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…
It’s a ubiquitous trick in a lot of pop music, to shift up a semitone every verse, possibly most memorably used in Stevie Wonder’s hit ‘I just called to say I love you’. This is the Blaydon Races tune exaggeratedly given the same manoeuvre, with the John Iveson middle section thrown in as well (see ‘Deck the Halls’).
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…
A very old favourite tune of mine, this is a version arranged for ten piece brass group, and recorded by Barbican Brass. I updated the arrangement and added percussion in 2019.
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…
