By DAVID PRATT

Lest the Juilliard centennial overshadow other landmarks this year, let us be clear: This article commemorates not the 100th anniversary of the School's founding, but rather the 45th season of the American Brass Quintet, one of the School's three chamber ensembles-in-residence and a group unique in contemporary concert music. On Thursday, May 4, in the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, the A.B.Q. (as we will henceforth refer to the esteemed quintet) celebrates Juilliard's anniversary and its own with a program of Renaissance and contemporary works, including the world premiere of one of its latest commissions, Joan Tower's Copperwave.

The American Brass Quintet: (left to right) members Michael Powell, Ray Mase, John Rojak, David Wakefield, and Kevin Cobb. (Photo by Richard Frank)

"One of its latest" because, as A.B.Q. followers already know, the ensemble almost always has several simultaneous commissions in various stages of development. Through these commissions, the A.B.Q. has helped build a large part of the contemporary brass chamber repertoire—which is actually quite a large part of the brass chamber repertoire, period. Since 1960, when the group was founded, more than 800 pieces have entered the brass quintet repertoire, many written for the A.B.Q., compared to fewer than 100 in the 30 years before. The quintet's commissions in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s came from, among others, Charles Whittenberg, Elliott Carter, Jacob Druckman, and William Bolcom. More recently, they have commissioned, performed, and recorded works by David Sampson, Melinda Wagner, Daniel Asia, and Paul Moravec; Juilliard's own Eric Ewazen, Robert Beaser, and Huang Ruo; and now, Joan Tower, with whom Mase says the group has long wanted to work.

As enthusiastic as the A.B.Q. is over our finest living composers, so the composers are for the A.B.Q. In a recent interview, Tower recalled the first time she got together with her commissioners to hear how her nascent work sounded. "Those guys are phenomenal the way they read," she said. "They read through it like nothing. They're orchestral players, which means they are very good sight-readers. They have also played together for so long that they can follow each other easily. They're a real team."

But the A.B.Q.'s attractiveness as repertoire-builders goes beyond musicianship. "They do the whole package," Sampson says. "They pay you, they play the work, they record it; what else could you want? They play it for an entire season, 20 to 25 performances. They get the details and subtleties down, and then they go in and record it. They have been the most consistent in commissioning, recording, and performing new work. They have single-handedly put together a repertory that will live in history. I give them huge credit for saving the brass quintet as a serious ensemble."

"They do the whole package," David Sampson says of the A.B.Q. "They pay you, they play the work, they record it; what else could you want?"

The teamwork began 45 years ago with trumpet players Theodore Weis and Robert Heinrich, horn player Arthur Goldstein, trombonist Arnold Fromme, and bass trombonist Gilbert Cohen. (There are bass trombone quintets and there are tuba quintets. The A.B.Q. is among the former; the Empire Brass and Canadian Brass are among the latter.) A fair amount of turnover characterized the A.B.Q.'s first dozen years. Then Raymond Mase took over one of the trumpet chairs in 1973, and is today the longest serving member of the group. His current colleagues are horn player David Wakefield (who joined in 1976); trombonist Michael Powell (1983); bass trombonist John Rojak (1991); and trumpet player Kevin Cobb (1998).

The post-World War II rise of the brass quintet helped (and was helped by) an increase in composition for such ensembles. Of the 20th-century works for brass quintet whose dates are known, only 20 were composed between 1930 and 1950. Forty-five came along in the 1950s. The A.B.Q., which decided to shun the inauthenticity and sometimes outright pandering of adaptations, had to commission or die. Thanks in part to the quintet, the 1960s saw 230 new works for brass quintet, with 324 more in the 1970s. Since then, brass quintet composing has slowed down some, according to statistics gathered by the group about five years ago, with only 284 new pieces in the last 25 years. But together, the 20th-century pieces form the greatest part of the serious brass concert repertory.

To understand why today's concert brass rep comes mostly from the past 75 years, we must digress for a moment, and rewind to the era whence cometh—usually in some edited form—most of the rest of the brass repertoire: the Renaissance. The soprano "brass" of the Renaissance was the cornetto, a wooden instrument like a recorder with a mouthpiece like a trumpet, but which sounded more softly than a trumpet of today. Trumpets also existed in the Renaissance, but were used mostly on royal occasions. And these trumpets had no valves.

As orchestras started to look more like orchestras (that is, with bigger string sections) they left the cornetto's softer sound behind. J.S. Bach, for example, rarely wrote for cornetto, but used trumpets in his large works. Those trumpets, still valveless, were limited to one scale, without chromatics. Composers had to limit brass playing, and would often leave them altogether out of slow movements that might have more chromaticism.

By the time of Haydn and Mozart, trumpets were less often used by royalty, and orchestras and orchestral styles had advanced, so the limitations of the trumpet kept it in the background until—fanfare, please—the 19th-century invention of the valve. This benefited the horn as well, and allowed the invention of the tuba, which superseded instruments rather alarmingly named "contrabass serpent" and "hellicon," and which coexisted for half a century with a keyed serpent called the "ophicleide."

American Brass Quintet 45th-Anniversary Concert Peter Jay Sharp Theater Thursday, May 4, 8 p.m. Free tickets available in the Juilliard Box Office.

Valves direct air through a brass instrument's tubes in ways that allow it to deliver all 12 tones of the scale. Even then it took years before the valved trumpet became an accepted replacement for the valveless one, and years after that before brass instruments gathered into quintets and inspired a repertoire. (If you are wondering about the trombone, it descended from the sackbut and the slide trumpet, and assumed its present form in the 19th century, coeval with the tuba.)

Many a brass quintet today augments edited Renaissance and newly composed repertoire with arrangements of works not written for brass. This the A.B.Q. has declined to do. A decisive moment came in 1980, when a presenter made an engagement contingent on the quintet including a set of piano rags adapted for brass. The quintet's manager took his clients' cooperation for granted. But the A.B.Q. not only turned down the date, they switched managers. They would be, to use Sampson's phrase, "a serious brass ensemble," and would be represented by someone who understood that.

Eschewing arrangements of non-brass works does not mean that the A.B.Q. won't edit for performance those small-ensemble Renaissance works written for cornettos and other precursors of today's brass instruments. Mase will add articulations, dynamics, and phrasing to pre-Baroque works already written for five of the brass or wind instruments of that day. "The idea is to stay close to the original," he says. "I often use the term 'historically informed' in referring to the way I want my editions to work. By contrast, 'arranging,' where someone might take a song for voice and piano and work it out for five instruments, can require all kinds of manipulations of the original, and in many cases what you end up with doesn't sound much like what it started as."

The A.B.Q. will include three sets of Mase's editions on its May 4 program: three madrigals of Luca Marenzio (1553-1599), one of the most successful of Renaissance madrigal composers; five chansons of Josquin des Prez (c. 1450-1521); and four Venetian canzoni, by Luigi Mazzi of Ferrara (fl. 1590s); Giacomo Filippo Biumi (1580-1653); Giovanni Gabrieli (1557-1612), a Munich court musician in the 1570s and then organist at St. Mark's in Venice; and Giovanni Priuli (1575-1629), a student of Gabrieli. Also on the program are David Snow's Dance Movements (1981), William Schmidt's Sonatina for trombone, horn, and bass trombone (1968), and a repeat hearing of an earlier A.B.Q. commission: Sampson's Breakaway for Two Trumpets and Electronics, which received its world premiere from the A.B.Q. last summer at the Aspen Music Festival, where the group has held a long-term residency.

Read an article about composer Joan Tower.

Breakaway has a compelling history. The second of its three movements, titled "A Single Shot (25 Years): Prayers and Chant," refers to the shot that killed Sampson's brother, labor activist William Evan Sampson, one of the "Greensboro Five," in a confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party on November 3, 1979, in Greensboro, N.C. Sampson wrote the movement on the 25th anniversary of the murder. (Four of the Greensboro Five died of gunshot wounds that day; the fifth, Dr. Michael Nathan, died two days later.)

These works will all share the program with Tower's Copperwave (and someday it might be fitting for Breakaway to appear on a program with Tower's recent Made in America). All together, the A.B.Q.'s celebratory program will say much about two inextricably entwined histories: that of the brass chamber ensemble, and that of its foremost exemplar in America today. The A.B.Q. did not just choose a path 45 years ago, it created one. That path, seemingly limited, with no crowd-pleasing adaptations, turned out to be one of enormous possibility.

David Pratt is a freelance arts writer and development consultant living in New York City. In addition to The Juilliard Journal, he has written for The New York Times, Playbill, and many other publications.