In the entire time Gaudete has been working together, we have never had the luxury of living close enough to each other to avoid at least part of our quintet having a difficult commute on slow trains or in bad traffic. It is part of living in a great city like Chicago, and we all accept it with generally good humor. Problems can arise, however, when we sit down to make music together and some of the group had to trek through the barren wasteland of the grey packed-in snow of February and arrive tired from the commute. This is inconsequential when compared with the challenge of getting on the same page if people have dealt with difficult personal circumstances during the day or even if we have all just been involved in different musical activities. Coming to quintet from playing in an orchestra, playing sackbut in an early music group, or even a long day of teaching and then having to sit down and fit into the quintet isn’t easy. To paraphrase the cinematographic masterpiece Airplane!…
It's an entirely different kind of playing, altogether.
Fairly early on, Gaudete knew we needed a solution to this problem. We were working on increasingly more difficult repertoire, and we knew we needed to start our rehearsals with something simple that could allow us to be in the right frame of mind to make music together. The chorales from the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach have been used by many ensembles for this type of work in the past, so they seemed to be the perfect starting point. As we tried a few of the commercially available versions, we were frustrated that the common solution for making them into a brass quintet was just to double one of the parts (most often the bass). These versions did not really address the more complex task of working on perfect balance and intonation with 5 independent voices who must be constantly adjusting and rebalancing as the voicing and doublings shift through the ensemble as is common in the quintet repertoire. If the trombone and tuba are doubling the entire time, they must necessarily listen to each other first, leaving the upper three voices to adjust to them with little concession the other way. My solution was to choose a set of Bach’s chorales of varying harmonic complexity and set them for 5 voices, carefully adding a 5th voice that moves among the inner 3 parts and resembles types of voicing encountered in the quintet literature without changing the essence of the chorale. I left the soprano and bass parts unaltered. I assembled a small book of these, and we started each rehearsal playing them. Over the years, we have worked though the book, and we have found that the chorales are valuable for a number of reasons. Chorales are simple enough to focus on the basic essentials of chamber music like entrances, releases, matching articulation, intonation, balance, group coordination, and collaborative phrase shaping, while still being satisfying music and not simply a technical exercise. When Gaudete works on the chorales, we don’t leave a chorale until it is perfect. Sometimes, this can take a third of a rehearsal. Most of the time is doesn’t, but even if it does, this type of intricate, detailed work is a very efficient use of our time. The comparative simplicity of this music allows us to identify the problems and fix them before we tackle music where extreme ranges, rhythmic complexity, extended harmonic language, and challenge of the individual parts can confuse the fundamental issues critical to playing together as an ensemble at the highest level. If we take the time to really establish the basics on the chorale each day, we have found that those essential chamber music qualities that we hone within the chorale transfer to the more difficult music.
Playing these chorales and striving for all of the wonderful and elusive qualities of ensemble cohesion at the beginning of rehearsal also serves to bring us all together, reminds us of what we can achieve with regular rehearsals, and why we love playing chamber music. The opportunity to work on music in this detail is rare in the music world, where there never seems to be enough rehearsal time. The luxury of taking the time to go into great detail helps bring us into the right frame of mind after a difficult commute or a difficult day and reminds us how grateful we are to have the opportunity to play chamber music.
Because these chorales have been so helpful to our quintet we want to share this choral book with as many quintets as possible. If you are interested in a free PDF copy of this book please send us an email at info@gaudetebrass.com