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…
