One Day Wonder #187

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

I’ve been watching a lot of Dexter lately. It’s a very entertaining and absurd show about a serial killer with a code of honor. It takes place in Miami so there’s a load of fair-to-decent salsa music going on in the background much of the time. Once again, I had no idea what I was going to do for today's piece, so I thought, OK, why not write a salsa tune? By now, I’m well aware of the technical limitations of the brass ensemble. I’ve restricted myself to brass only (except for #1; that was a fluke), so I couldn’t add percussion or a piano or anything else non-brass. Why brass only? Well, as odd as it may seem, if I start adding other instruments, I’m eventually going to have some huge, huge pieces of music and absolutely no means of having them performed. Likewise, if I lift my piece-a-day restriction, I’ll have the same problem. It’ll be Mackris v. O’Reilly all over again, except that I don’t have any cash to hire an ensemble. At least by keeping the band small and the tunes short, there might be a way to have some of these pieces performed. Sure, I could write lots of gigantic pieces, throw them on a shelf, croak in obscurity and have everything performed 20 years later, but this seems to be the best approach to the problem of being a complete unknown: write lots of manageable stuff. So there. Anyhow, where were we? Oh yeah, salsa tune. I figured that I could make up for the lack of percussion by making it really super-driving. In that respect, I succeed, but everything else is pretty dire. I really don’t like this piece. Harmonically, it’s pretty stupid, with fourth-relation shifts that grate on my ears because they don’t make any sense within the context of the piece. These came about because I was getting bored with the diatonic harmony. In addition, I hate the intro and the solo chorus, the phrasing is awkward and the thing has absolutely no personality. But it does have a pretty good beat. And that’s about the only good thing I can say about it. The lesson I learned here is to steer clear of salsa for the time being.