“Chamber Music” can be defined as “any small ensemble of one or more instruments” usually playing music designed to be performed in a smaller space than a large concert hall. Brass Quintets don’t often figure on many chamber music series – perhaps, in the Old Days, the idea of a group of brass players was better suited for ceremonial music maybe in the theater or opera house or, better yet, outdoors, the volume perhaps a bit much for the royal eardrums when confined to a small room in the palace – but certainly the sound and dynamic range of a brass ensemble would fit well in a church like Market Square Presbyterian. So you’re in for a treat with the first of the three concerts for Market Square Concerts’ Summermusic 2026 this weekend.
The third concert, on July 19th at 4pm, will feature music for voice and piano with tenor Curt Bannister and pianist Mark Markham ranging from Strauss and Ravel to Bernstein and Ellington. The second concert will feature violinist (and MSC Co-Director) Peter Sirotin joined by pianist (and Harrisburg Symphony Music Director) Stuart Malina with several friends to perform two works written four years apart, Dvořák’s “American” String Quartet and American composer Arthur Foote’s rarely heard Piano Quintet from 1897. That’s on Wednesday, July 15th at 7:30. All concerts will take place in the air-conditioned Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg.
The first concert on Sunday, July 12th, at 4pm, will feature the principal trumpet player of the Harrisburg Symphony, Kevin Gebo, and some friends of his who are also members of the United States Army Band’s Brass Quintet, trumpeter Andrew Boylan, hornist Rick Lee, trombonist Gregory Hammond, and tubist Andrew Dougherty. And their program is the one I’m going to be telling you about in this post of the Market Square Concerts Blog.
Kevin Gebo, Gregory Hammond, Andrew Dougherty, Rick Lee, & Andrew Boylan
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Despite the fact brass instruments have been around since before ancient times, the idea of putting five different brass players in an ensemble to perform chamber music is a fairly recent innovation, since the “first brass quintet” was supposedly written by Viktor Ewald in 1890. Trumpets, according to the Bible, played a significant role at Jericho (perhaps not the best image for concert performances but then ask any player in a modern orchestra who sits in front of the brass section). Trumpets and horns played a key ceremonial role in Ancient Rome, especially in the military world of the empire, though it was always confusing to me growing up, that the Latin word for “trumpet” was tuba; then, when I first heard the Tuba mirum, the “trumpet of wonder” heralding the Last Judgment, from Mozart’s Requiem with its striking trombone solo, I was thoroughly confused.
Stringed instruments evolved over the centuries until the present day “violin family” was more or less finalized between the 1500s and early-1700s, especially with famous makers like Stradivari. Almost immediately, someone got the idea to put four of these together – two violins, a viola, and a cello – to form a String Quartet (Haydn is often called the Father of the String Quartet as well as of the Symphony). So, if brass instruments had been around so long, why did it take so long for someone to do the same thing for a Brass Quintet?
It would take too long to go into the history of brass instruments in general, especially the acoustical and technical details behind their development, to cover the centuries that led from those ancient Roman instruments to the modern instruments we know – and hear – today. Like most of the woodwind family which went through the additions of keys and various other modifications since the early-19th Century, similar changes impacted trumpets and horns with valves or keys to make “pitch production” more consistent. The trombone, however, evolved from a larger version of the trumpet (in Italian, tromba: trombone, with a pronounced ‘e,’ literally meant “big trumpet”) sometime during the 1400s and had a movable slide to change pitches rather than keys or valves, showing all the essentials of the present-day instrument. As one trombonist friend of mine put it, when being accused of playing “a primitive instrument,” his trombone had “achieved an early state of perfection.”
One thing about chamber music ensembles, the idea of a String Quartet was to blend instruments of similar sound to cover a wider range than you would get from, say, a single violin. But the Brass Quintet combines four different instruments – like the String Quartet with its two violins, the Brass Quintet has its two trumpets for the same reasons, however you care to justify it – each of which have considerably different sounds. The problem for composers becomes one of making these instruments blend and balance each other, again while covering the full range equivalent to the soprano and bass voices with inner voices filling in the harmony. It is more a question of handling the multiple voices of these instruments – literally polyphony, “many voices” – aaand here I go down the rabbit-hole of explaining counterpoint versus straight chord-by-chord harmonic writing like you’d find in a hymn. Yes, brass quintets do play hymns (and Christmas carols; man, do they play Christmas carols in due season) but it’s always a balance problem, especially for the “inner voices.” Technically, it’s more natural (no pun intended) for each instrument to play their own melodic line to help define the texture. So, if you’re listening with this in mind, notice how different pieces on the program will use a chordal “blended” sound as opposed to a more linear “independent” role for each instrument.
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Given the concept of a Brass Quintet evolved too late for Mozart or Beethoven to write for the ensemble like they did for the String Quartet, most of the repertoire for the brass quintet is fairly modern. And rather than long extended works – who would fade first from dealing with a 45-minute brass quintet, the audience or the players? – many are fairly short pieces and, in order to incorporate more variety in the musical styles we’ll be listening to, arrangements. So we can have some Mozart, some Handel – well, truthfully, the orchestra for his “Music for the Royal Fireworks” included 24 oboes, 12 bassoons (and a contrabassoon), along with 9 “natural” trumpets and 9 “natural” horns (natural, here, meaning without keys or valves) along with 3 sets of timpani and various side drums for a military flare (the King, for this occasion, wanting “no fiddles”) – even a Rachmaninoff piano piece, his G Minor Prelude, Op. 23 No. 5, the slow movement of Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar (though it has a lovely melody for the English Horn which is not a horn per se… (yes, it’s actually a French instrument unlike the French Horn which is really German) – and a choral work by Eric Whitacre.
The Mozart is his overture to The Marriage of Figaro, complete with its bustling flurry of notes at the opening which must strike terror in the lip of many a brass player. Both it and the opening of Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks are arranged by Chuck Seipp.
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Eric Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque (“Light and Gold”) is a Christmas piece written in 2000; a few years later he arranged it for wind ensemble. “Light, warm and heavy as pure gold, and the angels sing softly to the new born baby.” Given Whitacre’s preference for dense harmonies and long sustained chords requiring “staggered breathing” from its singers, I’ll be curious to see how this translates to five individual players who need to breath.
Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th Century, wrote his G Minor Prelude from his set of ten preludes, Op. 10, in 1901 but only published the complete set a few years later. It may not be as famous as his ever-present Prelude in C-sharp Minor, written when he was 18, but of the remaining piano pieces he would compose during the rest of his life, the G Minor has always remained popular. This recording on the Telarc label, “A Window in Time,” was remastered from piano rolls Rachmaninoff recorded between 1919 and 1929.
Aaron Copland’s ballet Rodeo, about love on a dude ranch (really!), was composed in 1942 for Agnes de Mille who’d already blocked out her entire choreography before Copland had composed a note of music! She also specified a number of folk tunes she wanted him to use, like two that we hear in “Buckaroo Holiday” – “Sis Joe,” a railroad work song, and, for obvious reasons, “If He’d Be a Buckaroo.” How many of you have heard this music over the years and never realized Copland did not write these tunes? Here’s a performance of the original orchestral version, conducted by the composer (well, the composer of the ballet score, even if he arranged some folk songs along the way).
Speaking of
folk-song arrangements, here’s a famous tune that most people would
swear was by Copland. He used
it in another ballet, this one called Appalachian Spring
written for Martha Graham in the mid-1940s. He arranged a tune called “Simple
Gifts” which was a song
originally
composed by Elder Joseph Brackett
for a Shaker community in Maine in 1848, though it’s often referred
to as a folk song and the composer listed in programs as “trad”.
While there are many arrangements of the tune, here’s one not
by Copland, performed by
Alison Krause and Yo-Yo Ma. The quintet's program uses an arrangement by Jari Villaneuva.
While marches often form the basic fare for many a summer concert, here’s one from one of John Williams’ film scores, written for Stephen Spielberg's “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” from 2015. Here, the composer conducts no less a band than the Vienna Philharmonic in “The March of the Resistance.” To explain the music in the plot’s context would take longer than it would to listen to it: suffice it to say if you’ve familiar with the Star Wars films, you know the plot; if you haven’t seen it, no matter of explanation on my part will make it any more intelligible than Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen. For this concert, they're playing arrangement by the tuba player, Andrew Dougherty.
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Two works on the program are “original” compositions written for brass ensembles. The first of these is the Sonatine by Eugene Bozza, a French composer best known for what is often referred to as “lighter fare” though the same could be said of much of Francis Poulenc’s music as well, so it shouldn’t be taken too dismissively. Written in 1951, this Sonatine (a “little sonata”) is in four short movements – an opening Allegro vivo, appropriately French and saucy; a more serious and somewhat lugubrious Andante ma non troppo, before returning to a saucy scherzo, also Allegro vivo; the finale begins with a somber slow introduction before switching to yet another Allegro vivo full of swirling fanfares. It is, the composer says, “humbly dedicated to the musicians of the Republican Guard,” a prestigious unit of the National Gendarmerie responsible for ceremonial duties, security of key state institutions, and public order in Paris.
Kerry Turner is a prolific American composer best known for his works featuring brass instruments. Born in 1960 and winning first prize in a composition contest in San Antonio when he was 11, he attended Baylor University at 17 before transferring to the Manhattan School of Music. A horn player as well, he’s played in many orchestras including those in Luxembourg and in Köln, Germany. His work on the program, “The Casbah of Tetouan,” is described as a “symphonic poem for brass” but not originally for brass quintet. Written for a horn quintet in the late-1980s, it has become popular with brass quintets as well.
In this day and age and with an excerpt from John Williams’ music for Star Wars on the program, Tetouan may make us think of the world director Stephen Spielberg created for his intergalactic saga when in fact it’s a real place in northern Morocco whose history goes back 2000 years. Located across the Mediterranean just across from Gibraltar and not far from Tangier, the modern city has become a tourist destination, nestled between mountains and the Strait of Gibraltar, blending Andalusian, Berber, Jewish, and Spanish influences. Since 1997, it’s been recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site as well as for its crafts and folk art. It had been a Phoenician outpost when the Pillars of Hercules (the modern Gibraltar) marked the limits of the known world, and in 1286 the Bedouins began building a casbah and a mosque (and if the word casbah brings up exotic but vague impressions from movies past, it usually means, at least in Northwest Africa, a hill-top fort (not necessarily a market place), part of what was called a medina, the walled city surrounding it. It also became a refuge for pirates and, following a war with Castile in the early-15th Century, it was destroyed. When Ferdinand and Isabella drove the Muslims out of Spain in 1492, many of the refugees from Southern Spain, Muslims and Jews alike, fled to Tetouan.
Kerry Turner’s “The Casbah of Tetouan,” originally written for a Horn Quintet, was conceived, as the composer describes it, “during a visit to Morocco in the summer of 1988.”
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As we crossed the
Straits of Gibraltar and first laid eyes on the North African coast,
I knew we were in store for an adventure! The city of Tetouan was our
destination. We soon stood before its main gates. The many exotic new
sights overran our senses as we entered the city, complementing the
wild sounds and smells of the bustling ancient city. After proceeding
only a few feet past hobbled live chickens, we soon became completely
immersed in the endless, tiny alleys of the Casbah.
The Casbah
was a labyrinth of tunnels and passageways, lined with vendors and
shops the size of walk-in closets. Anything was for sale, including
copperware, sacks of spices and grains, and silk. Street butchers
displayed slaughtered lambs, goats and pigs, and a snake charmer with
his cobra unnerved the unwary passerby. Things began to swim before
my eyes somewhere around the urine-treated leather goods.
After
I informed the guide that I was ill, a young boy escorted me to a
quiet place. The boy knew every secret passage and shortcut in the
Casbah. He led me through even tinier streets and tunnels, across
nomad camps, and even through a kitchen! We sailed through the back
door of a mosque, and out the other side. Finally we entered a large,
dark and cool house, which seemed to be some sort of palace. The boy
led me to a back room and laid me down upon a bed of large pillows. I
passed out.
I awoke thoroughly disoriented. The first things I
saw were six elaborately cloaked elderly men, wildly discussing in
Arabic what possibly was wrong with me, I heard exotic music and
aromatic food assailed my senses. After closer observation I
discovered I was in a fancy restaurant, being entertained by a belly
dancer. Somehow my wife and brother found me and we resumed our
inspection of Tetouan. I still felt lightheaded and rather doped by
the "therapeutic" tea; my impressions of the city were
somewhat hallucinogenic.
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To many American music lovers, the name of John Philip Sousa is universal, but few might be familiar with other great march composers from the same era, like Henry Filmore who, after Sousa’s death in 1932, became hailed as “The March King.” But there is also Karl King who composed some 188 marches and “screamers” along with numerous galops, rags, and waltzes. When he was 11, he used the money he’d earned from his newspaper route to buy a cornet which he taught himself to play. At 14, he dropped out of school, joined various bands, started conducting some circus bands when he was 19, and joined the Fred Neddermeyer Band in Columbus, OH, conducted by Fred Neddermeyer who became his mentor. During this time, he received his only musical instruction from friends in the band: four piano lessons and one harmony lesson. In 1916, he married the calliope player of the Barnum & Bailey Circus Band of which he then became bandmaster the following year. He said years later the proudest moment of his life had been when he conducted the Barnum & Bailey band at Madison Square Garden.
With World War I now over, he met John Philip Sousa and hoped to join his staff, but Sousa had no openings for him. He soon settled in Fort Dodge, IA, where he became the bandmaster in 1920 and was instrumental in passing the Iowa Band Law in 1921, which allowed cities to levy a local tax for maintenance of a band. He continued to conduct Fort Dodge’s municipal band for the next 51 years.
The “Neddermeyer Triumphal March” was composed in 1910 when King was playing baritone horn in Neddermeyer’s band. And so we end the concert – and this blog post – with that very march, played here by the United States Armed Forces Bicentennial Band.
– Dick Strawser
