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Music open thread: Vibraphone concertos [1]
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Date: 2025-03-18
Music can win hearts and minds, though it certainly helps if the ideology they’re being won over from is an evil, fascist one. Vibraphonist Lennie Cujé was born in Germany just a few weeks before Hitler took over. Early on, Cujé was inducted into the Hitler-Jugend. Not yet a teenager, he wound up in the German Army.
Captured by the French and then released, Cujé made an arduous trek back to Frankfurt, where his mother was and where hopefully his father had returned after fighting in Italy.
Along the way, he heard a musical recording from the Americans, Lionel Hampton playing “Flying Home,” which was quite fitting for the young boy’s situation. A few years ago, he reminisced with Arlington Magazine reporter Kim O’Connell.
“Freedom,” Cujé says, when I ask him what the song made him think of. “Freedom and improvisation, which I didn’t know. At first, I only knew Americans from bombings. But when I got to the American sector and there was that guardhouse and that music, that was it. And they gave me a pack of cigarettes and a chocolate bar.” In postwar Germany, Cujé led a catch-as-catch-can existence, selling items on the black market with a band of compatriots until 1950. That’s when his aunt Magdalena Schoch, who’d immigrated to America years before, sponsored the teen to come live in her house in Arlington. (His mother and siblings would follow a couple years later.)
The growing boy attended Washington-Lee High School (later Washington-Liberty) and learned more about jazz. He was attracted to the vibraphone almost magnetically.
The vibraphone, sometimes called “vibraharp,” is a lot like the xylophone or the marimba, but with the important difference that its bars are metal, not wood. Also, the vibraphone has a motor that can be turned on to give the instrument’s notes a vibrato (hence the instrument’s name). The speed of the motor can be adjusted to give the notes more or less vibration within a range that can vary among different brands of the instrument.
This concerto by Florian Poser is one that I found immediately interesting.
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The second concerto for the instrument by Ney Rosauro is somewhat interesting. I have not heard the first one yet.
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I’m a little disappointed Vagn Holmboe did not write a vibraphone concerto. He did use the instrument in some of his symphonies to great effect.
I’m not exactly sure where the motor is on the vibraphone, I haven’t seen it in any of the previous videos or in this video of Nathan Daughtry’s Vibraphone Concerto.
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The open thread question: what is your favorite music with solos for vibraphone?
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