One Day Wonder #211

For 2 horns, 1 trumpet, 2 trombones and tuba.

Well, #202 was something of a revelation for me. It showed me that a brass ensemble is a dynamite vehicle for minimalism. OK, my stuff doesn’t fit too well into the category, as it’s not very minimal, but we’ll use the term for the sake of convenience. Anyhow, by using short motifs, longer, non-lyrical melodic elements and metrical change-ups, I was able to fashion something that was surprisingly entertaining. At least I thought it was. This piece is another attempt to emulate the practice. This time around, the background lines are longer (and emphasize the ascending fourths) and the meter changes are different. For this, we have four bars of 11/8 followed by two bars of 3/4. That’s the scheme for most of the piece, although there is an extended chunk of 11/8 toward the end and the last eight bars are in 3. But besides that, the approach is nearly the same. When I first finished this tune, I thought that it was a pale imitation of #202 and that, once again, I didn’t possess the vocabulary or the chops to produce a foray into the same arena without lifting some major elements from the original model. Well, a few weeks have passed (I’ve still got a major backlog of posts) and I’m listening to this piece with new ears. I really like it. It manages to build itself into a really compelling work. Yeah, it does get muddy toward the end, but that’s the intent. It starts out quite starkly and ends up swirling around all the notes going every which-way, followed by the coda and the ending. The great thing about both of these pieces is that they’re almost infinitely expandable. Granted, I wouldn’t ask for brass players to blow for hours on end, but I can see either this or #202 going on for 15-20 minutes. And they probably wouldn’t be boring. Well, that’s the hope. I mean, nobody wants to write boring music. I’m sure that Jean-Baptiste Lully and Carl Nielsen didn’t want to, but, well… it just kind of turned out that way.