ilikethetrumpet

Mr. Carroll,
First of all, thanks to you and the rest of the masters for your very helpful service on this site!

I'm a first-year trumpet grad student at U Iowa. I play some jazz, a bit of orchestra stuff, but I tend to be drawn most closely to music written before 1750 and after 1945. (Funny how those interests tend to correlate?) Two years of grad school fly by, so I have the future in the corner of my eye, and noticed that McGill has an early music degree program and a few brass professors devoted to that area.

About how big is that program in terms of players? What are the university's instrument holdings like in the natural trumpet/cornetto category? Of course my next move is four or five years or so off, but I just got engaged to a baroque-loving, Francophilic violist. She's a California native, but says that she wants to eventually settle "someplace snowy with lots of old stone buildings." That certainly sounds like Montreal to me!

One last question: do you tend to notice a correlation between baroque and new music players? There are musicological reasons for this, I'm sure, with Stravinsky, Hindemith, etc. reaching back to Bach, but there's something about the patterned, "smaller" manner of playing that really appeals to me more than Mahler or Strauss (as wonderful as those works are!)

Thanks in advance,
Peter

ecarroll

Peter,

Congrats on your engagement and thanks for your kind words about whatever I add to this site (highly speculative). Music is my life and trumpet music my passion. It's a privilege to share it here.

I'll gather all the info I can about the McGill early music program when I'm up there again in a week. It's a VERY serious program, but I don't know how many are enrolled or if they have brass instruments in their collection.

Many serious musicians have found their ways to the peripheries of music over the years. Perhaps musicians seemingly as disparate as Harnoncourt and Partch share a common need to experiment and create "new" sounds? The same ole, same ole has certainly gotten ole for me over the years. . .

Best to Caster Teoh and Meagan Gugliano if/when you see them. Both were at Chosen Vale.

EC