"Trombe in B"

[Richard N.]

OK - I'm having an old geezer moment.....

I'm looking at the score for Mussorgsky's Night On A Bald/Bare Mountain.

The trumpet part is marked as "Trombe in B", but on the first page of the score there is no key signature (piece is in one flat concert) and then at measure 9 without any other key change, the trumpet part is marked with one flat.

The (F) horn also starts with no key signature and changes to one flat at the same point as the trumpet.

However, the Bb Clarinet stays in one sharp throughout (as I would expect it to).

Which particular nugget of common musical sense am I missing here to make me not understand the above?

[cptexas]

Many times horn and trumpet parts are left without key signatures and have lots of accidentals. But that changing to one flat is bizzare. Does the Bb/F transposition make sence with the rest of the orchestra? If the notes sound like they fit in with the rest of the chord, then I would leave it and assume that the composer and/or publisher didn't get a good night's sleep. :D


-Chris

[Skysaw]

Definitely sounds like a typo in the score to me. Blame the publisher.

[cptexas]

Definitely sounds like a typo in the score to me. Blame the publisher.
Once I got a trebble clef key signature in my bass clef music. I was staring at it and asking myself, "What do I do with Db, Gb, and Cb?" :confused: :D

-Chris

[Fabio]

OK - I'm having an old geezer moment.....

I'm looking at the score for Mussorgsky's Night On A Bald/Bare Mountain.

The trumpet part is marked as "Trombe in B", but on the first page of the score there is no key signature (piece is in one flat concert) and then at measure 9 without any other key change, the trumpet part is marked with one flat.

The (F) horn also starts with no key signature and changes to one flat at the same point as the trumpet.

However, the Bb Clarinet stays in one sharp throughout (as I would expect it to).

Which particular nugget of common musical sense am I missing here to make me not understand the above?

Can you please let us have a pdf of the page?

I've some doubt about the B:

The Italian word Trombe is not well linking to a B in the English sense:
I suppose it's the German convention of B = Bb and H=B, also because I've never heard of Trumpet in B (D,C, Bb and A are the usual fundamental of trumpets)

Then it's Trumpet in Bb probably. But now you will expect one sharp as in The Clarinet.

The answers are two: engraving error, or natural sounds writing, sometime used to score brass instruments. The notes in the page are the solution of the enigma: please share it with us, and we will solve it together!

[Richard N.]

Thanks for the input guys.

Fabio - here is a pdf of the first three pages.

www.stradjazz.co.uk/BaldMountainScore_pages_123.pdf

I would also appreciate clarification of "Cassa" - what sort of drum should this be?

[Fabio]

Cassa, or GranCassa is the Italian for orchestral bass drum.

[Fabio]

Thanks for the input guys.

Fabio - here is a pdf of the first three pages.

www.stradjazz.co.uk/BaldMountainScore_pages_123.pdf

I would also appreciate clarification of "Cassa" - what sort of drum should this be?

VERY NICE SCORE! All instruments names are italian, and the note name are the germans (probably used in Russia too).

Unfortunately the pause of Trumpets let us in the mistery! But I think that the change of key is just preparing something following: for instance the Bb added to Horns doesn't change anything because Horns are playng a A pedal (the same with or without one flat). May be the following phrase is in a relative tonality, and the key helps the trumpet player?

The main theme entry will in few bars play strange notes (a modal writing of the composer, playing in a personal style chromatic steps of the minor key), then also natural sounds writing for trumpet is possible. You create a curiosity...I will investigate!

[Richard N.]

Yes, now I've done some work on the score, it appears that the Horns and Trumpets are written as transposing intruments but without key signatures - except where the engraver has slipped a random key signature at the start of one or two pages.

Just for my own pleasure/recreation/learning, I am re-scoring this piece in Finale - to later create a mock-up with GPO.

Whilst my biography includes being Principal Trombone with a prominent British orchestra, that was some time and a different genre ago, so hopefully I'll be able to pick a few brains as and when more questions arise.

Thanks.

[Richard N.]

Unfortunately the pause of Trumpets let us in the mistery!

Sorry Fabio, I have now posted another pdf which actually includes some notes in the trumpet parts. :)

http://www.stradjazz.co.uk/BaldMountainScore_pages_1to7.pdf

[scottnorma]

Richard, I haven't looked at the score, but it sounds like the original engraver/editor was out to lunch on this one. I can't imagine that the publisher's house rules were that terribly askew. And who knows? It could have been something so simple as the originating engraver handing it off at one point to an apprentice and never checking his work. The inconsistency of "Trombe in B" though, had to have been done by one person, but this mixing of the italian and german in the instrument nomenclature was not uncommon in some old Russian scores. They seem to have done considerable mixing and matching on the fly back then. The rest of what you described however is irregular, though unfortunately not all that surprising.

A lot of public domain scores that you can get these days are just straight reprints of the original plates, and they are hardly ever run past a modern day editor, such that, what you get is what you get. This is why you'll see lots of strangeness in these old scores.

The lack of key sigs for tpts. & hns. is left over from the days of crooks. And even 150 years ago after pistons and rotors had come along, this could've been considered an outmoded way of doing things, but most publishers kept the convention for a very long time - but at least partly this was in deference to the fact that the players back then were used to it. You'll see trill notation for percussion rolls. Missing dynamics are all over the place, as well as outright contradictory markings. But one of the all-time annoying conventions of notation from back then was that very often, when the horn part had to be switched to the bass clef to accomodate notes in that region, suddenly it was written a P4th below concert rather than a P5th above. This even shows up in some Stravinsky.

In a lot of these cases, it was simply an editor not wanting to catch an earful from an angry composer, so they would just leave obvious mistakes or notational oddities as is because of past run-ins. In Beethoven's 9th, the nomenclature he uses for the Trumpets most of the time is "Clarini", which is not uncommon at this time in and of itself. But in the Adagio, he lists them as "Trombe". This isn't an instrument change, but just a bit of inconsistency that remains even today in some conductor's scores of the piece. Of course, one can imagine Beethoven writing the Adagio at a time distant from the other movements, as was usually the case with him. And at any given point he could've been of the mind that the trumpets should be called one thing or the other. And since Beethoven had a rep for going to the publishing house even up until the minute of printing and making last minute changes, the engravers were probably just conditioned to not mess around with the guy, lest he be surprised and offended. Schoenberg's notation of string harmonics is another curious example. It included a mix of several conventions that taken alone would have done the job, but he jumbled them all together. (He notated the sounding pitch, the node that is touched, put the tiny circle for harmonic notation, AND wrote the abbreviation "harm." String players seeing this must have been saying, "Okay, okay, we get it. You want a harmonic here. Enough already!") Nevertheless, this has not been corrected in the conductor's score or parts.

[Skysaw]

Another point: As far as I know, no traditional instruments transpose to the key of B. Anything marked as "in B" means "in Bb."

Side note: As an orchestral horn player, I had to sight-read parts in F, E, Eb, D, C, and less often in Bb (up and down), A, Ab, and G. It was like having to have a gear-shift in your brain.

[scottnorma]

There were some trumpets in B-natural back then, but they were infrequently employed - and really a little bit earlier than the Rimsky-Korsakov score. The rarest model though would've been the A-flat trumpet. It had a pretty short shelf life.

[Skysaw]

Verdi doesn't count. He didn't know what he was doing. :eek:

[scottnorma]

Verdi? Oh, you must be talking about Jesse Green. For some reason those crazy Italians insist on translating his name into "Giuseppe Verdi". Maybe Fabio can shed some light on this. :)

[Fabio]

Sorry Fabio, I have now posted another pdf which actually includes some notes in the trumpet parts. :)

http://www.stradjazz.co.uk/BaldMountainScore_pages_1to7.pdf

Thanks: now everything is clear.

As I told, the trumpet is in Bb, the part is written in natural sounds, but of course transposed: in the last two measures of page 9 the E is correctly transcribed as a F sharp (because it's not in the key, the engraver has used it directly in the bar).

Then in page 2, the key of one flat in both horns and trumpet is IMO really an engraving error, nothing more. :cool:

[Fabio]

Verdi? Oh, you must be talking about Jesse Green. For some reason those crazy Italians insist on translating his name into "Giuseppe Verdi". Maybe Fabio can shed some light on this. :)

Yes of course...

The famous jazz and ragtime band composer and arranger Jesse Green, ("beppe" for friends) born in Busseto, near the Missisipi, had a big passion for strange ancient exotic stories, like Babylonian, Lonbards, Egyptians and so on.

In his funny musical "AIDA", to recreate the old Egyptian atmosphere, he wrote a 1800 military march, but he called it "Marcia Trionfale", and he orchestrated it with rythmic accompaniment of natural trumpets (the long one you can see in Ben Hur for instance, or other Roman or greek old movies...)... :p

[Styxx]

Symphony No.6, Sibelius

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
Symphonie No.6, Op.104 (1923)

Allegro molto moderato
Allegretto moderato
Poco vivace
Allegro molto
2 Flauti, 2 Oboi, 2 Clarinetti in B, Clarinetto Basso in B, 2 Fagotti,
4 Corni in F, 3 Trombe in B, 3 Tromboni, Timpani, Arpa,
Violini I, Violini II, Alti, Violoncelli, Contrabassi
Wilhelm Hansen

Just for grins I did a search on Trombe in B and this came up.

[scottnorma]

Fabio, did you know that the original version of "Un Ballo in Maschera" was originally titled, "The Halloween Party"? :)

[etLux]

B is, of course, common nomenclature for Bb in the Germanic scoring traditions, and commonplace in Russian scores.

But Russian scores from this period are practically notorious for engraving errors.

Some say the high tax invoked on vodka by the Czar to finance the Trans-Siberian railway was responsible: Many poor musicians were forced to switch to badly made "bathtub" vodka -- which packed quite an incredible, eye-crossing whallop.

In some cases, too, scores were actually "reassembled" from individual players' parts, introducting still further possibilities for error -- copyists rarely bothered with key signatures for simpler parts of a work; but, instead, simply scored in accidentals as needed.

scottnorma also outlined the matter of a plethora of crooks and bizarre notation conventions on the horns... many of which occasionally persist in scores to this day. Even if you know the conventions of these times, it can still turn such scores into jig-saw puzzles.

All-in-all, good arguments for doing conductor's scores at concert pitch... lol.

etLux
www.DavidSosnowski.com
.

[rwayland]

Symphony No.6, Sibelius



3 Trombe in B,

Just for grins I did a search on Trombe in B and this came up.

Just for grins, consider the 4 note opening of The Art of the Fugue.

Richard

[scottnorma]

Just for grins, consider the 4 note opening of The Art of the Fugue.
Are you talking about the third subject of the last fugue where he spells out his name?

[Fabio]

Are you talking about the third subject of the last fugue where he spells out his name?

B A C H (sounds like Bb A C B in English spelling), notes used by Johan Sebastian not only in 3th episode of the last 4 subjects big fugue, but sometime else like a musical signature...the man, the genius.

[rwayland]

Are you talking about the third subject of the last fugue where he spells out his name?

That, plus contrapunctus 11, where is is not quite as immediately obvious, being stated as B A C C C H.

Richard

[scottnorma]

What's amazing is that he was able to use those four notes for a subject at all. That's not an easy subject to say the least - well, not for mere mortals that is.

[rwayland]

What's amazing is that he was able to use those four notes for a subject at all. That's not an easy subject to say the least - well, not for mere mortals that is.


Yep! The most I have managed with it was to use it as an ending to a Prelude, Canon & Fugue I wrote about 15 years ago, and diddled with it a bit in a piece called Neubach.

Richard

[scottnorma]

Yep! The most I have managed with it was to use it as an ending to a Prelude, Canon & Fugue I wrote about 15 years ago, and diddled with it a bit in a piece called Neubach.
What's the matter? Couldn't you figure out a way to spell out "rwayland" using notes? :p