One Day Wonder #295

For 4 trombones and tuba.

Here’s the first in a series that I call “coasting to the finish line.” Honestly, I never thought that the project would get this far, so I began it with some pretty lax standards. In order not to make things seem too daunting, I originally intended to write only 300 short fanfares. I didn’t especially care how long they were or how they were structured or whatnot. All I wanted for them to do was to make a musical statement and end. That’s why many of the pieces before around #30 are so short. Actually, my attitude towards the fanfare-thing changed abruptly at #7 (after that, I wanted to write in all kinds of styles), but I still wanted to keep the pressure off until I proved to myself that I could write at least two minutes of quality music a day. That took a while longer, but eventually it became pretty clear that I could do that in all sorts of varieties. And then I was home free; I established some very rough guidelines (pieces should be at least two minutes long, express a coherent musical thought, and take on as many styles as possible) and hammered away for months upon months.

So this is a reworking of #6. I believe that I described the original as sounding like the theme music to a 1970s BBC version of King Lear. Yeah, that’s a good description. For this version, I had to scavenge what I could from where I could. There wasn’t a lot of source material, since it’s so short. I figured that an intro (with punctuation from the bass trombone) would be nice to set the mood. Following that, I’d lengthen the A theme, add a B theme, keep the C theme, because it rolls nicely back into the repeat of the A. Since that wasn’t quite enough to bring it up to two minutes, I tacked on a brief outro to mirror the beginning. I’d say that it works out OK, but I was definitely feeling a little claustrophobic. Scoring for four trombones and tuba doesn’t give you a lot of room to maneuver, since writing lots of high notes for your players will sound ridiculous, but lots of low notes will sound mushy. The A theme of the original #6 is very nice, but in order to extend it into a real melody, I had to do a few strange things that I’m not completely sold on, but I’m sure I’ll get used to. As for the B theme (which is just a variant on the A theme), I’m fine with that and the C theme is as-is from the original, only it’s repeated twice, which is fine, because it’s kind of cool. Overall, this is a good way to begin the coast to the line.