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…