This is a 10-minute run around Gilbert and Sullivan. All the big hits are here, dotted with quotes from even more. Doing D’Oyly Carte Opera in the 1980s and early 90s, I once asked a friend to cover some shows for me. On the phone, as he wrote in his diary, he had a mental blank when it came to…
A contemporary work about the Hiroshima bomb. The title is the date and time of the explosion. The first half of the piece is utterly innocent, a busy early morning street scene building up. But the plane is heard overhead, and after that it’s pandemonium, musical Chaos. Not without form though, and I hope that the recurring sequence, on which…
A Thali for Trombone is an Indian meal of four short movements served within two very short outer movements called Silver Pots, which is after all what thalis are often served in. The trombone imitates a sitar in 'Dall and Dosa', while the piano plays tabla (Indian drums). The remaining 'dishes' are Lamb Bhuna, Bombay Aloo, and Pickles and Pops,…
My favourite guitarist Jo Satriani has a lovely finger-tapping piece on his 3rd album called Day at the Beach. As so often happens, I was inspired to write a piece in similar vein. When he and Steve Vai came to Tower Records many years ago to sign CDs, I was there in the queue, clutching an A4 envelope with my…
This is a light tune. Light in style, floaty in feel, the trombone plays fairly high throughout, and is very much in the old-fashioned solo mode. You can hear it live in the Virtual Venue.
Encores are too long. This one is a minute and a half but there are a lot of notes. Mostly in 5, it’s a bombastic zoom up and down various arpeggios, always tongue-in-cheek (which makes it a lot harder to play). For use as the encore to the recital for which it was written (as is the case here), before…
So Bombasticity it is. It is a feeble, trombone-like made up word, it doesn’t say Love and Peace, and it doesn’t mean what I thought it might have done even if it was a word! But it has the hook, and if I made it up, it means what I want it to: just a bit of a swashbuckle.
The hook here, and hence the title, is two repeated notes, with which the whole band joins in several times, and maybe the audience/street-liners after the end as well.
This was originally a ‘chops break’ piece for Bones Apart, a simple tune that would be sparing on the embouchure and would therefore be a valuable asset in a concert programme. But though it’s short (3 minutes) and has only simple slow notes in it, I discovered having finished it that the ideal chops break is in fact called a…
Biggest work since Sketches of Shetland, this is a five-movement suite of dances ancient and not-so-ancient. They are Gigue - Sarabande - Tango - Pavane - Salsa, and a more detailed description of them all can be found below. February 2021.
A short piece written for a competition in Spain, hence its Spanish flavour. Each instrument has its own melody, its own dance. First they're played on their own with interjections from the others, then after a very short burst of flamenco clapping, the dances start to come together until all are going at once, gathering momentum and becoming a whole…
This is not an Elegy at all, there’s nothing mournful or melancholic about it. The title is merely a reference to Bernstein’s solo trombone piece ‘Elegy for Mippy II’, which he wrote about his brother’s dog. Ellie is our cat, and this piece is a sort of Day in the Life, following her biorhythms and those of cats in general.…
My other Big Idea. A set of four pieces not just for trombone but trombone player. Nowadays, the music profession has so contracted that we are all often required to double on other instruments. The alto trombone has been up the player’s sleeve for centuries, but more recently, euphonium and bass trumpet are common additions. To play this piece is…
Opposing Cannon, The Dove, and Crossfire are the three movements of this short suite for ten brass. Mostly Grade VI, the last movement probably Grade VIII. See the Virtual Venue for the audio file and further details.
More of a Concert March really, and my favourite of the batch of three (see Bravo! and Viennese Marches). It's pretty much a snare drum feature, with a dynamic 'A Team'-like section followed by a wintery tune - well, it's still pretty wintery in February. This March is slightly slower, but there's an optional opportunity to pick your feet up…
Definitely Arvo Part-driven, this is a relentless piece set in D minor. Huge, lumbering trolls hurl boulders at each other in the mountains through a torrential downpour. The boulders and the rain are heavy, the rocks boom. The fight in the monsoon continues from start to finish, if anything becoming more and more thick and stormy right to the end.…
Here is a Hoedown, written in 2011 for the brass and percussion sections of ICO. ICO is an orchestra based in Warsaw, comprising of young musicians from seven eastern / ex-Soviet countries: Poland, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova. For those eastern players, I wrote the most Western-like tune I could think of, a Hoedown.
