Brass Quintets: Horns of a Dilemma : Music: The genre sells a lot of records, but many brass players regard the form with suspicion, if not outright contempt.

Within the classical music universe, brass quintets constitute a growth industry.

In the last few years, the genre has prospered mainly by observing a programming formula that features short, light works borrowed from other mediums. A typical program might run along these lines: a few classic Dixieland tunes; a march or two and other manly martial stuff, such as “The Marine’s Hymn”; a flashy Gabrieli piece or other florid pre-Baroque work, and a “West Side Story” or other Broadway medley. Concerts can be delivered with or without orchestral backing.

The acknowledged inventors, and still most celebrated practitioners of this formula, are the Canadian Brass, although the genre also has been taken up by such groups as the Empire Brass and the Dallas Brass. These groups and their imitators have come to define for many listeners the essence of what a brass quintet--two trumpets, trombone, French horn and tuba--sounds like. And everyone connected with the phenomenon, including record people, managers, promoters and audiences, seems pleased with their success.

Everybody, that is, except significant numbers of classical brass players.

Among musicians who feel strongly about the brass quintet as a legitimate configuration for classical music, the breezy, show-biz-oriented Canadian model is regarded with suspicion or even contempt.

“The thing that upsets many of us is that the brass quintet, which was conceived of as a vehicle for serious chamber music expression, has been trivialized into mass entertainment,” says Karl Kramer, tuba player with the New Haven, Conn.-based quintet Brass Ring, and chairman of the music department at the University of Bridgeport.

Kramer faults the Canadian and similar groups for a number of transgressions, above all the use of transcriptions--works originally written for other mediums but now recast for brass quintet--as the basis for programming.

“I believe the brass quintet can eventually be seen as the artistic equivalent of the string quartet,” says Kramer. “But only if we play real music written for the medium. It’s true that we don’t have nearly the repertoire right now. But we do have a significant and growing body of works, mostly from the last 30 years or so. And we have to commit to playing what there is, instead of all that pop stuff.”

It’s not an entirely new issue: The San Francisco-based Kronos string quartet stirred up the chamber music scene when it started playing Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” at the end of its programs. Still, as a number of brass players were eager to point out, the Kronos also plays Bartok and Shostakovich.

The classical music world is usually discreet about its family quarrels, but Kramer and other serious-minded brass players have not been shy about venting their feelings on this topic.

In a letter last year to the organizer of a major brass symposium at which Brass Ring performed, Kramer characterized the repertoire of the Dallas Brass, which also appeared at the event, as “banal” and “stupid.”

The members of the Canadian Brass, all of whom are acknowledged to be first-rate players even by their detractors, are aware of the dispute they have helped to create. But they deny they are panderers.

“In the U.S., we teachers and performers just sort of drew a square in the sand at some point and said, ‘This is what a recital is,’ ” says Chuck Daellenbach, the Canadian Brass’ tuba player and spokesman. “We’re saying that there are other ways, that there can be growth to that tradition. People say to us, ‘You guys are anti-art,’ but the truth is we spend all our time worrying about the artistic values we’re a part of.”

A good many of their brass colleagues remain unconvinced.

“This is a very important question among all brass players,” says Raymond Mase, the longtime trumpet player with the American Brass Quintet and chairman of the brass department at the Juilliard School in New York.

“The (Canadian) guys are very sincere guys and very funny guys, but I think they’ve been guided all along by which piece got more applause,” Mase says. “Some people say the Canadian style is inevitable, but I refuse to accept that. What has happened is that, for the moment, the brass quintet has been made into something we don’t want it to be. But I think it’s changing. Our quintet gets a lot of calls from people who say, we had the pop-oriented thing and now we want to hear something more substantial.”

The brass quintet as an established and recognizable configuration is relatively new. The Eastman and New York Brass quintets, formed in the 1950s, are credited with being the first formal and successful specimens.

As a result, the literature written expressly for the genre belongs mostly to the last few decades, apart from some pre-Baroque pieces that were written for indeterminate instrumentation, and a handful of odd other pieces from mostly unknown composers.

This is in contrast to the string quartet, which has been the beneficiary of more than two centuries of steady, uninterrupted composition, from nearly all the Western world’s great composers, from Mozart and Haydn through Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and Ravel and Shostakovich and beyond.