One Day Wonder #55

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

This was an experiment. I wanted to write a chorale and then join the primary voices a fifth apart and have them all joined by the tuba. The result is something that sounds almost like a parody of a chorale. There’s some kind of grotesque and unsettling aspect to this piece that I really like. It probably has something to do with those drifting fifths that clash with the other drifting fifths. I tried hard to limit the exposed lines, because bare parallel fifths get boring pretty fast. Composition students are taught to avoid them like the plague. My old composition teacher once described them as sounding like "the Roman army on the march." So if this sounds like the mighty Caesar on the road to conquest, then I’ve failed at what I was trying to attempt.

Click on the title to listen.