Light concert music from Bernaerts, Chandos, DeHaske, Faber, Gramercy, Howard Snell, Kirklees, Lake Music, Novello, Obrasso, R Smith, Salvation Army, Studio Music, Windwood Music, Wright & Round and many, many more.
Category: LIGHT CONCERT MUSIC Composer: Paul Lovatt-Cooper
A beautiful medium tempo solo for either cornet or flugal commissioned by Ross Johnson and the Camberwell Citadel Band in Australia
Circa 4'00"
Soloist: Grade 3 ABRSM
Section: 4+
"Emerald Skies was composed for Bandmaster Ross Johnson and the Camberwell Citadel Band of the Salvation Army; it was recorded on their album “Equilibrium”. The piece is a beautiful solo that gives the opportunity for the soloist to show off their lyrical playing and sound to the full. The tempo of the solo is marked as 100 beats per minute, which keeps the music moving throughout.
Emerald Skies can be played as a flugel horn solo or a cornet solo, and with that in mind, the flugel part within the ensemble can be omitted if the flugel player is the soloist. A rare opportunity happens at one point during the piece where the soloist is given a choice of two melody lines to play. One line shows off the soloist's range as it soars from a top C in minims, the other line is a quaver melody that centres around a high G. The soloist simply picks one of the lines to play leaving the other but on another performance they might wish to swap them around.
I think Emerald Skies is a lovely melody, and I hope performers and audience members enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed composing it."
Category: LIGHT CONCERT MUSIC Composer: Lewis Furber
Level 1st. Section
The winner of the inaugural Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama Cory Composition Prize in 2015, debutant brass band compmer Lewis Furber unlocks an onginal and evocative soundworlcl, where the influence of composers such as Vaughan Williams is never away. Features solo for flugel horn, euphonium and baritone.
Category: LIGHT CONCERT MUSIC Composer: Paul Lovatt-Cooper
The Enigma Machine was written at the request of The BT Band and their Musical Director Michael Fowles to celebrate the band's 40th Anniversary. The first performance was given in the Villa Marina, Douglas Isle of Man on 30th September 2007.Section: 2+
Enigma Machine takes its name from the famous cipher machine used by the Germans in World War Two. The wartime Enigma cipher was cracked at Bletchley Park by teams of British code-breakers, including the legendary Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing.
Some of Britain’s finest brains of the period worked to decipher Enigma messages. Key to their success was working with UK industry to produce machines which automated various code-breaking tasks. One important collaboration was with the engineers at the Post Office (a predecessor of BT) who designed and built the world’s first electronic computer ‘Colossus’ which was a pioneering achievement in 1940’s wartime Britain.
Their collaborative work was part of a top-secret operation called ‘Ultra’ which proved to be vital in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
When performing this piece it is important to note that you will require the use of a WW2 siren. You can use either a real machine or a sound effect that can be played through a speaker system.
During this piece there are many and varied morse code messages played by the different members of the band. These various instructions and messages have been taken from books and documents highlighting the types of messages that were sent to various military groups during the war.
This piece uses a variety of musical styles: From the jumbled eerie messages given by the Germans at figure A, to the combat scenes at B and beyond, the military marching at G and the reference to Walton’s Spitfire Fugue at H. The middle movement features a quotation from the last post and then after a recapitulation of the opening material with embedded morse code throughout, the piece climaxes with a development of the famous last post motif to a tub-thumping ending.
Category: LIGHT CONCERT MUSIC Composer: Paul Lovatt-Cooper
You can view the Solo Cornet part as a PDF image of this work on your computer AND listen to an audio extract, by clicking on the "MORE DETAILS" button on the right.
Composers note : This piece takes its inspiration from the fantastic space exploration man has experienced during the last century. NASA sums it up perfectly.... “By nature, human beings are explorers. For thousands of years, we’ve pushed beyond our boundaries, broadening our minds and imaginations with each new discovery. That same spirit of exploration is the driving force of the USA’s Kennedy Space Center. At the beginning of the 21st century, we stand at a unique time in our exploration of the heavens. NASA has defined space travel as we know it and the exploratory voyages of our past and future now give us the potential-within our lifetimes to discover the unknown.’
Enter the Galaxies paints a musical picture of the experiences and excitement space exploration has to offer. The music begins with a ‘space-like’ whirlwind of triplets and semiquavers from the comets and glockenspiel which accompanies a fanfare from the ‘middle’ of the band. This quickly leads into a presto section introducing the lyrical principal horn as our first soloist. The horn is followed by the euphonium as the flowing melody lines are passed around juxtaposed by a virtuosic counter-line from the principal cornet.
The journey into the unknown is taken up a gear as the music modulates through a variety of keys before featuring the often neglected back-row comets playing the central melodic motif. From this point the music grows in intensity before the euphonium and soprano ‘lift-off’ into the finale with glissandi to sounding concert C’s. Following a brief coda the music comes to a climactic end using the melodic intervals heard throughout the piece with an augmented 5th resolving to the dominant 5th and finally onto a brilliant F major chord to close.
Enter the Galaxies is dedicated to the Cory Band and received its world premiere in The Sage Gateshead during their winning performance at the 2008 Brass in Concert Championships.