Here is the Overture to a piece called The Pirates of Titipu, a tribute to predecessors Gilbert and Sullivan by Hollywood writers Vibrul and Gallstein, arranged here for Brass Band. There are four well-known tunes, 'We're fellows both Hearty and True!', 'Let me not in Sorrow's Arms', A Felon's life is a Hopeful One' and 'I like to sing the…
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…
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 is very much another walk, like my ‘Winter Walk’ piece. And it is similar to that piece in some ways, though when writing this I was thinking of a day my wife and I spent walking between Craster and Dunstanburgh Castle, on the Northumbrian coast. It was sunny and lightly breezy, lovely conditions, and the North Sea was very…
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.
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…
Ghosts and Chimes. The title is that of the fifth movement of a piano piece written ca. 1984. Here I’ve arranged it for Brass Band and Pitched Percussion. The piece has a non-standard format and is all the better for it. The Ghosts and Chimes riff sets up and has a few permutations, then it starts building, at which point…
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,…
