One Day Wonder #243

For 1 horn, 1 trumpet and tuba.

Yes, after a major piece like #242, there’s always a letdown. I mean, I always get the feeling that I’ll never write two rockin’ pieces in a row, so why even try? My tendency is to wrap a small ensemble around a small task and plan for the next big thing. That’s what this is. It’s just a trio exploiting dotted and poly-rhythms. That’s all. The beginning has the tuba playing dotted-half-quarter rhythms, the horn with dotted-quarter-eighth rhythms and the trumpet with dotted-eighth-sixteenth rhythms. Each instrument then passes those figures around. That was how the whole tune was supposed to operate. The only problem is that it’s a pretty thin premise, so I brought in some poly-rhythmical contrasts and gave them to the horn (and later to the trumpet). The entire piece sounds like it’s wandering around in search of a purpose. And in a way it is. I listen to it now thinking: “God, #242 was so good and I follow it with this. Yeesh!” Well, by now I can take it all in stride. It’s not the end of the world. I have better pieces ahead of me and this one behind me. Look at it this way, at least I got this one out of my system. That means that I have one less substandard piece left in my arsenal…