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…
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.