One Day Wonder #140 (Variation #8)

For 1 horn, 1 trumpet and 1 trombone.

OK, this variant uses a lot more material from the original than #139. Once again, I’m mining the interval variety pack of #132 and putting it in the 6/8 bag. You might be aware that I’ve been trying to get the horn/trumpet/trombone small combo to play nice for quite some time. For a while, that desire fell by the wayside, but here it is again. And this time it works out very well. Gone is the time when I didn’t know how to deal with the instruments’ voices. I had a lot of difficulty blending and contrasting them, so I’d just write for them as best as I could muster. Just take a listen to #11 and you’ll know what I mean. But with this piece, I feel like things are completely different. Instead of going immediately to a fully fleshed-out version of the A theme, I let it evolve from starkness to warmth in its third and final iteration. The adventures between those restatements contrast rhythmically and harmonically. At the end, I bring back the intro and we’re out. The only troubling thing about this piece is that there’s a passage that is reminiscent of the intro of #122. This was kind of alarming, but not alarming enough to change.