One Day Wonder #48

For 2 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba.

One thing I learned from Mackris v. O’Reilly was that I can write one hell of a dirge. Have a listen to that piece's excerpt of the #10 Dirge. One thing I'm trying to avoid in this project is a repetition of any past successes or failures, so I didn't want a repeat of the Dirge. Luckily, I'm working with brass ensemble here and not chamber orchestra and choir, so that wasn't much of an issue. Both pieces are slow, but the similarities end there.

I wrote this piece to mark the passing of my godmother (whose funeral I attended the previous day). It employs a very slow (some could even say dirge-like) tempo and derives a lot of power from the key of F minor. One interesting harmonic thing that happens is lots of diatonic dissonances and suspensions that occur and resolve as the lines collide with each other and drift apart again. Otherwise, it's really quite diatonic (it stays in the same key). This was another chance to use the “cascade effect” in the trumpets. Towards the end, the whole thing starts to sound like a pipe organ, but that might be because of identical timbres of the trumpet section. I like this piece a lot, because, after finishing #10, I figured that there wasn't any reason to write another dirge again. Well, I had a reason and I wrote something pretty good.

Click on the title to listen.