Elin has been a favorite with music lovers throughout the Delaware Valley during her 40-plus years as a classical trumpeter. This writer first became enthralled by Elin's artistry while he was a college-age music student who had the pleasure of performing in concerts with her. When Valentin Radu asked me to interview Elin, I was thrilled to have the opportunity. However, since at every concert we all read her standard program bio, I wanted to discuss with Elin aspects of her life and artistry that are not found in the factual text of her bio.
In the 1970s a dynamic young Romanian musician with a dream and a strong will came to the U.S. in search of freedoms and opportunities which were denied him by the Communist government of his homeland. About 300 years before Valentin Radu arrived at these shores, Elin Frazier's family could be said to have undertaken an analogous, but more dangerous journey across the North Atlantic in a wooden sailing vessel, to escape religious persecution.
Elin ♫ The Early Years
Elin hails from historic Holbrook, Massachusetts and possesses a family heritage that precedes European colonization in North America! Elin's paternal ancestors settled in Nova Scotia, Canada, during the late 17th or early 18th centuries. Her paternal family name was originally Fougère (French for little fern), coming from an ancient town of the same name in Brittany, France. After France ceded large parts of Canada to the British Empire in the early 1700s, her ancestors adopted the name Frazier to avoid harassment from the English. The name Frazier has Norman/Scottish roots and means strawberry bush. Elin's Fougère/Frazier forebears intermarried with members of the indigenous Algonquin Miq-Mac (Micmac or Mi'Kmaq) people. Her father was French-Canadian and her mother was of old Scots-Welsh stock out of Gloucester, England.
Elin relates that as far back as she can remember she intuited that she always was musical. Her mother had a grand piano and loved to play the semi-classics, which naturally meant that Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops were very popular in the Frazier house. With music all around her, Elin's defining moment came at age 8 inside Holbrook's two-room school house (a converted fire station with the pole still in place).
The Light Bulb Goes On!
One day a local public school music educator came to Holbrook Elementary looking for kids to play in a band he wanted to establish. He demonstrated the trumpet, playing with a very sweet tone. Elin thought it was lovely and fascinating. At the end of the school day, she went home and announced to her father, "Dad...I want to play the trumpet every day for the rest of my life!" Elin's parents supported their daughter's ambition, for this is just what she has done.
Young Elin subsequently played with just about every youth and adult orchestra in the Boston area. With the preeminent Boston Youth Orchestra, she performed the famous Haydn Trumpet Concerto in Jordon Hall (e.g., Boston's Academy of Music Jordan Hall). As the first-prize winner in a competition, none other than Arthur Fiedler awarded Elin a trumpet!
At this point in our conversation I asked Elin, "Who was this man who changed your life?" I wanted to know his name, because by one degree of separation this teacher had also enriched the musical lives of untold thousands over the length of Elin's career. His name was Donald Leach. Although he was "only" an anonymous public school music education teacher, just consider Mr. Leach's impact on music in our region. Mr. Leach stayed in Holbrook for only a year and was succeeded by Jeanne Norris. Key to Elin's career is that Ms. Norris had studied at Boston University with Roger Voisin (1918-2008).
The Master Teacher
and the
"French Style" of Trumpet Artistry
Even though Mr. Voisin did not normally instruct children, Jeanne Norris arranged for Elin to audition for Boston's greatest master of the trumpet. Roger Voisin was a fourth-generation French trumpeter par excellence. At age 16 he became a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and was its first trumpeter for most of his lengthy and distinguished career. Impressed with Elin's abilities and moxie, Mr. Voisin took Elin as his protégée; she continued studying with him until graduating from high school and entering The Curtis Institute of Music.
Mr. Voisin taught in the French style of playing that was dominant in Boston; this aesthetic had a most profound impact on Elin's artistry and approach to music performance. (When this writer...who had grown up on Eugene Ormandy and who loved the Fabulous Philadelphians...was a student at Tanglewood, he was immediately taken by the difference in sound that the Boston Symphony Orchestra produced, and the approach to music that several of its players espoused. Elin confirmed these observations when we spoke.)
As Elin explains it, the French style of trumpet playing is one of freedom ... expressivity ... spontaneity with a liberal use of rubato. Rubato is an Italian word defined as "stolen". In the context of a musical performance, rubato stands for an artistically motivated lengthening or shortening of note values as a means of obtaining greater expressivity. For example, in a musical phrase (let's say a grouping of quarter-notes) notes of seemingly equal time value will not be played with identical lengths to the exactitude of a metronome's click. The artist may adjust the note's length by a fraction of a second in order to enhance the music's beauty. However, Mr. Voisin stressed that this rubato performance style was always underpinned by a keen respect for, and awareness of, the rhythmic pulse and had a very strong sense of timing. Also, the French style advocated a singing or sweet tone, not a blaring brassy sound.
Elin was further influenced by an artist who, in turn, was greatly admired by Mr. Voisin: This was Maurice André (b. 1933) who, Elin informed me, is widely regarded as the musician who restored the trumpet to its position of classical solo, virtuoso instrument. From Mr. André, Elin encountered dazzling "transcriptions" of Baroque and Classic period music that had been written for other instruments, such as the flute, by composers both remembered and forgotten. To hear Elin Frazier flawlessly perform on her trumpet the fast moving runs and musical acrobatics designed for the more agile flute is a thrilling, almost exhausting, audience experience.
Elin Comes To Philadelphia To Study ... and Stays
At age 17, Elin entered The Curtis Institute of Music as only its second female trumpet student to be accepted up to that time in the school's history. Her teacher was Samuel Krauss of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Elin's reflections about this formative period in her life would make for an article in itself. Let me only relate that Elin loved Philadelphia, felt at home here and found it to be a big Boston. She had made many friends, set down roots and stayed to become one of the region's busiest and most-in-demand free-lance trumpeters and teachers.
Currently, Elin is proud of her association as principal trumpeter with Vox Ama Deus and is delighted to perform marvelous duo recitals with Maestro Valentin Radu at the organ. Elin is honored to be the "staff trumpeter" at Philadelphia's Catholic Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, and to be the brass instruments specialist at both the Shipley and Baldwin Schools in Bryn Mawr, at Chestnut Hill Academy and at the Rutgers Camden campus.
Elin the Collector of Trumpets
Elin has built a collection of trumpets that numbers about 25 instruments; each serves a different musical purpose. Audiences who have attended recent concerts by the Camerata Ama Deus conducted by Valentin Radu will have seen Elin's highly unusual one-of-a-kind, four-valve, four-foot-long prototype trumpet built by Victor-Charles Mahillon. With this instrument's sweet tone, Elin sings many demanding Baroque masterworks. She has dubbed another her Mahler Trumpet. It is pitched in D and used when Elin performs the more Romantic symphonic orchestral works. For Josef Haydn's Trumpet Concertos, Elin prefers her Vincent Bach (no relation she thinks) E-flat trumpet, but switches to a Piccolo (i.e., "little") Trumpet in A for brother Michael Haydn's Trumpet Concerto, as well as for Papa Leopold Mozart's Trumpet Concerto. The Flügelhorn is her favorite on which to perform Bach's aria Make My Heart Pure. To interpret the demanding trumpet part of Handel's aria The Trumpet Shall Sound there is a favored small trumpet pitched in G that was built by the French Besson Company. And some of them, she admits, serve as replacement parts for the others.
Some Concepts That Inform Elin's Artistry
Elin also enjoys performing transcriptions of great vocal pieces by Bach, Handel, Romantic composers, as well as arias from operas. In these pieces Elin can perform expressively...not with a bombastic sound or with virtuosity for its own sake. The voice and the trumpet are similar in that both the singer and I must regularly practice to keep the muscles in shape.
When performing in Handel's Messiah, and especially the famed aria mentioned just above, Elin says: I am only an instrument; the trumpet is the focus. The 'Messiah,' like many religious narratives of every culture is both historical and mythic, but it is also metaphysical and symbolic. In this case, in addition to being a musical meditation on deity, it is a story of birth, death and rebirth through transformation or transcendence. Take for example words from the aria's recitative 'Behold I tell you a mystery...we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet!' The trumpet very often is associated with beginnings and endings. For example, at Rosh Hashanah we sound the Shofar (i.e., the Ram's Horn) to commemorate the Jewish New Year. We play 'Taps' at funerals or at the end of the day. Trumpets announce the opening fanfares at the Olympics, inaugurations and graduations. So at this psychological moment in the 'Messiah,' the symbolic trumpet represents transformation, with humanity becoming something more...more spiritualized than before. And the words are 'the trumpet shall sound...we shall all be changed...the mortal shall put on immortality.' This is what I mean when I say that the trumpet is the focus in a symbolic way...symbolic of ever new beginnings, or the upward spiral, that there is the dance of new life. So the player must get inside that music and forget all self concerns, but also be a humble channel and participant in this dance of refreshed loving immortality.
Technique serves the art and the projection of the sound (even with a 4'11" frame). Volume is just an aspect of technique. The secret of all brass playing is in the buzzing of the lips. I could play the tuba too; it is just a matter of good technique.
The origin of the universe was sound...the Big Bang.
Sound is vibration and that equals motion.
Love and energy is behind the music.
Who Are The Artists You Admire?
If Not Trumpet ... Then Which Instrument Would You Play?
We closed our discussion with these two questions and Elin immediately responded, Five great musicians were formative influences for me:
and perhaps I'd play the Cello. Each of these artists' performance art embodied the ideals that have informed Elin's life and kept her in this "business" for her life time. As Elin related, Each had a love and a passion for his/her art. When they performed, as the athletes like to say, they were 'In The Zone.' Each was a channel for the music; they served the music, only the music.
Elin will appear with Vox Ama Deus at Friday's BachFest concert at the Kimmel Center.
Vivaldi's greatest orchestral masterpiece, the Four Seasons, brilliantly performed by Thomas DiSarlo, our own genius concertmaster - this CD also features three other "more" concerti: two doubles (violin & trumpet) & a single (flute). A true collector's item! Recorded live at the Kimmel Center on April 17, 2009.
