Tuesday Tones

Today we’re going to listen to three different versions of the same piece! But don’t worry, the piece is really short. Like, really short. It’s about a minute long. And if you have ever been a viewer of CBS Sunday Morning, you know this piece well.

It’s called “Abblasen” (or “Ablassen”, I have seen both spellings while I’ve been reading up on this piece), and it’s the brief trumpet fanfare that opens the Sunday Morning show each and every week. It’s weird that through all my days as a trumpet player I never learned about the piece at all, since it’s quite probably the most familiar piece for solo trumpet out there, except for “Taps”. But now I’m glad I looked the piece up, because it turns out to have a pretty fascinating route to its current immortality.

“Ablassen” was written by Gottfried Reiche, who was a composer and a trumpet player of great renown in Leipzig during the time of Johann Sebastian Bach. Most of Reiche’s music has been lost, and he is best known now as the chief trumpet player for Bach’s work. Since Bach’s trumpet writing that would have been played by Reiche tends to be very difficult, it’s generally believed that Reiche was an extremely adept player. (To my surprise, it’s highly likely that Reiche was not the trumpeter who played the first performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, which is perhaps the “Mt. Everest” piece of virtuoso trumpet playing.)

I note above that Reiche’s compositions are mostly lost…and it turns out that the only reason we have this one isn’t because a manuscript survived, but because Reiche’s portrait was painted by a very exacting and precise artist, one Elias Gottlob Haussmann. Haussmann is best known for the famous portrait of J.S. Bach, but here’s his portrait of Gottfried Reiche:

As art, I love that painting! It captures a kind of defiant stern-ness in Reiche’s face, and I like that he has his collar open. Portraiture of that era always has a wonderful willingness to not be entirely formal. I wonder if that’s partly borne of an idea that if someone’s going to sit for a portrait for long hours, they should be comfortable while doing it…but I digress. (Also note the trumpet he’s holding: a coiled natural trumpet, from the era before valves. We’ll get back to that in a bit.)

The big focus here is that scrap of music parchment, that little fragment, in Reiche’s left hand. Many artists don’t bother to any sort of fidelity when they include written music in their art, but Haussmann did. It’s all there, mostly…there’s certainly enough there for musicologists to have been able to reconstruct that fragment into the fanfare we now know as “Ablassen”. So apparently the reason we have “Ablassen” at all owes to the meticulous reproduction of written music by a portrait artist. Imagine if Reiche hadn’t sat for this portrait…or if he hadn’t been holding that fragment of music. CBS Sunday Morning would be opening with something else.

Here are three performances of “Ablassen”. First is performed on a “natural” trumpet that has no valves. On a trumpet like this, changes in pitch are made purely with the muscles of what’s called the “embouchure”, which are basically the muscles of the lips and lower face. It’s these muscles that make the “buzzing” in the lips which then sets the air flowing through the trumpet to vibration, making sound. For reasons of musical physics, a natural trumpet can only produce scale-wise notes in its high register, where the overtones are densest; this limitation is why trumpet parts in the Classical era–Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven–are pretty boring. To get this level of chromaticism, you have to write for the trumpet in its very high register, where at the time few players could negotiate, and in any event, a trumpet playing that high tends to pretty much take over.

Second is a performance on a modern piccolo trumpet, played by Wynton Marsalis. Aside from specialists in historical performance, most repertoire like this these days is played on that kind of valved modern instrument. And finally, we have a nifty group performance of the piece. Enjoy!

(I found the information in this post in a number of places, but this site was the main source.)