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…
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.
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,…
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 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…
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…
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…
