Colby Norton Bartok Miraculous MandarinLow Brass excerpt (trombone, bass trombone and tuba)
In celebration of my birthday, I'm playing my favorite moment in all of the orchestral rep from my favorite piece, Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin! So much stuff happening in this piece that as a low brass player you CANNOT sleep on it!
Bartok’s The Miraculous Mandarin is NOT a ballet, but “a pantomime, since there are only two dances in the piece”. The most common performance is a suite from the larger work with a concert ending at rehearsal 74. Long story short, the piece is about three thieves who force a girl to attract men into their den to rob them. One of the people she lures is a mandarin (wealthy Chinese person). This excerpt in the trombones in tuba is the mandarin walking up the steps to the den. The trombones and tuba cut through the thin orchestra sound with mutes and tritones with odd leaps that are meant to evoke the climb up the stairs to the den. I would play these with a combination of legato/marcato tongue, or as I would call it closer to how I articulate a lot of jazz lines. Full value, but with clear definition between each notes. The accented quarter notes then need to be fully articulated to keep everything lined up among the section and with the orchestra.
After this 8th note passage, the low brass hit you with an excruciatingly loud octave Ab with the 2nd and 3rd trombone glissing down to an F. This represents the mandarin reaching the top of the steps and standing still while the girl hides in terror.
Pic borrowed from Stephen Lange
Some scores can seem like the first and second trombone and tuba do the gliss while the third trombone holds the Ab, but this clarification from Bartok himself lets us see what we are supposed to doing here. This is important as at first glance who holds the Ab and who glisses changes the texture and sound quite a bit from what Bartok truly intended.
Play the gliss after holding the octave Ab for about 2 beats and gliss ALL the way to 6th position. This may take some time with intonation adjustments, so do not just assume you all are going to find F in 6th together. You are surrounded by Abs as he tuba and 1st trombone are sustaining so finding the octave and minor 3rd should be an issue.
Multi-track Recording
There are a couple of options you can use to record multiple parts BY YOURSELF. the pandemic showed a lot of remote recording projects, some good, some bad. The success of a good multi track comes from 2 things in my opinion (besides practice).
Have a click track that is made purely for the project you are working on.
Have a scratch track.
The first point is so that you can simply make sure every part is using the same time feel, starting and ending point. Using just a metronome isn’t going to work as you will have to try to line everything up in whatever music editing software you are using. Have a click track that you make either in the same software or manually from Finale or Sibelius (creating a new piece and using something like a clave sound playing quarter notes for however many bars you plan on recording at the tempo you designate). This you can upload into the music editing software as well as the recording you made with it. This will help line everything up. But what about matching style, intonation and balance?
That is where the scratch track comes into play. Find a part that either plays the entire time, or appears to be the root of most of the chords you are playing. In this case, I recorded the tuba part first. It wasn’t perfect, but it set up my timing, phrasing and intonation foundation. Too many people just record parts onto of parts and its always out of tune because they aren’t playing along thinking up and down, only left to right. Up and down tuning is where we get those overtones, and we as low bras people, LIVE FOR THE OVERTONES!!
You can always re-record your scratch track after you have l;aid down the other parts. The benefit from this is understanding how each part relates to the other. When I did this I had to re-record the 3rd trombone line a few times to bring the volume up and bring out some specific notes becuase of the tessitura and mute.
Likewise, the 1st trombone part was consistently too loud as that particular register didn’t need any extra help popping out over the other 3 parts. The tritones in this lend themselves nicely to not being too hung up on intonation tendencies, but lets say this was a Brahms excerpt, I would mark every intonation change I made during the tracking prcoess to help me perform it better once we can perform live again! This is the kind of info I like to know going into a rehearsal or sectional to streamline the prcoess and make music, not enemies because I didn’t come prepared!
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