One Day Wonder #156

For 1 horn, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba.

Still at work, but I’ve decided to give myself a challenge and revive the “wild polka” format of days past. Because of its speed and scope, I was working on this piece till late at night and I still hadn’t gotten it right. I didn’t like the intro and I was very dissatisfied with the C theme in the trombone. I tinkered with the intro and scrapped the original C theme, replacing it with something even worse. I didn’t monkey with anything else. I really like the A theme. Yeah, all those sixteenth notes sound a little crazy, but that’s the point. For practical purposes, I divided them up between the two trumpets, so one plays two bars and the second plays another two bars and they play the end of the phrase together. I decided on the “start-stop” approach because I didn’t want masses of sixteenth for the A theme. Scads of notes make the brain stop listening. So what you get is a flurry of notes finished off with a plodding, noisy little phrase ending. This happens several times until the A section is over. Both B and C sections have a better flow to them. And speaking of the C section, it actually took about four days of rewriting to get it right. It wasn’t just the music wasn’t great, it was also that the phrasing was seriously screwed up. Once I was able to line those two things up, I could move on. I’m still trying to get the intro straightened out. I’ve abandoned it for the moment, because I can’t really think of what I’d rather have. Even with the amount of extra work and all the stuff I had to scrap, I’m pretty happy with it. Wild polkas are a little like marches: you have to write one every so often just to clear the belfry.