Review

Jean Baptiste Arban
Method for Trombone and Baritone Bass Clef: Revised for Trombone by Charles L. Randall and Simone Mantia

Arranged by New Edition edited by Alan Raph


New York, NY, United States
Publisher: Carl Fischer
Date of Publication: 2013
URL: http://www.carlfischer.com

Primary Genre: Brass Ensemble - 2 brass

The Grande méthode complète de cornet à pistons et de saxhorn of Joseph Jean-Baptiste Laurent Arban has been a well-worn volume in the library of many brass players since it was first published in Paris around 1857; no date is given on the first edition but the fourth edition was published in 1864. “Arban’s,” as it is often called, was one of the earliest method books for piston-valve brass instruments and it has been abridged, enhanced, modified and bowdlerized by dozens of editors and publishers over the last 150 years, some of whom have brought the Méthode to players in bass clef editions for trombone, baritone/euphonium and tuba. To those published by Carl Fischer that were edited Walter M. Eby (1921) and Charles Randall and Simone Mantia (1936), we find more recent adaptations by William Bell (Charles Colin, 1968) and Joseph Alessi and Brian Bowman (Encore Music, 2000) finding a place on trombonist’s bookshelves. 

Into this potpourri of publications comes Alan Raph, charged by Carl Fischer to update Randall and Mantia’s edition of Arban’s Famous Method for Trombone and give the book a new look and feel. Weighing in at nearly three pounds and 360 pages – a whopping 99 pages longer than Randall and Mantia’s edition – this new revision proves both that bigger is not always better and that a new edition can provide useful updates of language and ideas after an interval of 77 years. 

First, the good news. This new edition includes a compact disc that contains both PDF files of the piano accompaniments for the 12 Fantasies and Airs with Variations that make up the last part of the Method, and recordings of pianist John Walker tastefully playing ten of them. Here is something of great value; to purchase the music of the piano accompaniments separately – they are identical to Fischer’s 1912 edition of the accompaniments revised by Edwin Franko Goldman – would cost as much as purchasing the entire Method. This is a tremendous value-added aspect to this new publication.

Alan Raph’s additions to the Randall/Mantia text are clearly identified by being placed in italics and he has made many helpful adjustments to the earlier narrative, dispensing with sentences that were hyperbolic or overly descriptive in nature, such as, “[Arban’s] text for this particular section however, was mostly devoted to problems of the Cornet-a-pistons, and it is on this account that the following instructive and illuminating text has been added for the particular information of Slide Trombone players.” He has also updated spelling, such as “technique” for “technic.” In addition, Raph adds some good ideas of his own, such as his excellent point about considering slide positions for technical passages in light of changes of slide direction so false accents do not appear on weak beats.

Yet there are curiosities in Raph’s approach, principal among them his near obsession with alternate positions. Bass trombonists are aware of his quirky insistence upon using the F and D attachments for notes in and above the staff in his The Double Valve Bass Trombone (Carl Fischer, 1969, 1992). As a parade of editors have continued to modify Arban’s original, more and more slide positions/fingerings have been added until one now finds them added over and under hundreds of notes, pushing the player into a preconceived idea of the very point of the book. Randall and Mantia certainly did this – although Eby notably did not – but Raph takes the inclusion of alternate positions to another level, and the approach of Alessi and Bowman – simply printing Arban’s music and leaving the issue of slide/valve positions to the player – gives players more freedom to approach the book in the way that is most helpful to the individual. Raph also invokes André LaFosse in recommending that grace notes in fast tempi (page 137, exercise 48) and mordents (page 152, exercise 81) need not be played as written, but can be played as much as a third higher than indicated when played as a hard lip slur; Raph calls this a “lip-break.” But it is not too difficult to play such ornaments as printed, and this “easy way out” is not as effective as advertised, to say nothing of the fact that Arban and Randall/Mantia – on page 111 of Raph’s edition – argued vigorously against such a practice, calling it “an intolerable defect.” Raph also advocates an approach to legato that calls for lightly tonguing every note (page 45), which is at odds with the approach taken by most teachers, which encourages students to use a combination of tongue, lip slurs, valve slurs and air attacks to go from note to note in the way that allows for the smoothest movement in a line. Certainly there is room for debate on many of the basics of playing, but as one goes through this new edition, you find a number of approaches that, after giving them a try, don’t line up with generally recognized pedagogical – and even Arban’s own – practice.

It is simply impossible to get this thick and weighty tome to stay open on the music stand even after breaking the book’s glued binding; the spiral bound approach of Alessi/Bowman is a better way to deal with a book of this size. While the printing is crisp and clear, the layout has some of the clunky feel of Fischer’s new edition of the Bordogni/Rochut/Raph Melodious Etudes, with many staves containing only two measures of music. The first of the 14 Characteristic Studies is a case in point. In this new edition, Study 1 (pages 280-281) takes up two full pages with notes widely spaced. Randall and Mantia’s edition has the same Study laid out over one and one-half pages but three of Fischer’s own cornet/trumpet editions of the Method (those edited by Edwin Franko Goldman around 1912, by Goldman and Walter M. Smith in 1936, and annotated by Claude Gordon in 1982) nicely lay out the same music on a single page. While it is gratifying to see the four glaring errors in this Study that were found in Randall and Mantia’s edition now corrected, there is now a new mistake: the first of two grace notes in bar six should be a b-natural, not a b-sharp. There are misplaced slide position numbers from time to time such as on page 66, exercise 61, and on page 21, exercise 28, the printed e-natural1 should be e-flat1 in all four cases. Such errors, along with missing commas, other problems with grammar and punctuation, and errant accidentals and missing dynamics – to say nothing of the periodically confusing layout – are evidence of Fischer’s alarmingly sloppy editorial work. This is inexcusable, especially coming from one of the largest music publishing houses in the world.

With any publication that appears anew, a logical question needs to be asked: “What source material was used as the basis for the edition?” Carl Fischer’s decision to have Alan Raph edit Randall and Mantia’s “revised edition” begs a further question, “Revised from what?” By examining a copy of the first known edition of Arban’s Méthode – located in Paris and held by the Biblioteque National France (catalog FRBNF42817698) – it is clear that as well-meaning revisionists like Randall and Mantia and Alan Raph have gotten further away from Arban’s original, layers of new editing have conspired to obscure much of the author’s stated purpose.

Certainly a new edition of Arban’s Méthode was needed given the problems with Randall and Mantia’s volume. Alan Raph’s new edition is one way to approach the task – to clean up and further modify an existing alteration of Arban’s work. Alessi and Bowman took another tack, that of including most of Arban’s music but leaving out nearly all of his original text in favor of new comments. But there is still room for an Arban urtext, an edition that gives us Arban’s words and music as he wrote them along with footnotes and emendations to put his book in the context of his time for players of our time. Such a book, carefully edited and proofread, would bring Arban’s original exercises and intentions to light for the first time in over 150 years. Unfortunately, Carl Fischer missed the opportunity to do this and trombonists will have to wait until another publisher takes up the task of giving us Arban by Arban.

-Douglas Yeo
Arizona State University