Words by David C. Obenour
Perspective is such a powerful exercise when applied to music. A shifting of perspective can conjure new insight and challenge preconceptions both in how it’s created by the musician and how it’s considered by the audience. On Tonics, performer and composer Mark Kirschenmann has once again inventively shifted his method to challenge how we consider the trumpet. Replacing the traditional mouthpiece of his principal instrument, Kirschenmann experimented with a brass before then settling on a bamboo mouthpiece. This new approach softens the traditional full and certain tone of the instrument. Gentle melodies sustain and fade amidst strings, percussion, and piano. While informed by a number of practices and predecessors, the songs are as beautiful as they are bewildering.
Off Shelf: The principal instrument for composing and performing Tonics was a trumpet with a bamboo mouthpipe. Is there a history to this setup and style for playing trumpet? Do you recall how you first became aware of it?
Mark Kirschenmann: I’ve carefully researched this question, and to the best of my current knowledge, no one has done anything like this with a trumpet before. So, I may be the first! The idea originated by putting the brass leadpipe in my mouth and playing without the traditional mouthpiece. I’ve speculated that trumpeter Jon Hassell may have done this at times throughout his career. Eventually, I migrated to using the bamboo interface instead of brass from my study of the bansuri and shakuhachi flute traditions. I ordered a box of bamboo pieces from a flute maker in Florida and tried dozens of them until I found one that tuned well enough without too many resonant nodes. I thought the sound was beautiful.
OS: How does this style of playing continue or evolve on what you know of from the bansuri and shakuhachi flute traditions?
MK: I have to say, with vehemence, that I’m not continuing or contributing to the illustrious musical traditions associated with bansuri and shakuhachi flute playing. I greatly admire, respect, and study them, but I have no authentic cultural or musical connections. I studied and performed Hindustani raga privately with Dr. R.K. Srinivasan for four months while he was in residence at the University of Michigan, where I teach. The sound of the bansuri and shakuhachi surely lingers in the recesses of Tonics, though.
OS: With such a respected career in improvisational music, do you find meditative qualities in performing? Perhaps obviously, being a wind instrument, but breathe seems so central – even taken outside of the style in which you play on Tonics.
MK: Thank you for that. I do find meditative qualities in performing, but not exclusively so. Sometimes performing and improvising can be frustrating, painful, confrontational, etc. – all of which are valid and honest based on the context.
Breathing and phrasing shaped my melody-making on Tonics, along with the sound of the bamboo. My goal on Tonics was to play only what was essential to the melody. I’m also attracted to the idea that the silences between the notes and phrases are a sound unto themselves that we can hear and that I find very attractive. Taken together, these qualities may provide a meditative experience for listeners, or not. I hope that the music will speak for itself, and I encourage listeners to interpret it as they wish.
Breath is central to wind instrument playing and singing, and it inevitably shapes our phrasing unless we can circular breathe – inhale and exhale simultaneously – which I haven’t yet mastered!
OS: Does that quality change when you listen back to this or other music with this intention in mind? Or when performing with more of an ear for composition and creation outside of a performance?
MK: There is a fine line between meditative, ambient, easy listening, boring, etc, all of which are affected by our current state of mind, emotional and physical well-being, wants and needs. When I listen to music, I try to simultaneously understand and accept the intentions of the music for what it’s doing and for what it isn’t doing. I think it’s unproductive to judge music and art as “too much” or “not enough” of something if the intentions are clear. Creating art demands constant decision-making, which I revere. We all have tastes and opinions of art, which are personal but not factual. I try not to project my ego overly much.
For me, composition, improvisation, creation, and performance are all on the same continuum; I tend not to bifurcate them. For me, they only differ in their relationship to time and sometimes place.
OS: How do you think this way of playing shapes the sound of a trumpet? To your ear, what is different and what remains?
MK: I’m trying to respectfully expand upon the traditional sound and acquired roles of the trumpet without negating them. I’m decentering some of its Western traditions of virtuosity, timbre, and its – even genderized – role as heralding and heroic. I first became attracted to this when I heard Miles Davis make a trumpet sound vulnerable, fragile, and lonely. Jon Hassell contributed to this as well. The bamboo-produced sound is also very quiet.
The placement of the bamboo column in my mouth, rather than a metal, cupped mouthpiece on my mouth, is a significant embouchure change that I’m still struggling with. It’s proving difficult to maintain both at a high level.
OS: Explored within the context of the full album, can you point to songs or standout moments where you feel these sounds are well captured?
MK: The Breathing Room, Butterfly Garden, and Streamlines all capture the idea of quiet, distilled melody-making with sparse, ambient ensembles of prepared piano, strings, percussion, and voices.
OS: On Cybersonic Outreach you explored the trumpet through processed digital effects. Given the analog approach here, do they feel like companion pieces to you? Thinking of both recordings, does the one reflect on the other?
MK: In both cases, I wanted the melodies to be the focus, but the means of producing their sound were quite different. I’ve been playing trumpet through pedals, plugins, and MIDI for decades. An epiphany happened to me in ninth grade when I heard Miles Davis’s On the Corner, eventually realizing that he was playing trumpet through a wah-wah pedal: a life-altering moment! The bamboo mouthpipe is a more recent development. But the melody-centric approach does unite the two albums.
Another uniting thread is the visual dichotomy of my electric and bamboo playing. In both cases, you see me playing a trumpet, but it doesn’t sound like it. So, when solely listening to these albums, it’s easy to forget that you’re hearing a trumpet. In performance, there is a visual disconnect because you’re seeing one thing and hearing another. I like that theatrical illusion very much!
OS: When filling out the compositions around this instrument, what did you find the needs of the songs to be? What did you need to provide space for and what did you need to fill?
MK: I wanted to keep the melodies front and center, which presented a challenge because the trumpet is very quiet with the bamboo interface. I had to carefully sculpt the soundstage, leaving aural space for everything by not wasting notes or sound. I tried to make the ensemble parts essential to the big picture without being distracting to the melodies. It was a good lesson in orchestration, blending, and dynamics.
OS: The choral parts of Episodes in Blue Cornflower and Ultramarine drew a connection I hadn’t seen before with Koji Kondo and his work on the more recent soundtracks for the Zelda video game series. Are you at all familiar with his work?
MK: That’s an amazing connection that I wouldn’t have made! I listened to his Zelda Main Theme and definitely hear what you mean, thanks for pointing that out! Otherwise, Tonics bears the influence of master Indian flutist Hariprasad Chaurasia, who I’ve been transcribing, Miles Davis forever, Jon Hassell, Morton Feldman, Kaija Saariaho, and melodic ambient in general.