brasstet (1997; arranged 2013)

Between 1996 and 1997, I composed a long work for brass sextet called brass piece for arielle victoria. I was pretty fond of it, but wrote it with the idea that, because so much of it required fairly continuous playing, the performers would have to be adept at circular breathing. At the time, I didn’t think it was a big deal, but it turns out that it was, and I’ve since come to realize that there was very little chance that it would ever be heard other than in a suboptimal MIDI performance with sampled instruments. And that’s where things have stood since 1997, except for the last section that was arranged for string quartet and can be heard in an excellent performance by the Rangzen Quartet.

I had long toyed with the idea of scoring the entire piece for strings to circumvent the performance challenges, and this has now resulted in this arrangement for string quartet and contrabass. Other than some minor tweaks in a few sections, it is identical to the original brass work, but should pose no significant challenges in terms of performance. The audio file is not idea, of course, since strings are harder to convincingly sample compared with piano and a few other instruments, but overall it works

The score is here. A mp3 file is here.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 4,600 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 8 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.