TubeNet

Everyone once and a while someone asks about orchstartion on the list. One of the better books out there is the Rimsky-Korsakov Book of Orchestartion. Here is a link to a free online course with all the info from the book, sounds and video:

http://www.northernsounds.com/forum/for ... y.php?f=77

I am not a big fan oif the tuba description:

e) Tuba. Thick and rough in quality, less characteristic than the trombone, but valuable for the strength and beauty of its low notes. Like the double bass and double bassoon, the tuba is eminently useful for doubling, an octave lower, the bass of the group to which it belongs. Thanks to its valves, the tuba is fairly flexible.

but the course is quite good and so is the book!

You can alos go here:

http://www.garritan.com/

and follow the links.

Have fun,

I tried to access this at work, but Ft Hood's server blocked it due to the following:


http://143.84.72.2/doim_denied/CriminalSkills.gif

when I was in 2ID, for a while I couldn't get on the Tubenet and the message was the site wasn't "mission essential". We were however able to get access to certain adult oriented sites during the same time. Things were made right a little later on.

Took a look at

http://www.northernsounds.com/forum/sho ... cb&t=45356

where RK tells of all brasses.

It is obvious that his points of view are greatly influenced by two factors:

brass instruments were less efficiently made back then (less even across their registers)

communications were not at internet levels.

For a Russian of the period RK was very well travelled and highly informed. But what he tells about the usage of stopping and muting of the horn never was true (or something went wrong in the translation into English).

When he tells, that he has invented the alto trumpet, he is a victim of not being informed. The F trumpet was the orchestral trumpet of England and Denmark in several decades around the former turn of century. And Cerveny had been on the market with his patents already, while RK was a young boy.

RK was inspector of the Russian naval bands. For me that is the key in understanding his words on brass instruments. The Central and Eastern European countries stuck with a 19th century military band tradition very far up in the 20th century.

I won’t dare to compare St. Petersburg of 1870 with Budapest of 1971. But what I, on the radio, heard out of the latter town played by the then top Hungarian service band, was at the same time extremely musical and extremely old fashioned. The playing style never would have been accepted in one of the Hungarian orchestras of that period. They were world class.

The odd thing is that the same style survived in a time pocket within the Christian youth organisation, where I had my initial band training.

The torchbearer for that style until around 1960 oddly enough was a horn-player (soloist of our RSO)/conductor, who earned his pocket money by playing jazz piano on bars from his very young teen years. Later on he was the a front man in Danish light music at orchestral levels. I have studied conducting with him. Very funny guy, who also sings very well. "Please don’t get me started at the piano. I will go on for hours without end!"

But I still remember the recording of his arrangement of "My Bonnie is over the ocean". Very much oom-pah and an odd usage of a triple tonguing trumpet soloist. Very stiff rhythm and very similar to what I heard out of Budapest ten years later.

Klaus Smedegaard Bjerre