One Day Wonder #150

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

OK, it’s milestone time. I’m halfway done with this project. I never thought I’d get this far. I was originally going to write a short fanfare for brass every day until that got stale. It took all of a week, then I just started writing any piece I could think up. Some are good, some are not, but since I didn’t have anything else going on, it seemed the best way to go. Well, it’s become something very special in the meantime. I’m writing stuff now that I couldn’t have imagined back when I started. That’s what I signed on for. Once the evolution stops, I’m outta here. With that in mind, I decided to write a march with harmony based on fourths in celebration of the halfway point. This, of course, makes the piece sound rather thin and weird. And I really love it. The intro tips its hand to the rather unconventional harmony, but otherwise, it’s a very tradition and ordinary march, form-wise. What happens when you stack fourths in chords is that you get dissonance. When you combine the chording with moving lines harmonized in fourths, you get even more of it. But this isn’t wild, full-on contemporary music, fer Pete’s sake, it’s a march. And fourth-stacking has been around for a very long time. I just wanted to make it sound as good as possible, not as some kind of proof that such an elementary concept is plausible, but just because. Lots of pieces were written earlier last century that highlight various aspects of alternate harmony and the vast majority of them which weren’t written by Stravinsky are simply awful. Anyhow, my two goals were to employ weird harmony and to make it sound good. I hope that’s what happened. And the fact that I wrote the bulk of it at work makes me feel even better about it.