A Personal Commentary on the Serpent – Michael Yelland

I have a longstanding fascination with the serpent, but always thought they were impossible to play in tune, so refrained from buying one until after I went to the Historic Brass Symposium in New York in 2012. There I heard the inspiring performance by two leading serpent players,  Doug Yeo and Volny Hostiou at the last year convinced me otherwise, so I approached and American serpentologist, Craig Kridel to buy his Harding serpent. This was a fibreglass replica and has been clothed by my long-suffering wife as she has tolerated me learning this instrument. 
In 2014 I went to my first serpent workshop in a tiny village in Switzerland – one has to travel a long way to find like-minded serpent players. There were about 30 there – probably about half of the world’s serpent players and we played everything from renaissance church music through to modern jazz. I have since been to a ‘Serpentarium’ in a little town near Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2017, to play lots of wonderful serpent music with about a dozen other serpent enthusiasts. 
In his book on the tuba family Clifford Bevan states that there is no question that the serpent is the most difficult of all the cup mouthpiece instruments to play to an acceptable standard.  This is due to a combination of its rapidly expanding conical profile, a cup mouthpiece for generating the sound and side-holes for changing the pitch creates a unique timbre. The intonation is best for the fundamental and its harmonic series. So it works best as a kind of bugle horn.
However it is the notes between the harmonics that are the big challenge in taming this beast. For the beginner there is often considerable variation in the volume and tone of the notes as they go up and down the scales, but this evens out somewhat with practice. There is a need to lip many notes one way or the other to get all the notes. Some notes can be bent by more than a fourth, so the player needs to have a very keen sense of intonation. Consequently it is difficult to play in tune and so has been the target of some rather unkind critics in the four centuries that it has been around
In his book of orchestration, Evans said that “the serpent was such an odious affair that nothing short of compulsion could explain its employment.”
Burney in the early nineteenth century described the serpent as “a great hungry, or rather angry, Essex calf’, after an unfortunate experience in Antwerp where the serpent was’over-blown and detestably out of tune.”
The 19th century composer Hector Berlioz, who actually included the serpent in many of his orchestrations, once said: “The essentially barbaric timbre of this instrument would have been far more appropriate to the ceremonies of the bloody cult of the Druids than to those of the Catholic religion.”