Wednesday, March 16, 2011

BoneWeek 7

After a few false starts and dead ends, I managed to knock out another BoneWeek Fanfare. I started writing these in celebration of International Trombone Week. You can find the previous fanfares both on my website and the ITA website.

A few notes about this one.
  • There are no "quotes" of well-known trombone pieces
  • I tried to avoid falling back into any clichés (not easy sometimes)
  • I wanted it to have some rhythmic energy and no obvious presentation of a melody (see above)
With any of these fanfares, I use an odd test: would I want to play it. When I'm at a convention (like the Eastern Trombone Workshop which I'm missing...sigh) and looking through music I might purchase, I often look at the score and say, "Yuck, I wouldn't to play that part." The most common cardinal sin of composers and arrangers:
  • putting all the interest into the first part and thus generating boring parts for everyone else
  • making the first part so tiring that it becomes difficult to program such a chop-buster
These goals aren't difficult, so why do so many arrangements fail these tests. Lazy arrangers?

Anyway, here's the fanfare from my website. If you put it on a program, please let me know. It's always nice to get a concert program for my files.

You may ask, "How many of these things are you going to write?"

I have no idea.

Here's the link: BoneWeek Fanfare #7