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Music open thread: Trombone concertos [1]
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Date: 2025-02-24
In 1929, Polish trombonist Heinrich Schiefer got German citizenship. He was actually born in Germany, but Germany had no kind of birthright citizenship back then, and even now it is rather limited compared to American birthright citizenship as laid out in the U. S. Constitution.
In 1934, Schiefer joined the orchestra of the Jüdischer Kulturbund. The next year, he had to flee Germany, and Poland wasn’t a good option. So he wound up in Palestine. According to his bio from Porta Polonica,
After the Second World War, Schiefer had his German citizenship restored, kept in contact with his brother-in-law’s family in Berlin who still lived in the Schiefer family apartment in Kreuzberg, and travelled to Germany many times.
Schiefer played in the orchestra founded by Bronisław Huberman in Palestine. He also gave private trombone lessons, he had started doing that in Germany prior to World War II.
The trombone is an instrument that looks simple. There are no keys or valves to worry about, and all the fingers have to do is hold on to the instrument. But properly positioning the slide and using the right embouchure (the placement of the mouth on the mouthpiece), that can be quite difficult.
The trombone is capable of quarter-tones and smaller, and those are good when intended. Most of the music we play and listen to uses semitones as the smallest interval between notes. So, for most music, a trombonist is expected to place the slide at one of seven positions. Combined with the appropriate embouchure, those seven slide positions are sufficient for all twelve semitones in each full octave of the trombone’s range.
The positions are numbered so that seventh position has the slide almost fully extended. In seventh position, the trombone can sound its lowest note. In the case of the tenor trombone, that would be an E just one ledger line below the bass clef staff.
The seven lowest notes in each of the tenor trombone's seven slide positions.
Technically, lower notes are possible, but either that risks disassembling the instrument or producing a tone too unfocused and ugly to be usable in a musical context. As for first position, I don’t actually know if that’s with the slide fully in or just almost fully in.
In the open threads about the horn and the trumpet, I wrote about how the old versions of those instruments were limited in what they could play by a single harmonic series. The trombone, with its slide, is not limited to a single harmonic series, as the player can choose any of the other six slide positions, or some “fractional” position.
Composers still need to be mindful of the harmonic series, because many of the trombone’s lowest notes are each playable in only one position. Obviously the seven notes shown above are only playable by the tenor trombone in the positions indicated. The following passage on tenor trombone would probably not sound as the composer hoped, even if the trombonist tries to indulge him.
An example of a musical passages requiring ridiculous changes of position for the tenor trombone.
If we were to transpose that up a couple of octaves, it would be far more playable, but perhaps not any more suitable to trombone technique.
To play the B-natural, or H as the Germans call it, that’s just above the first position B-flat, requires the slide to be in the seventh position. Obviously trills on that B-flat are impossible, whether a semitone trill, requiring an alternation between first and seventh positions, or a whole tone trill, requiring a barely more manageable alternation between first and sixth positions. Both that B-natural and that C are playable in only one position, seventh and sixth respectively.
On the tenor trombone, the E-natural on the bass clef staff is the lowest note that can be played in more than one position. It can be played in seventh position, as it is an octave above the seventh position E on the ledger line, or it can be played in second position as it is a perfect fifth above the A on a space on the staff.
There are several notes on the tenor clef staff that can be played in three different positions. If one position is inconvenient for the note before or the note after, one of the two other positions is likely to be agreeable. The composer is not expected to specify positions, but he should be aware of what positions are available to the player.
The tenor clef makes sense for most tenor trombone parts. In the time of Brahms and Bruckner, orchestral composers generally wrote for three trombones: alto, tenor and bass. Alto and tenor trombones can usually be comfortably written on a single tenor clef staff, while the bass trombone should almost always be written in the bass clef.
An excerpt from the Credo of Bruckner's Mass in F minor, after the death of Jesus but before His resurrection.
I’m told the alto trombone is no longer in general use, and the orchestral parts for it are played on tenor trombones instead. In the case of concertos for alto trombone, it probably makes more sense for the soloist to use an actual alto trombone, such as this concerto by Michael Haydn (younger brother of Joseph Haydn).
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Or this one by Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (one of Beethoven’s earliest teachers).
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Film composer Nino Rota wrote several memorable movie scores, and also a number of concert works, including a trombone concerto. This one is for tenor trombone, right?
This one for bass trombone by Chris Brubeck is fun:
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The open thread question: what is your favorite music with trombone solos?
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