Talk:Concerto for Two Trumpets (Vivaldi)

Queries

• The Britannica text is wrong: the trumpets are tacet in the middle movement. I've corrected this but without a source yet. Are we allowed to use the score or recordings as a source for what is self-evident, or do we have to have a textual source that says, yup, tacet in II?
• Afair it's not just his only two-trumpet concerto but his only trumpet concerto at all. There is no single-tpt concerto (more's the pity) and although I have something in the back of my mind about some other work that mentions trumpet somewhat soloistically I don't think there is anything else that is recognized as a trumpet concerto per se.
• When we first spoke about this I started digging about it bit with my usual incompetence. I was disappointed to find that apparently the Journal of the International Trumpet Guild, which is sometimes very useful, has little or nothing on this work. But I could search better, and there must be more out there.

Best to all, DBaK (talk) 07:37, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Late: thank you! We can quote the score for tacet in movement 2. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:10, 21 July 2022 (UTC)

Sources

• Britannica as noted above is not accurate and anyway very short.
• Either Grove is genuinely hopeless on this topic, or my research skills are even worse than I thought. This latter possibility is very alarming.
• I've started looking at individual brass books. You might want to send out for food and drink: it could take a while. Baines doesn't seem to mention Vivaldi. Tarr doesn't have anything as useful as an index but he does have a nice clear header/subheader structure and he just doesn't seem to go there. Am I going nuts and I have missed a chapter?
• I downloaded and checked the ITG Journal index. It's a bit sad – there are a few references to Vivaldi but mostly about recordings, or people playing what are really concerti for other instruments, but on the trumpet, or indeed the "violin played like a tromba marina" nonsense. I will have a proper check through this index and its refs but I have a distinct feeling that I am probably not going to find the lovely academic article for which I was hoping!

I haven't given up or anything but I just found it useful to note progress, or the lack of it, so far. Someone somewhere absolutely must have done some decent and interesting writing about this work. I just need to be less rubbish about finding it! DBaK (talk) 09:12, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Again: thank you for digging. DYK is today or not, but what can we do when people don't write about fascinating music? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 18:12, 21 July 2022 (UTC)

Yes, quite. And a tiny update: I have moaned at Britannica about their error. If they correct it we should then have something more citable although it would still be a long way off a fully-formed and substantial article. DBaK (talk) 12:34, 22 July 2022 (UTC)

International Trumpet Guild Journal

A little update on this potential source. It's not really essential reading here but I thought I might as well record it in order to save future editors, or even future-me, the pain of further digging. As mentioned above I'd hoped to find a serious ITG article about the piece. You'd think something significant would have been written about it there but, oddly, it has not. I checked the current ITG Journal (ITGJ) index which is for the whole publication history March 1976 – June 2022 and covers the ITGJ itself plus sub-publications, newsletters etc. The index contains only three unique references to Vivaldi.

Two can be discarded immediately: these are a sheet music review and a recording review, both of transcriptions of music originally for other instruments.

The only item in the whole index which is even tangentially relevant to this work is:

• Seidler, Richard D, Vivaldi's "Thirteen" Concertos for Trumpet(s) – punctuation exactly as in listing and article. ITG Newsletter, February 1980, p. 15. Marked as copyright 1975 NACWPI [National Association of College Wind and Percussion Instructors] Journal, reprinted by permission.

This appears to be a decently researched and written piece, but its only use to this article would be as reinforcement of there being only this one Vivaldi concerto for any number of trumpets. The article is really about debunking Rinaldi's cataloguing where he does indeed get up to thirteen concertos mentioning trumpet: its whole point is that twelve of them are absolute nonsense, the result of mistakes and misunderstandings. It does mention this one, but only to say yes there is no dispute about it. So it's a sort of glancing confirmation that there's only this concerto, whilst (politely) pouring scorn on the others listed. It's too boring to recount here but, believe me, that's all that is there for us and its value seems pretty limited.

Bit of a disappointment really but at least I know I checked it now and can move on! DBaK (talk) 12:31, 22 July 2022 (UTC)

Other comments

This is from my Talk page, but probably better here:

I have only a rather weak ref for it being the only trumpet concerto – please see the ITG section on the Talk page above. I will try and look at other stuff. Is it being his only tpt concerto so obvious that it is one of those The Sky Is Blue things??

The programme note is not bad – I rather like it! – but it is less academic than I had hoped. I don't mean to sound rude but I am not a fan of the cutesy language like empty the plumbing. I will expound on this if you like but the short version is that the slow movement usually needs to contrast, and natural trumpets are unsuitable in various ways and are often (but not always) omitted. We don't do a lot in the slow movement of Brandenburg 2 either! Getting water out of it is trivial and routine and commenting on it doesn't add anything. Again I will continue to look for better refs.

The new EL to the Thai university PDF is not up to scratch and, with all due respect, should be omitted. I also think it violates the programme note's copyright or something very close to it.

Comments to follow DBaK (talk) 08:29, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

I've made a few changes based on the above. We still need more refs and I have made a couple of remarks that are obvious to me but may look like OR so I will try to ref them if I can. I removed the Thai PDF and the dewatering thing. I think that's about it for now. DBaK (talk) 08:32, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

YouTube

Gerda Arendt suggests a YouTube link for the EL section. I find the legal/copyright/whatever situation around all this quite scary [long discussion here avoided] so I would rather someone with more experience of this than I have made the decisions. A lot of the recordings I see on YouTube don't look like they have the permission of the recording license holder, which makes me nervous.

If we use recordings that are put there by the performer or promoter do we have more chance that the rights situation is OK?

• If we had only one recording then I think it should be on natural trumpets. This could be this one put up by Nathaniel Mayfield who is one of the players. It's great. It's quite old and the video is a bit meh but the playing is terrific.

• If – and only if – we had room for a second, maybe one with modern (piccolo) trumpets? This could be Paul Merkolo with the ECO and again because it was put up by Paul I guess/hope the rights situation is likely to be better? They are on picc A trumpets, I think, and do a very nice job, but I still think the natural trumpet one is the priority.

A lot of the others are just someone taking the track from a recording and shoving a still pic in front of it. This seems unlikely to be legit.

There is also a Hogwood/AAM one which does look legit (it is on the AAM channel) but it is from 1981 and we must have sped up our ideas over the years, as it sounds v-e-r-y s-l-o-w to modern(ish) ears and I cannot recommend its use even though the playing per se is great. DBaK (talk) 08:48, 24 July 2022 (UTC)