Best posts made by SSmith1226

“Over a thousand (1,006) alphorn players gathered on Klewenalp in Canton Nidwalden. At the gathering, they played choral melodies and broke the world record for the largest alphorn ensemble.”

Youtube Video

Youtube Video

1 hr and 45 minutes later in the same spot, overlooking Cape Cod Bay, The Northern Lights!

Three hrs after the above photos

@Newell-Post

The following site addresses the differences in the various Flugelhorn Shank sizes and gives a list of the various brands of Flugelhorns that use each shank size. You have a Small Morse, or Bach Shank, which would explain your ill fitting mouthpiece.

https://bobreeves.com/blog/the-ultimate-flugelhorn-mouthpiece-shank-guide/

@BigDub

Wayne,
It is good to see that great minds think alike. I proposed this 17 days ago and thus far no brave souls other than me, and now you, have volunteered.
Here is the link to that discussion:

https://trumpetboards.com/topic/711/trumpet-board-performance/7

If there are enough volunteers, I will send you some music to look at.

@barliman2001 said in Looking for F trumpet:

To make quite clear why I am looking for an F Alto trumpet: Together with a few other people, I've founded an amateur original sound orchestra here in Vienna. We don't go for Baroque original sound - too expensive for amateurs - but rather for Classical and Romantic era music. Lots of the trumpet parts at this time were written for trumpet in F... so any hybrids or weirdos like Frumpets are out of the question.

Here is another “out of the question” “hybrid and Weirdo”, the Berkeley Double Bell Bb/F Trumpet. The F side plays through a single bell configuration. The video starts with Bb version and at 1:12 switches configuration and plays on the F Trumpet. Later, it switches bells, I believe back to Bb configuration using a piccolo trumpet bell, playing on a standard Bb length trumpet.
Never the less, since the F Trumpets are quirky at best, generally with intonation and accuracy problems, this should fit right in!

@barliman2001 said in >OLDS Recording...:

and I cut short a holiday in Italy to be in their shop on Saturday morning... happy!

Congratulations on your new horn! However, what is much more important to many of us is, how did you convince your wife to end your Italian vacation early, in order for you to purchase an old trumpet. How ever you did it must have been brilliant, especially since you lived to write about it!!! Or, did you have to dictate this post?

Figured it out!!! On the iPhone the screen did not display the entire tool bar (photo 3). The tool bar slides to the left and displays the arrow pointing up (photo 2). This button ( photo 1) allows linking of the photo in the photo app to the post. I didn’t realize this until seeing the entire tool bar on the wider iPad screen.
Steve Smith

@SSmith1226

A great interview with Adam Rapa:

My layoff was 44 years. Life, including school, work, and eventually family got in the way. I started playing again in 2016, when I started slowing down at work. For the first six months I played by ear only. My regular progressive lenses were locked in to about 14-16 inches to focus for work and would not allow me to read music at trumpet length and beyond. After six months I had “music glasses” made and I could once again see the music. The comeback was slow but has been steady.

@J-Jericho
All I have to say to that is tekiah, shevarim, t'ruah, tekiah gedolah and the walls came tumbling down.

The following is an article from yesterday’s New york Times:

Franz Streitwieser, a German-born trumpeter who amassed a collection of brass instruments that encompassed centuries of music history and drew musicians from around the world to its home in a converted barn in Pennsylvania, died on Nov. 8 in a hospice in Sebring, Fla. He was 82.
The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, his son Bernhard said.
While a performer by profession — on one of the most extroverted of orchestral instruments, no less — Mr. Streitwieser had the soul of an archivist.
He took a 19th-century yellow-and-white barn in bucolic Pennsylvania and converted it into a museum to house one of the world’s largest collections of brass instruments and to serve as well as a concert space. The Streitwieser Foundation Trumpet Museum, in Pottstown, opened in 1980 and was home to approximately 1,000 items until 1995, when it found a new home in Europe.
Mr. Streitwieser (pronounced STRITE-vee-zer) sought to elevate the trumpet’s status.
“When somebody finds an old violin in the attic, they think it’s a Stradivarius and it’s valuable,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1983. “But when somebody finds an old brass instrument in the attic, they just throw it out. We want to change that.”
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In addition to its standard brass fare, including valved trumpets, French horns and trombones, the museum showcased a variety of curiosities: over-the-shoulder trumpets used in the Civil War, replicas of Bronze Age Viking trumpets, horns carved from elephant tusks. Visitors would have encountered a life-size cardboard cutout of the composer John Philip Sousa and a 12-foot-long horn carved from pine wood, made for Swiss shepherds.
Mr. Streitwieser situated the museum in Pottstown because he and his wife, Katherine, had moved there to be closer to her relatives. She was a descendant of the DuPont family, of chemical company renown, which helped support the museum.
The museum stood on a 17-acre plot called Fairway Farm (it also had a bed-and-breakfast), and it drew brass devotees from far and wide. The music historian Herbert Heyde, who later curated the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s instrument collection, spent six months cataloging the Pottstown museum’s contents in the 1990s.
But Pottstown, which is about 40 miles from Philadelphia and closer in culture to the state’s rural center, lacked strong funding for arts programs, and attendance at the museum lagged. After Ms. Streitwieser’s death in 1993, Mr. Streitwieser could not afford to keep the museum going and was forced to find a new home for his trove. Local universities expressed interest, but none had the space.
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It was Austria to the rescue. Kremsegg Castle, near Linz, was establishing a government-funded musical instrument museum, and officials there knew of Mr. Streitwieser as a prominent collector. They offered to take in his holdings — and him as well, as a consultant. The collection was packed up and sent off in 1995.

Franz Xaver Streitwieser was born on Sept. 16, 1939, in Laufen, Germany, a Bavarian town just across the border from Austria. He was one of five children of Simon and Cecilia (Auer) Streitwieser, who were farmers.
As a boy, Franz visited a music store with his mother one day and felt drawn to a gleaming brass trumpet. But it was prohibitively expensive, so the shopkeeper pointed him to a tarnished, less costly trumpet toward the back of the store. He bought it, and after a teacher of his gave him a can of polish, it gleamed. It was the first of many instruments in his life.
Franz soon joined the town band and went on to Mozarteum University Salzburg in Austria, graduating in 1961 with a degree in trumpet performance.
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While at the university he met Katherine Schutt, an oboe and piano student from Wilmington, Del. Their courtship played out during the filming of “The Sound of Music” in and around Salzburg, and the couple became extras in several scenes.
Mr. Streitwieser and Ms. Schutt married in 1963. They lived mainly in Freiburg, Germany, where Mr. Streitwieser was principal trumpet of the Freiburg Philharmonic from 1965 to 1972. Traveling to the United States regularly, he spent a year in New York City studying at Juilliard. The couple had five children, one of whom, Heinrich, died in infancy.
Mr. Streitwieser began collecting brass instruments early on in Freiburg — his son Bernhard said the family home sometimes resembled a trumpet repair shop.

In 1977, Mr. Streitwieser worked with the German instrument maker Hans Gillhaus in designing a modern version of the corno da caccia, a circular horn popular in the 18th century; they called it a clarinhorn.
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The family moved to Pottstown in 1978. Mr. Streitwieser played in local orchestras and in 1980 received a master’s degree in music from the University of South Dakota. With Ralph T. Dudgeon, he wrote “The Flügelhorn” (2004), a history of that member of the trumpet family.
After the death of his first wife, Mr. Streitwieser married Katharine Bright in 1994 and soon moved with her to Austria in the company of his brass collection. The couple spent half the year in an apartment in the 13th-century Kremsegg Castle, at home among their horns. The rest of the time they lived in Florida, moving for good to Lake Wales, in the central part of the state, in 2004. Mr. Streitwieser founded a brass quintet and continued to perform in local festivals.The Streitwieser collection remained at Kremsegg until the musical instrument museum closed in 2018. Much of its contents were moved to Linz Castle and Museum or other museums in Upper Austria.
In addition to his son Bernhard, Mr. Streitwieser is survived by his wife; his sons Erik and Charles; his daughter, Christiane Bunn; his stepdaughter, Henrietta Trachsel; a sister, Anna Breitkreutz Neumann; and 13 grandchildren.
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Dr. Dudgeon, who also played music with Mr. Streitwieser and help catalog the brass collection, said he first heard of him in the 1970s. He had come to pick up a purchase from a Massachusetts music store and found that the shop had very few brass instruments left.

@tjcombo
Tjcombo,
I did figure it out. Check out my post on page one of this thread just below the photo that talks about thanking your father for bringing you into this world.
The tool bar is longer than the screen is wide. It will slide to the left and expose an upward pointing arrow as illustrated in my post. That arrow will give you access to your photos on your iPhone.
At least that is what worked for me. Good luck.
Steve Smith

I don’t recall ever seeing any Klezmer music discussions on this site,TM, or TH. What I am posting is not religious music but but is cultural in nature. In the United states we have been influenced by Klezmer Music since the immigration from Eastern Europe since the 1880’s. In the mainstream, a great example is Ziggy Elman’s solo in his song “And the Angel’s Sing”. Another example is the Andrews Sisters adaptation of “Bei Mir Bistu Shein”. I will post videos of these selections below in order to see how they were influenced by the Klezmer style, as well as a couple of videos of the Klezmatics, one of best known contemporary Klezmer bands who also are influenced by many other kinds of music. These videos don’t represent across the board examples of all types of Klezmer Music, but will serve as an introduction.

Speaking of AI….

Youtube Video

Youtube Video

Youtube Video

If this topic is about the Trumpet Solo on the Ice Castles Theme instrumental, as recorded by Marvin Hamlisch, it appears that the most likely artist was John Harner. I base this on the old thread from TH, “The Great Unknown trumpet player on old 1979 Ice Castles recording”. There were several possibilities suggested, but the last post in this thread gives second hand confirmation that John Harner played and recorded this. Below is the link to the TH discussion, a link to a short biography of John Harner, and a YouTube video of the instrumental recording. The Trumpet Solo begins around 2:35.

https://www.trumpetherald.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=768

https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-communication-fine-arts-and-media/music/_files/docs/jazz-camp-harner-bio.pdf

Youtube Video

@georgeb
George,
Congratulations and I hope that you have many years of pleasure with your new horn!

@BigDub
At 70, I’m with BigDub...

There is an interesting story about the last video in my initial post. It was originally composed as L'Estaca (Catalan pronunciation: [ləsˈtakə]; meaning "the stake", figurative sense "without liberty") is a song calling for Catalonia to be free from Spain, composed by the Catalanartist Lluís Llach in 1968. It was composed during the reign of the Dictator, Francisco Franco in Spain, and is a call for unity of action to achieve freedom. The song has become a symbol of the fight for freedom everywhere. The song was covered in Yiddish (under the title "Der Yokh") by the American klezmerband, The Klezmatics, in their 2016 album Apikorism. The Klezmatics version is above. The Catalonian Lyrics describe the struggle for Catalonian freedom using a metaphor of being tied to a stake.
The song is a conversation held in a doorway at dawn, where the main character asks Grandfather Siset "Don't you see the stake that we're all tied to? If we can't take it down, we'll never be able to walk." and the old man tells him that the only way to get free is by working together: "If we all pull, it will fall down. If I pull this way and you pull that way, it will surely fall, fall, fall, and we will be able to liberate ourselves."

The struggle for freedom is hard, it is never over, there is no rest. In recent years a Yiddish version of the song has become a regular part of the Klezmatics’ concert performances. The translation, by Yuri Vedenyapin, remains faithful to Llach’s Catalan original but gives the song a Yiddish flavor and resonance.

Llach says that when he original composed the song, he used the word 'column' instead of 'stake'. In the Klezmatic’s version, Der Yokh, the title refers to the wooden collar placed over a work animal’s neck attaching them to the cart they must pull. Also, in past history a yoke was often placed over the neck of a defeated person, often making them a slave.
Here is the Catalonian original.

I had an interesting experience this week. Several months ago I got accepted to the Florida “All Star Community Band”. It is made up of around 110 musicians from around fifty or more community bands from all over the state who are recommended by their local band directors. Every few years this band forms and performs at the State of Florida Band Directors Conference. In general, each player in the band comes from the first or second seat in their home band’s section. Through attrition, not talent, I as a three and a half year comeback player, sit in the second seat of the first trumpet section of my home band. Most of the participsnts have extended experience and are great musicians. Each piece played is chosen and conducted by different “all star” conductors from around the state.
We all got together for the first time Monday afternoon and evening. Our rehearsal lasted over 5 hours.
At 8:15 am Tuesday we met again and rehearsed until 5:00 pm with a 1 hr lunch break.
Wednesday we met at 8:15 am again and rehearsed until 12 noon including a dress rehearsal from 11:00 to 12:00. At 3:30 we started our 1 hr concert. By the start of the concert, my lip was like a piece of wood. Fortunately I was one of four people assigned second cornet / trumpet, but never the less the pieces were quite challenging.
Out of curiosity, have any of you experienced such intense sessions culminating in a high profile, high level performance without major rest? If so, was this at an amateur level, or professional level. Is this what a professional band or orchestra goes through routinely, or is this an exception. I felt very sorry for the first trumpet players, but somehow they held up and did a great job. I certainly had my problems often times could be heard playing unison with the trombones, or blowing occlusal air balls.
Never the less it was a challenging but great experience. If given the opportunity, I would do it again.