Tower

2 trumpets, horn, trombone, euphonium, tuba

This is a brass sextet I wrote in January 2005 for the Humboldt Brass Chamber Music Workshop, also performed by a brass sextet under my own direction at Harvard in the Holmes Living Room, Pfoho, on Sunday, 2/26/2006 at 4 PM. It was awarded third place. The three movements are untitled.

In Music 51 I was told not to write parallel fifths. Of course, this got me into trouble, because those things creep into your chorale writing and you don't notice them until the professor X's it in red pencil, so I banged out some parallel fifths and octaves on the keyboard until I got that little melody at the fast section. The intro tower chords, from which the piece gets its name, were my way of getting every voice into the forbidden parallel motion, with some chromatic alterations for fun. The rest of the first movement wrote itself; a little counterpoint with doublings at the fifth or fourth, some motifs came out of that, and eventually there was a sonata form. The second movement was something I was playing with on the keyboard for a long time which fascinated me because there were four chords, none with a third, and three of them were clearly major or minor. CGD, BbFC, AbEbBb, GDA... Neutral, major, major, minor. And no thirds. I improvised a little melody over them, heard in bars 5-8 and again in 9-12. This I already had before I found out about this contest, so I used that and continued writing based on themes from the first movement to both great effect and structure. Mmm, structure! The third movement I had less of an idea for what to do, but I felt it ought to be march-like. I had those first four bars for a long time before I could do anything else, but eventually I settled on the pretty obvious four-measure repeated line, over and over again. That's Tower.

Listen to Tower - I (right-click to download)
Listen to Tower - II (right-click to download)
Listen to Tower - III (right-click to download)