Notes from Around the Sundial
Created | Updated Nov 19, 2008
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world!
Recorder Consort Playing
I learned to play the recorder as a child. It is a simple enough instrument. You don't have to blow hard, and it is quite loud — annoyingly so at times, when other people are playing it. Recorder is often taught in school as a beginner's instrument, and many people think of it as no more than that, something suitable for children, but not really musical. You only have to listen to the concertos of Vivaldi to realise that this is not true. Vivaldi wrote as much for recorder as he did for 'normal' flute, and Vivaldi concertos marked 'Flauto' (flute) are actually intended for recorder — he used the term 'Flauto traverso' (transverse flute) for what we could call the flute. Some of Bach's Brandenburg concertos feature recorders as well, and once you get back into Renaissance music, there is tons of music written for recorder.
Most of this early music was not written for one recorder player, but for a group of three or four. Such a group of recorders is called a consort. It is a good grouping because the recorder itself is a bit limited in the range of notes it can produce, but the instrument is available in a number of different sizes, the bigger ones producing deeper notes. This means that with a group of four recorders, known as Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass, you can play beautiful music across the full range of pitches. Recorder playing in a consort was a favourite pastime in the Renaissance: before television, before films, before big consorts, it was normal that all educated people could play an instrument and could get together in small groups to play music together.
The Consort Class
For the last two years or so, I've been going to lessons in how to play in a consort. This year, there are four of us in the class, two men (D and myself) and two women (J and H), plus the teacher. We meet for two hours roughly every two weeks and practise. Some members of the group prefer to specialise in one instrument: J is happiest on tenor recorder and D has a wonderful alto so he prefers to stick to that when possible. H likes to switch between soprano (the highest) and bass (the lowest) while I try to play all four instruments, which can be confusing as they are all slightly different.
Consort playing is a different challenge to solo recorder playing. Unlike a piano which has 88 keys and therefore 88 different notes it can play, the recorder is restricted to about 14 notes, with a few extra which are thrown in occasionally. This means that the individual parts are not usually very difficult to play. Nevertheless, there are a number of challenges:
The tune you are playing is not the same as anyone else's. It may coincide for short phrases, but in general, you're on your own. If you make a mistake, you can't stop to fix it, because the rest of the group won't have stopped. You have to keep playing.
You have to all play at the same speed, which is harder than it sounds. First you have to learn to play the piece in exactly strict time, then you need to listen to the other players as you play. If they take a little longer over a phrase than you expected, you have to compensate by adjusting your own speed. If there is a part where you play a tune while all the rest are accompanying you, you may feel that you need to change the speed of this phrase. You need to be confident that if you speed up or slow down here, the others will follow. There's a lot of give and take in this, and you need to keep one eye on the music and the other eye on the other three players.
Piano players have it easy when it comes to pitch. The instrument is tuned before you start and doesn't go out of tune quickly, so you can assume that when you press a key, the right note comes out. Most other instruments do not have this luxury. In recorders, the pitch can be varied by blowing harder, and also by changing the patterns of your fingers on the holes. It also changes as the instrument warms up, so you have to make conscious adjustments to the pitch so that you are in tune with the other players. Some days everything seems to work out fine, while at other times we have to put a lot of work into getting all the instruments in tune with each other. Thankfully, we don't normally play with any other instruments, so it is only within our group that we have to keep in tune.
Our teacher is a patient woman, who is a wonderful recorder player herself. She has boundless enthusiasm, which really helps when trying to deal with players like us who can produce beautiful music one day and be all over the place the next. She plays along with us, and she can switch between the four different parts, so that if any one of us is having problems, she can play along with them until they've got past the dodgy spot. This is immensely useful during rehearsals.
The Concert
We try to put on a concert about twice a year and invite our friends along to it. The best way to improve is to perform, as it puts pressure on you to get it right. Our teacher is actually married to a viol teacher. Viols are archaic string instruments that also play Renaissance music in consorts, so we try to organise our end-of-term concert so that the viol students and the recorder students can play together. They'll do a few pieces, we'll do a few pieces and then we'll all play together. This year, the combined concert probably won't be until the end of January, so we should be pretty good by then.
Making Music
Making music is really one of the most enjoyable pursuits, whatever form it takes. And making music together adds the discipline of working with the other players. It's a real partnership. Try it some time.
