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.
The first movement of this piece can be found bigged-up as the first movement of Factions. Mike Allen (Co-Principal trumpet in the RPO) and I spent a month in 1988 touring round Germany with an American Company doing West Side Story. It was brilliant fun at that age, and we couldn’t care less that some of the venues were pretty…
Loopy Louise is my wife Helen. On a train journey to Manchester, she suggested I write something for just mouthpieces, so that’s what this is. Or intended to be, anyway. It works much better on the whole instrument, and is an encore piece, containing 10 ways to say Goodbye, in about 90 seconds.
Quite the opposite of Speedbird, this is sleazy stuff. It sets off at a hell of a lick but soon collapses into a dark, smoky riff. The tenor sax takes a solo before being undertaken by the sultry baritone in its sultriest register. The piece builds with a huge crescendo, and ends as low and dirty as possible, on the…
Here are the Polish and British national anthems, closely entwined and used in some of Lutoslawski’s favourite techniques. This sounds intense, but is actually an attractive piece on the ear, and I enjoyed exploring it.
This was written for the Cory Composition Competition in 2019, and though it didn’t get anywhere, it has had its followers, and performances. Obviously a Spanish piece, there’s a section that evokes a Spanish guitar, with 6 instruments representing one open string each. It starts as a fiesta, with some flamenco clapping, then the guitar introduces the beautiful middle section,…
Pam-e-ent-see Kaz. I wanted to call this piece ‘A tribute to Serocki’, but it translates better into Polish to say Pamieci, which is closer to ‘in memory of’. Kaz is a flippant shortening of Serocki’s first name, Kazimierz. And the piece is less in memory of the composer himself than a tribute to his Sonatina for Trombone, written in 1954…
Pete Radcliffe was a history teacher at our school. He lived at the end of our road and was a keen guitarist. I’d started playing, and he introduced me to some of his favourites, Larry Coryell, John McLaughlin, Al Di Meola. Pete didn’t take a guitar group at school but this piece was written very much with that in mind. …
The Recital. Eight brand new pieces for trombone and piano. If I’ve had a Big Idea in the last few years, this is it. I noticed, when at student recitals, that too much of the repertoire was the same stuff I’d been playing at college 30 years ago. To gain the contrast they needed for their performance, students are still…
RBY is a piece of many colours, not just the three primary ones. I have tried to portray some facet of the tones you get when you mix two of the three colours on a palette, i.e. orange, green and purple/violet, and of course black, the dark heart of the piece when you mix all three colours together. Thus black…
Another piece that’s more rock than classical really. In fact there is a version with drum kit, which is the version I always listen to. And another of my weird titles. It’s just because it’s lovey-dovey at the beginning and end, with what I then considered rather astral, floaty chords. The middle is all driving rock for trombones.
After the intensity of 6845, a gentler piece, possibly for a youth band at 4 minutes. A relaxing sailing trip hits a storm thrown at it by Steve Reich, before the boat sails off into the sunset with a sultry flugel solo.
Here's a little brass quintet I did in 1998. This is easy listening, and not too hard to play either. I couldn't settle on a title, both seemed to suit the music well, see below. Grade VI upwards.
24 studies, to be sight-read then enjoyed! One in every key, graded between 1 and 10 for difficulty, and available in tenor, bass and brass band treble clefs.
24 studies, to be sight-read then enjoyed! One in every key, graded between 1 and 10 for difficulty, and available in tenor, bass and brass band treble clefs.
24 studies, to be sight-read then enjoyed! One in every key, graded between 1 and 10 for difficulty, and available in tenor, bass and brass band treble clefs.
Here is a five-movement, continuous twenty-minute piece depicting these beautiful islands. We first went there in 2008, and standing at the very top of Britain, at Hermaness, in freezing rain, watching the furious sea crashing on the rocks and the cliffs round the lighthouse, the gulls and terns whizzing around above the water, I knew this would be great for…
I’d had this tune going on for years, scribbled on a piece of paper somewhere. I showed it to Amos one time and said I’d never known what to do with it. He suggested his group, the Big Buzzard Boogie Band. Speedbird is a punchy piece, always driving forward, propelled by a ‘push’ in every bar. The featured solo is…
This is the first of 2 pieces in the style of Steve Reich. SRI is Sacro Romano Impero, the Holy Roman Empire, which of course was the First Reich. Har bleedin’ har. But I liked the title enough to keep it, because 3 stark capitals are a bit mechanical, as this sort of music is, and there’s also more than…
See above, Orchestral Woodwind Section. I wrote this piece at college when I could sort of play the piano a little bit. There are 5 short movements, I think the whole piece is under 10 minutes. They are in increasingly long compound times, and are 1. Rushing Water (3/8); 2. Gaudy Tune in A major (5/8); Tombs (7/4); On The…
Three books of five short pieces to round off a brass band rehearsal in a cheery way! Many of us start rehearsals with the old faithful hymn books. Here are fifteen pieces with which to end rehearsals, fifteen lively and catchy little numbers to end the night on. All are about a minute long, a simple blow to send us…
This piece follows straight on from the relentless Giants in the Rain, and is therefore a quiet, ethereal contrast. Giants started with a long piano introduction, Ghosts has the solo trombone softly laying out the theme, a recitative-like chant based on the most recurrent motif of the recital, a 5-note snippet going up or down towards the end. The piano…
It would help to describe this piece if I gave one of (!) its original titles, which was Fanfare, Theme, Ghosts and Hoedown. This is a melange of a piece, in those implied moods, written as a thankyou to Duncan Wilson and Kidlington Concert Brass for performing Sketches of Shetland, which I must say they did brilliantly. When I couldn’t…
An old Scottish bandmaster used to refer to the trombone section as Gwackomeres. After years of this, I asked him why he did it. So in his Scottish accent, and miming a trombone slide going in and out, he said ‘Go awa, come ‘ere, go awa, come ‘ere’. This is my guess at a correct spelling! The piece is very…
Trombonists reading this will all know of Andre Lafosse, who wrote 2 study manuals in 1921. In 1946 he wrote a third, and all 3 are regarded as excellent material on which to learn the entire range of trombone technique. In the third book there is a set of 12 studies, often used as exam and audition pieces to this…
Written after a visit to a Concentration Camp in East Poland (see also the ‘Pieces of Writing’ section). If you want a moment of utter gravity within your orchestral concert, this is it.
Or Bombasticity II, takes us back to the beginning of the recital. Genesis did an album in 1979 in which the opening returns at the end, and the way they did it always gripped me. This is a similar effort, to close this cyclic recital. So after drifting through the sky above the clouds, we sink right back to a…
The Scourged Back is the name of a photograph, taken in 1863. It's of the lacerated back of a Louisiana slave known as Whipped Peter, you can imagine how awful this photograph is. I can't show it here. This is the story of his escape from his plantation and arrival in Baton Rouge, where he joined the Union army in…
An African legend, of a young girl, her capture and escape from an evil ogre, and the hideous death inflicted on him by the girl's father. Lots of detailed storytelling, many scenes and atmospheres, and 'curtain calls' from the main characters at the end!
1. Fury. 2. All You Need is... 3. Moods of Echoes. The three are not really a suite, but work best each on their own as solo pieces with three very different inspirations behind them. Plus postage, they're £10 each one, or £25 if you want to play all three. Bargain!
There’s a glorious picture of Glastonbury Tor, and I’ve yet to find the photographer who took it. This piece is entirely based on this one incredible image, mostly bright orange, of the sunset mists across the fields, rooks rising from foreground trees, and the magnificent monument itself, just rising on its tor above the clouds.
This is for chamber orchestra, and was commissioned by the City of London Sinfonia for their brilliant 1st trumpet player, Nick Betts. I’ve known Nick a long time and I know his distinctive playing very well. So that made it easier and more satisfying to write for him, as I knew pretty much exactly how he would sound. A few…
The third of my initial forays into this style and ensemble, this portrays a hot, shimmering day, probably in a desert, where you can see the heatwaves hovering over the sand. The double bass is an unlikely soloist, accompanied by tinkling, drifting piano, up to its highest note this time. The piece grasps reality for a while in the middle,…
This shouldn't mess with the marcher's feet, but it might, as the accompanying figure is often in 3/4 Waltz time. There's a slightly G&S-style middle section (I changed the traditional order round a bit in this one) and then the melodramatic bass tune, which is a version of The Blue Danube. Lots of fun.
I used to live in Walthamstow, and this is a short, light piece, the most traditionally-brass-band I’ve written, with a catchy theme and middle section. What makes it Walthamstow is the postcode bridge section, where during its brief four bars, 17 Es are heard on the flugel and xylophone.
Written for a performance at an International Trombone Federation bash in 2006, for Katy Price and Christian Jones, shortly before they got married. Based on their initials, and the imminent wedding, the theme takes its cue from the song about Casey Jones, the American pioneer.
This was the second Steve Reich-inspired effort. SRI is driving, headlong music, this is more atmospheric, and tells a story. It would have been A Walk in the Woods but it’s in ¾ so the Waltz seemed appropriate. The woods were going to be tranquil English ones, but things take a decidedly spooky turn in the middle section. After a…
This is a simple piece written for the CSD Brass Band, which stands for Cambridge and Surrounding District. My old pal Chris Lawrence is the conductor, and they rehearse in a lovely old church in the town. Having been to a rehearsal (for another piece of mine) I decided to write them one of their own. The letters C, S…
Here's a bright Xmas tune, for children's choir and a few accompanying instruments (see and hear it in the Virtual Venue). Score, parts and lyrics supplied. The fading light at the end of a school day in December is a magic moment.
