marie-golde - No.8

I’m going to begin my selection with one of Holborne’s simplest galliards, The Marie-Golde. He takes a very chordal approach with this one, avoiding too many complex syncopations, and you can imagine this being danced to. Among the more traditional performances I found this very sonorous recording by the Chromos Tuba Quartet - a combination of instruments even Holborne wouldn’t have expected when he gave such a generously broad range of options on the front cover!

Infernum - No.21

This beautiful Pavan is a fascinating mix of styles. The first two sections feature plenty of counterpoint between the parts, while the final section returns to a more chordal approach, with all five voices moving in parallel. I’ve chosen two contrasting performances, the first of which features Hesperion XXI directed by Jordi Savall. In keeping with the rather dour title, he goes for sombre viols and lute, with the addition of bass drum at key moments.

In contrast, Capella de la Torre go for a largely wind based consort featuring shawms and sackbuts, with lute and drums. The result is fabulously sonorous and I can’t wait to explore more from this ensmeble.

My Selfe - No.36

Here we have another Galliard and, one presumes, a self portrait of the composer. This is another number where you feel you could actually dance along. The tone of The English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble is gentler than modern brass, but you’d still be able to hear them clearly over the sound of dancing shoes on a wooden floor.

The Image of Melancholy - No.27

If ever you need something mellow and harmonious to relax to after a busy day I can’t recommend this Pavan enough. The music begins with a steady, contemplative feel, gradually becoming more conversational as the piece draws on.

With this performance by Consort Brouillamini you get four Holborne dances for the price of one, recorded at a concert in 2019. Played on wide bore Renaissance recorders, their tone is glorious and it’s great to see this wonderful music being played before an audience.

I also discovered another performance on recorders, this time by The Royal Wind Music, directed by Paul Leenhouts. This uses a broader palette of tones, with each line doubled at the octave.

The Night Watch - No.55

Now we come to an almain, a somewhat livelier dance than the preceding pavan. This is one of Holborne’s best known dances and is sure to get your feet tapping. The Academy of Ancient Music take a relatively leisurely approach, so perhaps the watchman in question was reaching the end of his night on duty…

Wanton - No.61

Holborne doesn’t specify the type of dance here, but it’s generally assumed the triple time movements towards the end of the collection are Corantos. I love the perpetually shifting rhythmic patterns and it can be tricky to grasp where the beat is moving to next.

Bjarte Eike’s recording with the Barokksolistene takes a relaxed approach which I really enjoy.

In contrast Les Sacquboutiers chose a livelier tempo, playing cornetts and sackbuts, with some delicate percussion to emphasise the perpetually shifting meter.

The Funerals - No.31

This beautiful Pavan was inspired by a heartbreaking story, which just makes it even more moving. Holborne’s patron, the Countess of Pembroke, tragically lost her father, mother and brother in the same year, 1586, and he wrote this as a lament for their loss. The opening is section is gorgeously sonorous, with a very static bass line. Gradually the music encompasses more movement and in the final section the Bassus line takes centre stage. Les Voix Baroques and Matthew White create a heart rending sense of melancholy with a broken consort. They use a combination of instruments I would never have considered but it’s so effective and beautifully played.

Muy Linda - No.34) Galliard

Whoever Linda was, she evidently had a sense of humour if Holborne’s music is anything to go by! The music bops along, switching endlessly between simple and compound time and Holborne really has some fun in the final section. Here the Cantus, Quintus, Tenor and Bassus lines play quite happily together in 3/2, while the Altus part stubbornly sticks with a 6/4 meter. I’ve had some fun working on this with several groups recently and there’s always a degree of mirth as we wrestle with Holborne’s cross-rhythms!

The first of my chosen recordings features Les Sacqboutiers once again, with their wonderfully delicate sackbut and cornett combination, accompanied by a sparkling tambourine.

In contrast L'Achéron go for a string based approach, combining viols, cittern, bandora and ottavino, creating masses of energy but occupying a totally different tonal world.

The Fruit of Love - No.58

The Fruit of Love is another Almain, and a good place to begin if you’re new to Holborne. I featured the B-Five Recorder Consort in one of my Sounding Pipes playlists a while ago and was delighted to find more of their mellow recorder tones here.

We’ve met L'Achéron already, but here we have another video, featuring The Fruit of Love, in the trailer for their album of Holborne, as well as an introduction by their director, François Joubert-Caillet, explaining more about their approach to this music. You also get a second helping of Muy Linda at the end!

The Fairie-Round - No.63

I couldn’t complete my list of Holborne hits without including The Fairie-Round - a truly interstellar piece! As well as being littered with brain jingling cross-rhythms, this is one of the pieces NASA chose to include on the golden records they sent into space on the Voyager 1 and 2 probes in 1977. These discs were designed as a representation of human culture and achievement, should the probes ever be intercepted by extra-terrestrial life. They’re currently heading out of our panetary system, beyond Pluto, but given the vastness of space it may be some time before any aliens get to hear David Munrow’s take on this particular dance!

If that performance wasn’t energetic enough for you, do take a listen to this interpretation by Consort Brouillamini from their album The Woods so Wild. It’s played at a lower pitch than the Early Music Consort of London, but that doesn’t stop it sparkling like the sun!

Heigh Ho Holiday - No.65

My final selection just had to be Holborne’s final dance, Heigh Ho Holiday, which is full of joy. The Royal Wind Music bring buckets of energy to their performance. They begin with a sparkling four foot consort, before adding the deepest tones of the recorder world without diminishing the sense of drive by one iota.

Which is your favourite Holborne?

Perhaps you’re already a Holborne convert, playing them regularly with a consort. Or maybe you’ve made some new discoveries today and are raring to give them a try? Either way, I’d love to hear which of his dances you love the most. I’m sure you’ll agree there’s something in the collection to be enjoyed whatever mood you’re in, be it melancholic or bursting with energy. Please do drop a comment below to share your favourites and I’d love to know if anyone has played all of them!

The pencil is mightier than the sword

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Why a simple pencil could help you become a better musician.

Admittedly the author Edward Bulwer-Lytton may not have had music in mind when he coined the phrase, “The pen is mightier than the sword” in a play about Cardinal Richelieu in 1839, but I hope he wouldn’t mind me purloining it for educational purposes! 

Are you a musician who always keeps a pencil on their music stand? Or are you the sort who thinks, “I’ll remember that!” when the act of going to find a sharp pencil feels like too much hassle? I’m definitely the former. In fact I always have a pencil with me (there’s even one tucked away in my camera bag) on the basis that I never know when I’ll need one, and a pen’s marks have too much permanence. I’ve long been a great believer in using a pencil when I’m practising or rehearsing, because I know only too well how fallible the human memory is. 

Let’s take a quick look at the nature of how our memories work first, as it’s relevant to the way we learn music.

Neurologists differentiate between short term and long term memory, but what does that mean in practice? Short term memory is the transient storage of information - for around thirty seconds; perhaps up to a minute. It’s generally thought we can hold up to about seven items of information in our short term memory and beyond that new information quickly displaces the older items. 

If we wish to retain information beyond the limits of our short term memory we need to use other strategies to reinforce those memories. Saying the information aloud or mentally repeating it to yourself will often work. When I’m playing or conducting I might notice a mistake I want to come back to. I know I’ll probably have forgotten the detail by the time we reach the end of the movement, so I have to find a way to retain the location in my mind. Speaking aloud mid-flow isn’t an option, so I’ll quickly search for the bar number and this helps me at least remember where the passage was when we reach the end of the piece! 

Of course, if we only had short term memory we’d be in trouble. Luckily we have the ability to lay down long term memories - the human equivalent of saving data to a computer hard drive. It’s this mechanism which allows us to remember information and events over long periods. Some of the information we store is vital to our lives (where we live, or our partner’s birthday, for instance) but it also allows us to store all sorts of other detritus. I’ll often hear a song on the radio and I’ll be able to picture where I was when I heard it last - sometimes years ago. That’s of very little practical use, but it’s a knack I seem to have, for better or worse! 

Because our short term memory is so brief, that means we’ll sometimes need help remembering musical details - and that’s where your pencil comes in. When practising we repeat phrases to help our brain and fingers transfer this activity to long term memory, but we need to ensure we practise these phrases correctly and lay down accurate memories rather than practising mistakes into our performance. I’ll often use my pencil for exactly this purpose. I work on the basis that if I’ve made a mistake more than once I need to write something in to remind myself and prevent it happening a third time. 

There’s no shame in using your pencil

I played in the Phoenix Recorder Orchestra for ten years, during which time Steve Marshall was the ensemble’s music librarian. He would see all the parts handed back after a concert and was fascinated to compare how much or little different players had written in their music. Steve would often comment that my music usually had many more pencil markings than anyone else’s. As the single professional recorder player in the orchestra, he mused that if I, as someone who could probably sight read most of the music largely correctly, needed to write things in everyone else definitely did! Ultimately, there’s absolutely no shame in using your pencil. Writing reminders in your music is not an admission of failure, but it does show you’re serious about not making the same mistakes every time! 

The joys and pitfalls of other people’s markings 

When you’re handed a piece of music which already contains markings from other musicians, do you rub your hands in glee or are you overcome with a feeling of dread? Undoubtedly, notes from other musicians can be helpful - they give you a head start and warnings about likely pitfalls. Of course, that’s assuming they’re correct. When faced with music which has already been marked up, approach these annotations with an open mind. I often discover parts in my own library which have been incorrectly marked and that can be destructive. If you find an incorrect marking don’t just leave it there - grab a rubber and either remove or correct it - that’ll help you and the players who come after you! 

The other charm of pre-marked parts can be the non-musical information they occasionally contain. I’ve seen orchestral music with phone numbers, doodles and even whole sentences of prose written on them. I’ve never yet rung any of the phone numbers, but I often wonder what might happen if I did! 

Pick the right tool

Hopefully I’m on the way to convincing you why you should always have a pencil (never a pen!) to hand, be it in rehearsals, lessons or just practising at home. But what sort of pencil should you use?

There are many options but the most important things is to choose one with a soft lead. A 2H pencil is no use to any musician and, in my opinion, should be banned from all musical instrument cases! A hard pencil will likely leave indentations in the paper and the writing will be difficult to erase. A soft pencil (2B is a good choice) will allow you to write quickly and lightly, as well as giving you the option to come back and change your mind later. 

If you’re someone who never remembers to sharpen their pencils, a propelling pencil can be handy. This was my choice for many years, paired with thickish 2B leads -  usually 0.7mm. I’d keep a tube of spare leads in my pencil case and never faced the frustration of a blunt pencil - just click the end and you’ve got a fresh supply of lead. 

More recently I’ve returned to traditional pencils and my favourites are currently Blackwings. They’re not especially cheap, but they have lovely soft lead, sharpen beautifully and their erasers actually remove markings effectively. One of my bugbears with many pencils is the way the rubber on the end just smears the graphite around, leaving an unsightly and permanent smudge.

As I’ve just implied, the other vital tool in your armoury is a good eraser - after all every musician is entitled to change their mind. If your favourite pencil has a rubber which doesn’t actually do its job, make a point of finding an eraser which works effectively - you won’t regret it. The rubbers on Blackwing pencils can be extended as they wear down, and you can even buy replacement ones which slot into the ferrule on the end if you use up the eraser before the pencil becomes too short to write with - a feature I’d never come across before.

What should you write in your music?

This is one of those questions with an infinite number of answers, but here are some of the things I mark in my own music. My conducting scores contain lots of additional scribblings, but let’s focus on playing today. There are the obvious things, such as breath marks, accidentals, dynamics, alternative fingerings and ornaments. But there are many other things you can mark in too.

An 18th century custos at the end of each line in a Sammartini Sonata. Click to see enlarged.

I’ll sometimes use my pencil to mark in a custos at the end of the line - that’s a little squiggle which shows the pitch of the first note on the next line. These often appear in old publications and can be handy if the music doesn’t go where you’re expecting it to. In a similar vein, I’ll sometimes highlight a moment where a musical sequence changes with a circle. If you’ve had a regular pattern of notes for a bar or two, a subtle change can be easy to miss. 

Pencil markings can also be handy as reminders about the progress you’ve made in your practising. I’ll often write a small box around note groups which need further attention. This reminds me the next time I practise, but also gives me a heads up to concentrate harder at that point in rehearsals and concerts. Once I’ve nailed the passage reliably I’ll rub the box out and remove the distraction. If there’s a longer passage (may be two or three lines) which need closer attention I‘ll sometimes write a line in the margin at the side instead, so I don’t end up smothering my music in pencil!

Here I chose to add a line in the left margin to remind me this passage needed practice to tidy up my fingering

If I’m gradually working something up to a faster speed using my metronome, I’ll often note the maximum tempo I’ve achieved at the end of a practice session. Then, when I return to it I’ll know where I’d got to. Often I’ll need to backtrack a notch or two, but it’s a handy way to track my progress.

Another time I’ll use my pencil is when I’m trying to decide on alternative fingerings or ornamentation. There’s one piece of Vivaldi we play with The Parnassian Ensemble with a passage where there are many places I could use an alternative fingering, but the benefit isn’t always immediately obvious. Having too much choice can be paralysing, and as we learnt it initially I found my indecision about where to employ an alternative tripped me up. My solution was to make a decision and write it in my music - simple! Yes, I then changed my mind about a couple of notes, but it was easy to amend those markings, and the result was a much more fluent line.

Create your own language, but be clear!

Over time you’ll probably create your own language of symbols for the things you write in your music most often. There are of course universally understood symbols such as sharps, flats and naturals which all musicians use - or so I thought… Many years ago I took in the orchestra music after the students’ concert at the Recorder Summer School. To my astonishment one of the treble players had carefully written the word ‘natural’ in longhand over every place where an F sharp wasn’t needed. Maybe that’s what he or she needed for the message to sink in, but there’s definitely a more concise way of notating a natural note!

The most important thing is for your symbols to mean something to you and to be clear. Don’t write something terribly cryptic in your music, only to realise you have no idea what it meant when you come back to the same piece the following week! In my own music, I’ll write the word ‘BIG’ over a tick if I need to take a deep breath - it’s clear and unsubtle enough to make me do what it says. Passages where I want to take some extra time will be decorated with a wiggly line, and if I need to be more aware of another player or a conductor I’ll draw a small pair of glasses. Nothing ground breaking there, but I know what they all mean and that’s the key reason for writing on the music in the first place.

A glimpse of my annotational world…

While researching this blog I had a good old rummage through my music library in search of examples I could share with you. In the examples below you get a sneak peak at what goes on in my own music, but please understand some of it isn’t pretty!

This example shows my unsubtle ‘big breath’ marking, along with an indication of the length I wish to play the appoggiatura. With a dotted note like this, the appoggiatura could be performed as a quaver or a crotchet, so this pencil note tells me I’ve decided to play it as a quaver. I can of course change my mind and amend the markings later if I wish to. Incidentally, I always mark breaths with a tick. Some musicians use commas, but I personally find those too easy to ignore, especially without my reading glasses!

In this snippet I’ve added a simple curved line. A passage like this is at risk of being played non-legato because of the flats and the leap up to a high D - the line reminds me I really must play it smoothly. Some musicians will instinctively play a slur when faced with a curved line like this, but I know what I intend as it’s a marking I often use. If I wanted a real slur I would place the line more precisely rather than using a quick sweep of the pencil.

Below we have my way of marking in alternative fingerings. Some players use ‘II’ instead, but ‘alt’ works just fine for me.

The letters over the music here are from when I loaned my music to a pupil, but I’ve been known to use this indication myself too. The T is simply a reminder to tongue the note - something easily forgotten amid a flurry of trills and demisemiquavers.

Here we have a couple of markings to indicate rubato - being flexible with the time and rhythm. The wiggly line tells me to stretch the notes out a little - in this case a small ritenuto leading up to the pause. The word ‘time’ over the breath mark, however, is a reminder not to rush on after the pause. How much time I take before continuing may depend on the acoustic in which I’m performing. In a dry room, with little echo, I might move on fairly swiftly, while a resonant church acoustic may require a big, dramatic silence for the impact of the pause to sink in.

These markings date back to my student days and were written in by my teacher, Philip Thorby, but I’ve continued to use these symbols as they work for me. The straight lines (sometimes horizontal, sometimes diagonal, like an acute accent) indicate notes which need weight. The U-shaped symbols are similar to those used in poetry when analysing the flow of the text, and tell me to keep them lighter and stress-free. These marks may not be obvious to other musicians, but after 35 years of writing them in my music I know exactly what I intend.

Sometimes I see people writing small essays in their music and I wonder how on earth they’ll read it all in the heat of the moment. My approach is to find a single word which encompasses the character or mood I’m aiming for, so I can take it in with the swiftest of glances - as I’ve done in this example.

How much is too much?

Judging exactly how much to write in your music is a bit of a balancing act. Leave things out for fear of cluttering the page and you may omit critical information. But if you cover the page in annotations it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees!

The example below is one of my more prolific annotations. There are the usual articulation marks and dynamics, but also some character related words, such as ‘more butch’(!), ‘very calm and still’ and ‘naive’. On the Grave you’ll notice I’ve made some decisions about how I wish to ornament the music, along with an indication below the stave as to which chords are being played in the continuo part. These harmonic markings are a combination of pitches and figured bass which works for me as I’m used to playing from figured bass, but may not help non-keyboard players!

This is about as extreme as my own pencil markings ever get - any more than this and I know I’ll begin to ignore some of the symbols because my brain can’t process it all quickly enough. Not all musicians are the same though, and in this example of a Bach Violin Sonata, annotated by Yehudi Menhuin, there’s barely a scrap of paper left untouched!

Another example by an internationally acclaimed performer which surprised me was the edition of Bach’s Goldberg Variations which pianist Glenn Gould used for his 1981 recording of the work. The music was discovered and auctioned off by Bonhams in 2018 (you can read more about it here) and it gives a fascinating glimpse into his thought processes. You can click on the images below (and any of the others in this post) to see them in more detail. Personally, writing on music in pen like this makes me shudder, but Gould was an eccentric character and this approach evidently worked for him.

Are you indecisive?

If you’re still working out how much annotation is right for you there are other ways you can experiment.

The obvious one is to make a few photocopies of the piece you’re learning. You can do this legally for study purposes, providing you own the original. With these you can try different markings and see what works best for you, before transferring your final annotations into the published edition.

Maybe you’re someone who responds well to colour coded markings? I’m not a fan of writing on music with coloured pencils or pen as the marks can’t be erased or changed later. One solution is to insert your music (or a copy of it) into a clear plastic sleeve. You can then write on the sleeve with coloured dry erase markers in the knowledge that you can rub off anything which doesn’t help.

There are even options available for musicians who would prefer to store their music on an electronic device rather than carrying around weighty paper tomes. I’m still relatively new to this approach, but I do use the forScore app on my iPad sometimes. The app allows you to store vast quantities of music on your device and you can annotate it with a stylus, saving different versions if you wish to. I use this mostly for proof reading scores I’ve typeset while I’m on the road, but I know several musicians who use an electronic tablet to rehearse and perform from.

Eight quick annotation tips

  1. Don’t be afraid to change your mind. Music making should be a fluid affair - your interpretation can and should evolve over the years. Do write helpful markings in your music, but don’t be afraid to erase and update them as your taste changes.

  2. If you have lessons with a teacher, don’t rely on them to write things in for you. They may well do so, but if you think of something which will help you play better, grab the pencil and do it yourself!

  3. Be ready to adapt your decisions. Playing in a different acoustic or working on an ensemble piece with new people may mean you need to change your markings - be flexible and willing to change if need be.

  4. If you take music grade exams you don’t need to rub all your markings out before the exam. The examiner almost certainly won’t even look at your music and if your annotations help you to play better why make life harder by erasing them?

  5. If you mark a passage as a reminder that it needs more practice, don’t be afraid to rub out the annotations when you’ve overcome your stumbling blocks. You may find them helpful still, but on the other hand you may find them an offputting reminder of your earlier failings!

  6. Don’t be precious about writing in your music. Doing so isn’t an admission of failure, but will help you avoid mistakes in future. Music is a tool rather than a priceless work of art.

  7. Be a thief! Analyse the markings you see in other people’s music. If you spot a symbol which makes perfect sense to you and might be useful, don’t be afraid to ‘borrow’ it!

  8. If you’ve made a mistake more than once, strongly consider writing something in your music. This is a rule I follow myself. Missing an accidental when sight reading is unfortunate, but human. Forgetting it the second time round means I might well miss it again in future so I know I should pencil it in before I play the music a third time. This way simple mistakes don’t turn into bad habits, which are much harder to eradicate.

Musical annotations as a snapshot in musical history

While researching this subject I came across a short video from the British Library about the importance of annotations in historic music editions. Now I’m not suggesting your copy of Telemann’s recorder sonatas will necessarily be of critical importance to musicologists in a century’s time, but clearly there are things we can learn from old scores and the trail of pencil breadcrumbs their owners have left for us!

Have I convinced you yet?

I often tell the groups I conduct that the clink of a pencil returning to the desk of a music stand is one of my favourite sounds. This sounds crazy, but as a teacher I know that if a student has written something in their music they’re more likely correct their errors next time round and that’s got to be a good thing!

If you’re someone who always has to borrow a pencil from a neighbour in rehearsals, perhaps my words may be enough to inspire you to pop one in your instrument case, so you’re prepared next time you need one. I’d love to know your thoughts on this. Are you an enthusiastic scribe, or does your music tend to remain as untouched as a fresh fall of snow? Please do drop a comment below!

Some of my favourite things….

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The recorder is relatively unusual in the music world in that we don’t tend to play just one instrument. After all, you wouldn’t expect a violinist to also play the cello and double bass. Yes, we usually begin on either a descant or treble (depending on your age and the span of your hands), but most players will gradually begin to explore other sizes, if only out of curiosity. How far your explorations go may depend on physical or financial limitations, but I would always encourage any recorder player to expand their horizons if they can.

In today’s post I’m going to talk about some of my favourite members of the recorder family - in particular the instruments I own and perform on. I’ve also chosen a piece played on each instrument so you can hear what they sound like.

When non-musicians learn that I’m a recorder player there are several questions I’m frequently asked, including which size I play and which is my favourite. Of course, I quickly enlighten them about the huge variety of recorders, from the tiny garklein to big basses, but choosing a single favourite is tricky. If you pushed me hard for an answer it would probably be my tenor, so let’s start there!

The viola of the recorder family

Now don’t misunderstand me - I’m not about to tell any viola jokes! I have some very good friends who play the Cinderella of the string family, and its warm, mellow sound should be heard on its own more often. The tenor recorder shares these characteristics and it’s this gorgeous tone which drew me to my own instrument.

For decades I plodded along with a Yamaha plastic tenor recorder - a fantastic instrument which plays in tune, with a lovely tone and a modest price tag compared to its wooden cousins. I knew if I were to buy a wooden tenor I’d want one which was even better than the Yamaha - and that’s tricky unless you’re willing to spend lots of money. For the amount I needed to spend I simply couldn’t justify the cost relative to the amount it would be played, so I dismissed the idea for a long while.

Many years ago I identified my dream instrument – Stephan Blezinger’s Bressan tenor. I promised myself I would immediately buy one if I ever won the lottery, but in the meantime I kept saving the pennies. By 2016 I’d almost saved enough, but the UK’s Brexit referendum conspired against me, sending currency exchange rates haywire which in turn increased the price of my much longer for tenor by another £400!

Ultimately, a conversation with my Dad convinced me to take the plunge regardless of the cost. I recall him saying something along the lines of, “You’re a long time dead - spend the money now and enjoy the instrument!” I’m so pleased I did, as my gorgeous tenor definitely has the most beautiful tone of all my recorders. Sometimes I’ll use it to demonstrate a point during a rehearsal or workshop and and I’ll see people looking up with an expression on their face which says, “Ooh, that sounds rather lovely!“ I do of course realise this is down to the instrument as much as the player!

Do I get to play very often? Well, thanks to Covid I’ve played it much more than I ever dreamt I would through my consort videos. The tenor is never going to be an instrument with a large solo repertoire, but it brings me so much joy that it was worth every penny, even if perhaps my accountant wouldn’t agree!

One of my favourite solo tenor pieces is Christopher Ball’s Pagan Piper. In 1913 Claude Debussy wrote a piece for solo flute called Syrinx, which depicts the story of the god Pan pursuing a nymph called Syrinx, whom he loves. This love is unrequited and she turns herself into a water reed so she can hide in the marshes. The story has a tragic ending as Pan cuts these reeds to make his musical pipes, thus killing his loved one. Syrinx can also be played on the tenor recorder (I’ve performed it myself) but here we have Christopher Ball’s reinterpretation of the story, composed specifically for the recorder. He subsequently also wrote a companion piece called Pan Overheard. There are definite echoes of Debussy’s impressionistic style and you can feel the influence of the water as the music effortlessly ebbs and flows.

The place where most of us started – or is it?

I imagine the majority of recorder players began their musical lives with the descant. For children, this isn’t a musical choice so much as a pragmatic one – a simple fact that small fingers find the descant an easier stretch than the treble. I’m fond of my ebony descant recorder (the one you’ll see me playing in many of my videos) but my favourite is my Von Huene Ganassi descant recorder, which I’ve had since my second year at music college. It’s made from a single piece of maple wood, is unbelievably light, yet makes the fruitiest tone I’ve ever heard from a recorder of its size.

The title page of Ganassi’s Opera intitulata Fontegara

This design is based upon an instrument kept at the Kunsthistorische Museum of Vienna and has a full two octave plus range - something which isn’t possible on all Renaissance recorders. The wide bore, with a flared bell, means the lowest notes are incredibly rich and full bodied.

I most often use my Ganassi descant for playing the music of Jacob Van Eyck. Of course Der Fluyten Lusthof was composed in the mid 17th century (firmly into the Baroque period) so this probably isn’t a historically correct choice, but I think it suits the music very well nevertheless!

Most recorder players will be familiar with at least some of Jacob Van Eyck’s music, even if you haven’t played all 150 pieces from Der Fluyten Lusthof. Van Eyck was a blind musician employed by the city of Utrecht to care for the carillon in the Dom Tower. He was paid an extra 20 guilders a year to entertain the passersby in the churchyard with his recorder and this was where he performed the sets of divisions (or variations) which were later gathered togther to form Der Fluyten Lusthof - ‘The Flute’s Pleasure Garden’. This particular piece is unusual in that it’s not a set of variations, but a single movement. I like to imagine Van Eyck standing alone in the church, playing this music, having fun as he explores the way the sound echoes off the stone walls.

Sometimes a semitone can make all the difference

Last year I wrote a blog about the standardisation of pitch and over the centuries, which you can find here. The concept of an internationally recognised Baroque pitch is a convenient one adopted over the last century or so, with A=415Hz being the most common today

My thirty year old Prescott A415 treble recorder

I was lucky enough to acquire my first A415 recorder when I was just a teenager, and I used it through most of my college studies. Eventually I succumbed to the lure of an instrument made by Tom Prescott, based on a Bressan from Edgar Hunt’s collection of recorders. It plays better than my first A415 recorder, has a beautiful warm tone and absolutely gorgeous low notes. Thirty years later this recorder is still going strong and I still love playing it.

It’s not until you’ve played a Baroque pitch recorder that you really appreciate the difference that semitone makes. Playing just a semitone beneath modern concert pitch brings such a warmth and mellowness to the tone - far more than you would expect. If you ever have a chance to try playing at A415 grab it with both hands!

Daniel Purcell is an underrated composer today, overshadowed by his brother (or perhaps cousin) Henry. He had a successful career in music though, working as organist at Magdalen College, Oxford and writing incidental music for more than forty plays in London. This movement comes from one of his chamber pieces - a trio sonata for two recorders and basso continuo - which is a perennial favourite when we’re programming concerts with The Parnassian Ensemble.

Plumbing the depths

On the face of it, playing the largest members of the recorder family might not seem that appealing. The music played by these larger instruments is often simpler, and much less whizzy than that played by the high instruments. However, if you’ve ever played a bass clef instrument in any type of ensemble or orchestra, you’ll know there’s a huge satisfaction in feeling you’re providing the foundations to the music.

Big bass recorders may not have the sheer weight of sound provided by low brass instruments, or even a cello. But even one great or contrabass recorder can add so much depth to any ensemble. In 2008 I took the somewhat odd decision to arrange a piece of Sibelius (Valse Triste) to conduct in my massed playing session at the Recorder Summer School. We already had a sizeable forest of greats and contrabasses, but when Steve Marshall doubled the first note of the contra part on his brand new subcontra, an octave lower, I swear I felt the floor vibrate beneath my feet, and a huge grin spread across my face!

I have to confess I’m torn when it comes to choosing a favourite instrument here. Both the great and contrabass recorders I play in my consort videos are on long-term loan from friends, and for that I am immensely grateful. I love the sensation of playing the contrabass in a recorder orchestra, and the Paetzold instrument I use has wonderfully resonant low notes. However, I do also have a very large soft spot for the great bass, which offers the opportunity to both reinforce the bassline and help fill out the harmonies. I think we’ll call that one an honourable draw!

The piece I’ve chosen to share the mellow tones of the bigger basses is not traditional recorder repertoire - a choral piece by the French romantic composer Gabriel Fauré. In this arrangement of Cantique de Jean Racine by Brian Bonsor the recorders sound wonderfully mellow, with the lowest voice taken by the great bass. Brian was an enthusiastic composer and arranger of music for recorders with piano, so a piece for voices and piano was a natural choice for him to arrange. I remember the year he brought it along to the Recorder Summer School (in his impeccably neat handwritten manuscript) for 150 recorders to play it with Brian directing from the piano - simply heavenly. This performance is one I conducted for the CD Bravo Bonsor!, with Brian’s good friend James Letham at the piano.

The magic of the voice flute

The largest recorder here is my Cranmore Voice Flute

My final favourite instrument today is the voice flute - a member of the recorder family, despite its name. The voice flute may be less familiar to many recorder players, but it has a unique quality which I love. Fundamentally it’s a tenor recorder pitched in D – that means the bottom note is a D rather than a C. That may seem a little quirky until you understand its musical purpose.

During the Baroque period, it wasn’t uncommon for recorder players to steal flute music for their own purposes, transposing the notes a minor third higher to fit the treble. This is all very well, but you can’t then play the same music with other instruments because of the change of pitch. Another option is to use a voice flute which shares the same range as a flute of the period. This makes it possible to play flute music at the original pitch but on a recorder.

My own voice flute is one made by Tim Cranmore about 20 years ago. The finger stretch can be a little challenging, but absolutely worth it for the gorgeousness of its tone. More recently, when playing with the Parnassian Ensemble, we experimented with using my voice flute alongside the Baroque flute in some 18th century French repertoire, and the result was just glorious!

My final piece of music does exactly what the voice flute was intended for - a beautiful borrowed Fantasia for flute and comes from my own CD, Helen and Friends. All twelve of Telemann’s Fantasias are glorious, but I have a particular fondness for this one, especially when played at the original pitch. I shared a recording of this work by Frans Bruggen in my recorder themed take on Desert Island Discs if you’d like to compare and contrast between the sound of voice flute and treble recorder!

So there you have my favourite recorders. I’m afraid I really couldn’t narrow it down to just one, as a real recorder player doesn’t specialise on just one. That’s the magic of our chosen instrument – if you fancy something whizzy and sparkly a descant is perfect. But if you’re in a mellow mood and want to explore the deeper end of things, a contrabass can be so soulful.

~ ~ ~

Do you have a favourite size of recorder? If so, what is it about this particular instrument that draws you in so much? Please do share your thoughts in the comments below - I’d love to hear your preferences!

The technique zone - Making space and time to breathe

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You’d think we’d be experts in the art of breathing, wouldn’t you? After all, breathing is something we do instinctively, so it’s a subject we rarely give a second thought to. If we’re running for a bus, or maybe if we’ve got a bad cough, we might be more conscious of our breathing, but otherwise it’s something we do without consideration.

A while ago Liz, one of my subscribers, got in touch to tell me about the challenges she finds when breathing deeply to play the recorder and it struck me it might be a useful topic to cover here in the Technique Zone:

“It’s making time to take a breath I find difficult. I'm still frequently left short of enough breath for the final note, and Bach is just impossible! I think the problem lies in finding/making enough time between the notes to take a big lungful or not breathing in deeply enough in the first place.”

I think there are two issues here. One is learning how to breath in deeply and quickly, so we make the best use of our natural lung capacity. The second is a musical issue - specifically how to make space for breaths without it feeling like we’re creating a huge chasm in the music.

I often see musicians struggling with this problem, so if you’re nodding your head in sympathy with Liz’s message, you’re in good company. In today’s blog we’ll look at both topics and I’ll do my best to help you overcome these challenges.

Back to basics.

Let’s begin with a quick refresher on the best way to breathe when you’re playing. I covered the topic of breathing and tone production in a blog last year. You’ll find that post here, but let’s have a quick refresher on the basics of breathing for playing the recorder before we consider other techniques.

First of all, be as relaxed as possible. Whenever you play, always sit or stand with good posture, keeping your face, throat, neck, shoulders and abdomen, relaxed and soft.

When you breathe in, allow your rib cage and stomach to expand as the air descends into your lungs, inflating them like balloons. You then need to create a little tension to control your tone when you blow out again – specifically in your stomach muscles. Tightening these muscles places pressure on the diaphragm, which in turn gently squeezes the air from your lungs and out into your recorder.

When we practise these techniques to improve our breath control and tone quality, more often than not we do so in a slow controlled way. This means taking leisurely, relaxed breaths in, then releasing the air in a measured way, perhaps playing long notes. This is excellent practice, but doesn’t necessarily equip us for the real musical world.

Learning to breathe quickly

Bach was a musical genius, but rarely considered the need to breathe in his music!

As Liz implied in her email, one of the greatest challenges is being able to breathe in deeply at speed.

Composers don’t always allow us a lot of time to breathe, and some are more sympathetic than others - I am of course primarily thinking of J.S.Bach. Singers and wind players alike always complain about his long phrases, which take no account of our very human need for oxygen!

If we’re going to breathe in quickly and deeply, what’s the most important factor to remember? Undoubtedly relaxation is key here.

If you’re one of those people who habitually pulls in their stomach muscles to make themselves look thinner, you’re going to struggle to breathe in quickly and deeply. Instead you need to let your stomach and rib cage remain as relaxed as possible, even if this means you don’t look quite a slender as perhaps you might wish!

Let’s begin the process of speeding up our breathing with an exercise:

Practising this exercise regularly, gradually reducing the time you allow yourself to breathe in, will help you learn to fill more of your lung capacity more swiftly. Of course sometimes you’ll have almost no time to breathe – maybe just a tiny rest or perhaps even between notes in a fast run. Here you need to speed up this technique even more, and for this I have a mental image to help you.

Many years ago, I observed a colleague at a Saturday morning music centre talking to his young choir, helping them learn to breathe quickly and deeply. He described the type of breath they needed as one of those you take when something catches you by surprise - a sharp but deep breath.

No doubt you can think of occasions when you’ve experienced exactly this, but my colleague Mitch had a particularly imaginative scenario which he described to the children. He asked them to imagine they were sitting in a peaceful space, minding their own business, perhaps quietly reading a book. Out of nowhere a tribe of rabbits bursts through the window, riding Harley Davidson motorbikes and toting machine guns. He proposed, quite rightly I think, that this sight would cause you to gasp with surprise!

Try to imagine such a scene. Perhaps not rabbits on motorbikes, but instead think of a moment when something has caused you to gasp for breath in sheer surprise. When this happens, you don’t have time to think about the mechanics of how you breathe. Instead your body instinctively draws the maximum amount of air into your lungs at great speed. This is what we need to do, albeit in a slightly more controlled way, when we have to breathe swiftly and deeply, mid phrase.

Removing the kinks…

We’ve already talked about how your midriff needs to remain soft and relaxed, but this isn’t the only part of your body to consider. Working upwards from your lungs to your windpipe, you come to the narrowest part of your breathing apparatus.

Take a moment to picture your garden hose. Imagine you’ve tied knots in the hose, or trapped part of it under something heavy. These kinks and restrictions prevent the water flowing freely and quickly. Now think of your windway and picture what happens when you tense your throat. Just like the hosepipe, this tension creates a restriction, stopping the air flowing freely. This limits the speed at which you can fill your lungs.

Spend a couple of minutes quietly breathing in and out again in a genuinely relaxed way. Make sure you keep your face cheeks, lips and throat really relaxed, so your entire breathing apparatus is as relaxed and open of possible. One of the best ways to remove tension and relax your throat is to yawn. When you yawn, your soft palate lifts, and your throat opens up, creating lots of room. I bet just reading about it makes you want to yawn, doesn’t it? I’m fighting back a yawn just writing about it now!

Most wind instruments require an embouchure - using your lips and face muscles to control the vibrations of a reed or to buzz into a brass mouthpiece. Our instrument doesn’t demand this, but instead you should aim to keep your face and throat relaxed and free of tension when playing. I’ve heard other wind teachers talk about breathing in with a ‘yawning breath’ which is a great image to have in your mind. Imagine your throat and windway as wide pipes which have enough capacity to allow in lots of air very quickly, rather than that narrow, knotty hosepipe we imagined earlier.

Use your mouth, not your nose!

Finally (and this may seem like a statement of the blindingly obvious) always breathe in through your mouth to play the recorder. I’ve encountered several recorder players over the years who breathe in through their nose. When you think about it, it’s clear that inhaling through your mouth is quicker and more efficient, simply because air cannot travel as quickly through the small spaces of your nostrils. However, if this makes just one of you think about what you’re doing and realise perhaps you’ve been breathing through your nose rather than your mouth, it’s been worth me stating the obvious!

Okay, so we’ve considered the physical aspects of breathing quickly and deeply, so now let’s look at how we put this into practice while playing music…

Sometimes the music we play allows lots of room to breathe. This may come in the form of rests or breath marks, carefully planned out between phrases. But sometimes a really quick breathe is required, perhaps during a very small rest or in the middle of a long run of fast notes. This is where the techniques I’ve described above will help you.

Tailoring breaths to suit different recorders

Of course, different sizes of recorder demand varying quantities of breath. When playing a sopranino, for instance, you may find that inhaling really deeply results in you having too much air left in your lungs, so you then have to exhale before you can breathe in again for the next phrase. In contrast, a bass recorder will gobble up all the air you put into it very quickly and you might find you simply can’t reach the end of a phrase.

We all have different lung capacities and this is partly determined by our build. For instance, a tall person will naturally have larger lungs than someone who is short. It’s entirely possible to develop your breathing though, learning to use your natural capacity more efficiently, as I discussed in my earlier blog.

Even if you work really hard, you may still find there are phrases you simply cannot play in one breath, particularly on larger sizes of recorder. In this situation don’t give yourself too hard time - you’re only human and we all have our physical limitations!

If you feel you’re going to run out of air, don’t just stagger on to the next breath mark, rationing your breath to try and make it last. This compromises the quality of your tone and ruins your intonation. A much better solution is to find an additional place to breathe, so you can maintain the best possible tone throughout. If you’re playing in an ensemble with several players on each part, a handy strategy is to agree who will breathe where. By staggering your breaths in different places, you can create the illusion of a long well supported phrase, even if no individual player can manage the entire phrase in one go.

Be prepared!

When sight reading we tend to grab breaths whenever we can. That’s absolutely fine because you’re just getting to know the music. But when you settle down to really learn a piece thoroughly it’s a good idea to plan you’re going to breathe, especially if the music you’re playing from doesn’t contain printed breath marks. Knowing the location of your next breath means you can judge how deeply you need to breathe at any given moment.

Remember, there’s rarely an absolutely right or wrong place to breathe. Experiment inserting breaths at different places and see which feels right for you. Most music contains regular phrase lengths - perhaps two or four bars - so use that as a starting point. If the piece begins with an anacrusis (or upbeat), subsequent phrases will likely do the same - a useful guide when seeking out further breaths.

Remember too that any breaths you pencil into your music aren’t then set in stone forever. Music making should be a fluid, dynamic affair, and you’re allowed to change your mind about the best places to breathe as you get to know the music better.

Breathing without spoiling the musical line

Breaths should never sound like a desperate gasp for air!

If you only have a short space in which to breathe, it’s very easy to feel you need to do so as quickly as possible, to avoid interrupting the flow of the music. This seems logical, but in fact a desperate gasp will often interrupt the musical line more than a carefully planned and more leisurely breath.

Imagine you’re reading a speech to a large crowd of people. Between sentences you breathe in and take a moment for the points you’ve made to hit home. Hurrying on between sentences makes the text harder to understand for your audience and will make your listeners feel uncomfortable. Try to use the same strategy in your music making. The music needs to breathe just as much as you do, so use your breaths as musical punctuation to add clarity to your phrasing.

The music below is a short extract from the second movement of Handel’s Recorder Sonata in F major - you can click on the music to make it bigger if you want to play it yourself.

Here’s a recording of the same extract. Listen carefully and you’ll hear I’ve added a breath three notes before the end of bar 22, in the middle of the semiquaver passagework. At this point the melodic pattern changes and it seems to me to be an appropriate spot for a top-up breath.

Try playing the music yourself at a tempo which allows you to get around the notes fluently - you don’t have to play it as quickly as me! Now record yourself and listen back to it. The voice memo app on a smartphone is useful for this. When you listen to yourself playing, do your breaths sound like an act of desperation by someone who’s gasping for air? Or do they sound well considered and musical?

Compare your recording with mine and listen to how I make room for the breaths. The music, like spoken text, needs room to breathe, so the musical sentences make sense. Even in the middle of a run of semiquavers you can create space to breathe. Try and make your breaths feel they are an intrinsic part of the music, rather than an apologetic need for air.

If you find this difficult, play the music again and make really obvious spaces for the breaths, creating additional rests where you need to inhale. Gradually make these spaces smaller, using the quick, deep, yawning breaths I described earlier. As this becomes more natural you’ll be surprised how much time you can take to breathe and if you do this with conviction it will feel like part of the music.

Now make another recording with these more leisurely, purposeful breaths, and listen back to it. Does this feel like a more coherent performance? Do the breaths feel more organic and musical? It may seem counterintuitive to do this, but as your confidence and conviction grows around breathing, your breaths will sound more musical and considered.

Collaborate with your fellow musicians

If you’re playing with other musicians, agreeing on where to breathe should be a collaborative process. There will be places where you should all breathe together, and you may decide that the music would benefit if you allow a little bit more space to do so. In other situations, one part will need a breath while the other voices are still playing. Here it may be necessary to note in your part that someone else needs a little time to breathe. It’s all a matter of give-and-take - if you allow one of your fellow musicians time to breathe, no doubt, they will do the same for you at another time.

~ ~ ~

I hope the tips I’ve shared today will prove helpful in your playing and have gone some way to answering Liz’s question. The most important thing is to remember you’re human and your lung capacity and technique may not always immediately match up to the music you’re trying to play. This shouldn’t stop you trying challenging pieces of music, so have a go, experiment with different places to breathe, and most importantly, have fun. Don’t get too hung up on the notes, but instead focus on making music, allowing room for both you and the music to breathe.

If you’ve learnt a piece of music which particularly tests your breathing, why not tell us about it in the comments below. I’d love to hear what strategies you used to overcome the challenges while practising.

Sounding Pipes, Edition 3

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As we approach the Christmas holiday I thought I’d share another of my occasional recorder playlists for you to explore. Once again, I’ve spent some time exploring my own CD collection for inspiration, as well as noting some of the gems YouTube and my various music streaming services spontaneously offer up to me.

As you already know, I enjoy an eclectic mix of music and while all of my recommendations today include the recorder, some of them aren’t necessarily repertoire you might immediately associate with our favourite instrument! There should be something for everyone and hopefully these tracks may inspire you to explore further to widen your own listening habits.

Happy listening!

John Dowland - Lachrimae Pavan (Flow my Tears)

The Flautadors Recorder Quartet - Cynthia's Revels (First Hand 2015)

You may well be familiar with John Dowland’s melancholic lute song, Flow my Tears, or perhaps his consort version, Lachrimae Pavan. This achingly beautiful melody became very well known and has been used in compositions by countless other composers. Jacob van Eyck wrote two sets of variations upon the melody which were published in his collection Der Fluyten Lusthof in 1644. One can imagine how doleful they must have sounded, echoing off the walls of Utrecht Cathedral as van Eyck played them to passersby in the churchyard. In this beautiful recording The Flautadors have chosen to combine Dowland’s music with van Eyck’s divisions, creating a weaving line above the sonorous harmonies.

Colin Touchin - Manchester Welcome

Three Teacher's Recorder Orchestra, conducted by Colin Touchin, 2008.

The death of Colin Touchin this autumn was a sad moment for the recorder world and I wanted to share one of his pieces with you to remember him. Colin was a friend and mentor to me for many years, and well known in the recorder world for both his compositions and conducting. I worked with Colin for nearly a decade as part of the tutoring team for the National Youth Recorder Orchestra and learnt a lot from his precise and economical conducting style. Watching this video reminded me of some the conducting techniques I learnt from Colin. All conductors ‘borrow’ ideas from each other and I fondly recall a moment in a rehearsal where Colin commented that the tenors missed their entry because he hadn’t twitched his elbow. We all chuckled, thinking that was preposterous, but when he gave a twitch on the second try they miraculously came in, bang on time! That taught me an important lesson about the importance of clear gestures when conducting and I’ll miss the opportunity to learn more from Colin in the future.

Manchester Welcome was the second time Colin had composed a piece for a Society of Recorder Players national festival. The first piece, Staffordshire Festival, came in 1991 and had no contrabass part because such large instruments were still relatively rare then. Fast forward to 2003 and we had a vast hall of players, including a phalanx of contras and Colin was able to make use of these enlarged forces to create a full scale orchestral piece. The excitement was palpable, enhanced by the fact that we were playing in the hall of the Manchester school where Colin had learnt the recorder as a youngster.

J.S.Bach / Benedetto Marcello Oboe Concerto BWV 974

Simon Borutzki, Lea Rahel Bader, Magnus Andersson & Laute Clemens Flick - Bach all’ italiano (Klanglogo 2016)

I first encountered Marcello’s Oboe Concerto in D minor as a teenager, when a college friend of mine performed it in a concert, and its haunting melody has been a firm favourite ever since. the film director Sydney Pollack was evidently a fan too, as it appears in the soundtrack of his film The Firm - a solitary piece of orchestral music in a score that’s otherwise entirely played on the piano.

Even in the 18th century, Marcello’s music was already being borrowed for other purposes. J.S.Bach chose several concertos by Italian composers and arranged them for solo harpsichord. It’s this version which German recorder player Simon Borutzki has used to create his own interpretation for recorder. You may recall we saw also Simon in action in my last Sounding Pipes playlist, conducting the Berlin Recorder Orchestra in a Rossini Overture.

Lennox Berkeley Sonatina

Jill Kemp & Aleksander Szram - English Recorder Works (Music & Media 2013)

We take the recorder’s huge repertoire of contemporary music for granted these days, but during the early days of the instrument’s revival new works were hard to come by. In 1938 one of Edgar Hunt’s recorder students, Manuel Jacobs, wrote the following in an article in the Musical Times under the pen name Terpander:

“It cannot be too much insisted that if the health and strength of the present recorder revival is to be maintained, the revival itself must be recognised as essentially a contemporary phenomenon and contemporary music must be written for it. Seen and treated purely as an object of antiquarian interest, it will die the speedy death that all movements which reply too exclusively and too morbidly on the past and its associations deserve to die. Actually the recorder is less remarkable for its ‘antiquity’ than for the accommodating way it fits into its 20th century surroundings.”

Jacobs was obviously a very persuasive character and his efforts resulted in works for the recorder by many young composers of the day, including Lennox Berkeley, Stanley Bate, Christian Darnton, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Eve Kisch, Walter Leigh, Peter Pope, Alan Rawsthorne and Franz Reisenstein. Many of these works are still in print today, although some have aged better than others.

Lennox Berkeley composing at the piano

Lennox Berkeley’s Sonatina received an informal first performance by Carl Dolmetsch at the London Contemporary Music Centre in June 1939, just twenty years after Arnold Dolmetsch made the first modern recorder. Earlier in 1939 Dolmetsch gave the first of his Wigmore Hall recitals and, frustrated by the dearth of modern music, he composed a Theme and Variations of his own to fill this gap in the programme.

At his second recital there, in November 1939, the Berkeley took pride of place in the concert, receiving its public premiere, starting a pattern Dolmetsch would continue for five decades. At his annual Wigmore Hall recital, Dolmetsch would perform newly composed repertoire - some 32 pieces in all. I went to his final recital at the Wigmore Hall in October 1989, where he premiered Variants on a Tune of HH - a reference to the composer Herbert Howells.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Berkeley’s Sonatina. It may be one of the earliest 20th century works for recorder, but it’s stood test of time and remains a great piece of music. There may be moments which show a less than perfect understanding of the instrument (top F sharps and occasional unsympathetic chromatic passages) but I think we can forgive these at a time when the recorder’s capabilities weren’t yet well understood. I’ve shared the first movement below, but you can listen to the whole work, along with other works by Malcolm Arnold, Gordon Jacob and York Bowen here.

Guus Haverkate - The Marmalade Cat

Tom Beets & Recorders Incorporated

Photo by Helen Hooker

Just this week I reviewed The Marmalade Cat for The Recorder Magazine so it was fresh in my mind when I started writing today. Haverkate is a composer you may well have come across, either through his other ensemble repertoire, or perhaps his modern studies for recorder. His music often has a pictorial quality, conjuring up mental images of an ongoing storyline. The laid back big band jazz style of The Marmalade Cat makes me think of a larger than life ginger tom cat sauntering along the street on a warm day, stopping occasionally for a wash and a spot of relaxation time in the sun.

Tom Beets recorded this performance with his orchestra, Recorders Incorporated, in Wells in January 2020 and I just love its laid back feel and Tom’s relaxed conducting style. Grab a cuppa, turn up the volume, sit back and enjoy some chilled out recorder jazz!

John Williams - The Cantina Band from Star Wars

Orlan Charles

My final choice today should put a spring in your step, although I must warn you may be humming the tune for days! This is one of those videos thrown up for me by YouTube and it immediately made me smile. Orlan Charles is a Brazilian recorder player and flautist who performs a huge variety of music, as well as arranging for many different types of ensemble. This arrangement of the Cantina Band music from Star Wars is one he recorded four years ago and it showcases his recorder playing, body percussion and some choreography too. As someone who spends a lot of time creating multitrack videos I can’t help feeling I need to raise my game after watching this!

So there you have six pieces to entertain and inspire you - some serious, some much less so! I hope you enjoyed them - drop a comment below to let me know which one’s your favourite. While you’re doing that, why not let me have any suggestions for future editions of Sounding Pipes. Perhaps you want more recorder orchestra music or repertoire from a particular period? I’m open to ideas and I’m all ears!