Ensemble Sticks Its Noyse Into Music’s Past

Referring to music as noise is often the derogatory characterization used by adults in describing a new generation’s sound ideals. For the Renaissance brass ensemble that calls itself The Whole Noyse, no such put-down is intended.

According to the ensemble’s leader, Stephen Escher, “In the 16th Century in England, a group of similar instruments was called a ‘noise.’ So the phrase ‘a noise of viols’ was like ‘a pride of lions.’ ” Escher explained that his historical rummaging had uncovered a reference to a five-member municipal band in Norwich, England, in 1584 that was described as “beeying a Whoall noyse.”

Escher and his four musical colleagues from the San Francisco Bay area have been performing together as The Whole Noyse for the past two years. Saturday night they will make their first foray into Southern California with a concert in the Great Hall of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral, sponsored by the San Diego Early Music Society.

While Renaissance brass instruments have exotic names such as sackbut, curtal and cornett, only the sackbut, which looks like a smallish modern trombone, is actually made of brass. The cornett is a high-pitched wooden instrument with no keys or valves, although it is played with a shallow, cup-shaped mouthpiece similar to that used on a modern trumpet or cornet. The mouthpiece is the cornett’s only link to the modern brass family. The curtal is actually a double-reed wooden instrument that most musicologists describe as the ancestor of the bassoon.

Although Escher does not mind explaining the unusual characteristics of his group’s instruments, he is impatient with amateurish Renaissance music groups that remain preoccupied with the instruments’ strange shapes and quaint sounds.

“They never get beyond the ‘toys’ approach to music-making. They are more interested in the instruments’ cute sounds than in the music they can play,” he said.

Nor does his group go in for the typical Renaissance ensemble’s fetish for donning period costumes--fancy doublets, feathered, floppy hats and sweeping capes--in concert.

“We have done it in the past, but we don’t do it anymore,” Escher said. “We found that when we dressed seriously for performance, people started taking us more seriously.”

Admittedly, the audience for Renaissance instrumental music is specialized.

“Mostly it’s made up of people who got interested in early music because of baroque music. Renaissance music, however, usually gets the short end of the deal because not enough people get beyond the baroque.”

Escher grew up in Mason City, Iowa, the birthplace of Meredith Willson and prototype of the small town in which the composer set “The Music Man.” Appropriately, Escher played modern brass instruments there; he encountered the Renaissance cornett when he went to college.

“When I was an undergraduate, a friend of mine built a cornett for me. I practiced it in our garage one summer when I was home working as an ice cream maker in our family business.”

Escher is still up to his arms dispensing ice cream in Palo Alto, a job he pursues in order to support his love of Renaissance music.

Other members of The Whole Noyse are Brian Howard; Richard Van Hessel, former director of musicians at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; Ernest Rideout, and Stanford University faculty member Herbert Myers.

For its concert at the cathedral, the ensemble will play a program of all German music composed between 1530 and 1650.