The Maalouf family

Review of Nassim Maalouf's Improvisations Orientales Video: La trompette arabe de Nassim Maalouf (non-French speakers are advised to watch up to ~4:00) His son, Ibrahim Maalouf "is noted for playing Arabic music with quarter tones on the trumpet, which is a rare skill, pioneered by his father and Don Ellis in the 1960s." Also review. They play a microtonal four-valve trumpet, with a fourth valve played by a left index finger. There are not a whole lot of close-up pics, this is the best I could find (youtube). I did find an article on trumpet modifications, tho.

Notes on style and then some

Listening to a lot of euphonium on youtube in the last few days. I heard a few euph+piano duos and they are uniformly amazing. Here are a few: Piazzolla's Café 1930 and Ibert's La cage de cristal by Anthony Caillet, Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata; Badinerie and Chiapanecas on tuba.
I also listened to several examples of baritone as a part of jazz combo and found it rather underwhelming. The deep rich sound that complements solo piano so well tends to get lost somewhere in the sonic muck and in general sounds rather out of place.

Also, today I learned of anime series about euphonium. I... uh... am struggling to find words... Actually, instead of trying to come up with something meaningful to say, I think I'll just up and move to Japan.

Yay marimba!

I've heard that Bach's solo cello suites were done on marimba and was wondering how that sounds. That's still a mystery, but meanwhile the curious can check out Mozart's Flute Quartet done on five marimbas:
W. A. Mozart - Flute Quartet No.1 in D Major K285,
I. Allegro
II. Adagio
III. Rondeau

UPDATE 12/17/2013: A mystery revealed - BACH Cello Suite No. 5 for Marimba - Jisu Jung

Ill Wind

...a bit of a devil to play...
The lyrics

Fnugg

Musician and his instrument, pt.1

Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto...

...through the eyes of bass trombonist.

I don't want to turn this blog into a freak show, but this is too good to pass up:

A carved wooden French horn:



The inquiring minds want to know - how does it play? The maker speaks:
not very good to tell you the truth. It marginally worked, and the valves do register different notes. As I build more instruments and experiment with different woods, I imagine I will eventually discover a combination that makes it sound better. But just refining my technique so I can build them with thinner tubes makes a big difference on sound.
He also made a semi-playable wooden trombone and plans for a tuba and a trumpet.

Now, a real instrument - a borosilicate glass trombone:



When the saints... on the glass trombone. He say, that the glasstrombone is difficult to play and takes a lot of air - sounds good though!

Canon 1 à 2 from J. S. Bach's Musical Offering (1747) being turned into a Moebius strip, then played in two directions at the same time.


By the way, I looked through Russo's Composing - A New Approach; many of the exercises deal with resource limitation - i.e. a cell, a row (using only certain notes of the scale and/or in a certain order), composing with only a certain rhythm etc. I was playing Bach's Bourrée in E minor the other day and realized the whole thing is written with a single simple rhythm throughout (quarter-eighth-eighth-quarter-eighth-eighth). He probably wasn't doing a "resource limitation exercise", just writing a tune with the bourree dance rhythm, but it came out as a perfect example of how much you can accomplish with extremely limited means.