Double Bass
SKU:
BT.YE0030
Composed by
F. Keyper. Exam Material.
Book Only. Yorke Edition
#YE0030. Published by
Yorke Edition
(BT.YE0030).
An easy
virtuoso work published
here for the first time
and now much performed.
Recorded Slatford/Academy
of St
Martin-in-the-Fields
(EMI). AMEB (Australian
Syllabus) 2004.
Orchestral material on
hire from Yorke Edition
(notSpartan).
Pr
ogramme Note:
As
a young professional
player in the 1960s, my
work as a double bassist
with chamber ensembles
and small orchestras took
me all over the world.
This presented an
unparalleledopportunity
to scour libraries and
archives wherever I went.
Long before the advent of
the photocopier and
e-mail, research was far
more challenging than it
is today. Eastern Europe
was particularly
difficult to access,
withmanycollections kept
under lock and key for
all but a few hours a
week. One quickly found
colleagues who were keen
to share information
gleaned in passing, even
though they had no
specific interest in
one's own
particularspecialism (it
is so often the
peripheral topics that
fascinate as much as the
main subject under
investigation, and one
can quickly be
side-tracked into
political and social
issues that have only
slender bearing on the
job inhand!).
In
the early 1970s James
Brown, the then
sub-principal oboist of
the English Chamber
Orchestra with whom I was
working at the time,
stumbled across a small
collection of double bass
manuscripts at the
RoyalDanish State Library
in Copenhagen. They were
by Franz Anton Leopold
Keÿper (b. c.1756, d.
Copenhagen 7 June 1815),
a double bassist of Dutch
origin who worked as
principal of the Royal
Chapel Orchestra in
Copenhagen.Keÿper's son
was the bassoonist Franz
Jacob August Keÿper
(1792-1859). The
collection included a
number of concertos, some
chamber music, and
various naïve fragments.
Although hardly the work
of a Mozart or Haydn,the
style is characteristic
of the period. For an
instrument such as the
double bass, whose 18th
century solo repertoire
is largely written for
tunings that are no
longer in everyday use,
Keÿper's music is easily
approachablein its.