Gustav Bumcke – Two Quartets (1908)

I’m writing a piece for an ensemble that includes a sax trio, so I thought I’d check out some of the historical mutliple-saxophone repertoire.  I stumbled across this piece because it was on the same CD as another piece I had heard about, the Glazunov Sax Quartet (1932).  I’d never heard of Bumcke before, but according to the liner notes, he was Germany’s first saxophonist and saxophone teacher.  And these two short movements certainly sound like the work of someone with a great love for the instrument.  Rather than using the usual soprano-alto-tenor-bari lineup, the piece is written for alto, tenor, bari and bass sax, giving the piece an incredibly rich, sonorous texture.  It helps that the music is written in a late-Romantic style that’s very much focused on the vertical — as a professor of mine once said about Wagner’s music, melody here is only the horizontal surface of harmony.

Both movements are slow, meandering, luxurious and understated.  They have character-piece titles — “Abendgang” (“Evening Promenade”) and “Klage” (“Plaint”) — but I don’t feel like those words particularly describe the music, which is really more about beautiful sonorities than painting images or conveying specific moods.  The first movement floats around Db major and Bb minor;  the second is a bit more chromatic, and towards the end things start getting a little weird in a typically turn-of-the-century way, with unexpected third relations popping up around the cadences.  What I find most interesting, though, is how much my ear has been trained to associate the sound of the sax with various kinds of pop music.  There are a lot of plaintive, chromatically inflected lines in the piece that I would probably call Wagnerian if I heard them played by the first violin section in an orchestra, but because they have the timbre they do, the first thing that comes to mind is a melancholy neo-noir film score, like Jerry Goldsmith’s theme for Chinatown, or maybe some kind of slightly surreal lounge music, like the act that would follow Julee Cruise at the Roadhouse in “Twin Peaks.”  Obviously I’m not complaining:  anything that defamiliarizes the sometimes too-familiar gestures and tropes of notated music is a good thing in my book.  Plus Bumcke’s writing really is quite beautiful.  But I do find it a bit frustrating to know that it’s basically impossible for me to hear the piece the way audiences at the time would have heard it.

One final thing:  there is something seriously weird going on with clefs in this piece.  The alto sax is just written in treble clef, but the other three instruments have miniature secondary clefs on every stave.  At first I thought they were transposition keys, because the tenor sax has a miniature tenor clef after its treble clef, which correctly provides the transposition down a major ninth.  But the other ones don’t work:  the baritone sax has a tenor clef as well, despite the fact that it transposes down an octave and a major sixth, not a major ninth;  and the bass sax has a bass clef, which suggests a transposition down an octave and a major sixth rather than the correct two octaves and a major second.  Reading a score where every single instrument transposes is enough of a pain;  these mini-clefs had me utterly confused until I realized they weren’t doing what I thought they were doing, and now I’m utterly confused as to why they’re there at all.