One Day Wonder #300

For 3 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba and timpani.

Here we are at the end of the line - #300, which is really a revamped version of #1. And yes, I realize that this is the 301st piece in my projected series of 300. OK, so this treatment isn’t two minutes long. Big deal! It’s a great improvement over the original. For one thing, I shrink the size of the band by three. Gone are the bass trumpet, 4th horn and 3rd trombone. I didn’t need those guys the first time around but was too dumb and inexperienced to know. I still wanted to keep the timpani. I haven’t used a non-brass instrument since then, so it seemed appropriate to have it at the conclusion of the project. Since the main motif (you can’t really call it a melody) is this full-bore blast of A minor, I figured I’d build into it with something out front. This worked out well. I also extended the main motif by a few bars and let the trumpets loose every so often and reworked the ending a bit. This also works out well. See, back when I started the project, I was just thinking that I’d write big fanfares that would serve a purpose at some later date. In other words, they didn’t necessarily have to be good, they just had to have possibilities. That attitude quickly changed because writing one big fanfare after the other seemed kind of limited and dull. In addition, I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with all these instruments. So soon after beginning, I went small with #3 and started moving away from the fanfare at #7. Here’s a curious fact: #1 is the largest ensemble pieces (14 parts) in this body of work. Only #284, at 13 parts, comes close. Bigger is not always better. I quickly found that out. I also quickly discovered how versatile and subtle brass instruments can be. Sometimes, raw power isn’t the answer, but sometimes it is. And once again, I reaffirmed my belief that once you’re completely out of ideas, that’s when the real music begins.