A Monday Morning Music Lesson: Harry James, Concerto for Trumpet, 1941

Harry James was one of the most popular musicians of his era, the 1930s into the 1940s. He was a virtuoso with well-trained classical technique and he had a gorgeous tone. He was taught by his father, who assigned lessons from the Arban Method, the standard trumpet book since its publication in the mid-19th century.

Now that I've written it out with timings, the most striking thing about this piece is the temporal illusion it creates. The whole piece is only a bit over two minutes long. Half of it is in free-time cadenza sections at the opening and the end and half is a series of shorter passages in between. That middle is much more active and occurs in five sections. Two of them are short transitional passages by the band (3 and 5, see breakdown below), two are virtuoso flights for James (2 and 6), and the third (4) has James playing a jazzier style, but one derived from the frailach (klezmer) elements lead trumpeter Ziggy Elman introduced into Benny Goodman's band. My guess, though, is that if you asked, people would tell you that those middle five sections required more time than the opening and closing cadenzas.

At least, that's what I would predict based on Robert Ornstein's work on subjective time back in the 1960s. Using an ingenious way of assessing people's subjective sense of time passed, Ornstein discovered that it was a function of how much memory 'space' was required to encode what had transpired during an interval(On the Experience of Time, 1969). The more things that happen in an interval, the more memory required to encode those events.

I don't know that the note count would be for the various sections of this piece, but, in any event, only a very skilled musician would have half a chance of recalling James' performance on a single hearing – and I rather doubt such a musician exists, though who knows, perhaps a savant. But what happens in the cadenzas is pretty much of a piece. What happens, though, in between is quite different. The underlying rhythm changes several times and we have three distinct music styles: the swing interludes, the two classical sections, and the one jazz/klezmer section. That's a great deal more variety.

It takes a great deal of musical skill to change musical gears, as it were, as often and as quickly as this piece requires. The level of routine musical skill in those Hollywood studio orchestras was very high. Was it higher than the routine level of intellectual skill of contemporary members of the faculty of, say, Harvard or MIT? What about the legendary Wrecking Crew of the 1960s and 1970s in the pop music business?

I don't know who composed this piece, probably one of the studio's staff composers. it's routine for its time and place. However, we praise the Beatles for their ability to combine different genres of music. I doubt that they would have done that so easily if film composers hadn't been doing it for three decades or more before they came along.

Finally, this piece is still being performed. Search for it on YouTube and you'll find several good  contemporary recordings. Which trumpeters play it straight and which add their own touches?

Sections and timings

1. 0:01: Opening cadenza, free time.
2. 0:34: Chromatic virtuosity, mimicking "Flight of the Bumblebee", stop-time background with a staccato feel.
3. 0:45: Short transition, swing style background.
4. 0:48: Again, stop-time background on a vamp, but with a more legato feel, as of a chant.
5. 1:20: Short ransition: back to swing-time.
6. 1:30: The band vamps, staccato feel as at 2. James is again in virtuoso style, but distinctly different from 2. Here he picks out a simple melody on accented notes while playing rapid 'twiddly' (my term) figures in between.
7. 1:42: James launches directly into a cadenza to close, free time. The cadenza is distinctly different from the opening one.
8. (2:12: Closing high notes.)
9. 2:17: End.

A note about form

The list has nine items. The last simply marks the end of the piece, so we can eliminate it. Item eight is simply that last note in the closing cadenza. If we absorb it into the cadenza that leaves us with seven items. The frailich/klezmer section is fourth, that is, it is the middle item. That gives us:

1. Cadenza
2. Classical virtuosity
3. Transition
4. Jazz/chant/klezmer
5. Transition
6. Classical virtuosity
7. Cadenza

That looks like ring-form composition to me: A, B, C, X, C', B', A'.