FESTAL BRASS WITH BLUES - Parts & Score, TEST PIECES (Major Works)
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Cat No.JM30998 Price
£90.00 Composer: Sir Michael Tippet Category: TEST PIECES (Major Works) Difficulty level: Championship
Duration 11.00
Championship level work.
Although Sir Michael Tippet has in the past written four short fanfares for brass instruments and a four-movement Sonata for four horns, Festal Brass with Blues is his first ever composition for brass band. It was commissioned by the Hong Kong Arts Festival for a concert at the 1984 Festival, given by the Fairey Engineering Works Band conducted by Howard Williams.
Composed between July and September 1983, Festal Brass with Blues is in one continuous movement and could be described as a fantasy on themes from Tippet’s Third Symphony This certainly has some bearing upon the title and musical content of the piece. For in the second part of the Symphony Tippet produced a contemporary ironic commentary upon Schiller’s Ode to Joy and Beethoven’s setting of it in his Ninth Symphony He achieved this by first building up an elaborate interplay of musical ideas, a festal rumpus which leads, via a quotation from the Ninth Symphony (the noisy opening of the finale, in fact) to a sequence of blues and a dramatic scena for soprano and orchestra. A similar procedure can be observed in the brass band composition. The music starts quietly, gradually accumulating ideas (some of which are derived from the Third Symphony), with a mixture of counterpoint and antiphonal contrasts for different ensembles within the band. A festal mood, of sorts, is engendered by fast rushing semiquavers and repeated notes, around which are intertwined ardent lyrical melodies, At its climax, the Beethoven quotation used in the Third Symphony is incorporated, and the music continues with a transcription of the slow blues (plus the quiet linking episode that precedes it) from that work, with the flugelhorn taking the main solos (as in the Symphony). As this is all developed, the texture often thins considerably, and though the earlier music returns, the polarity established between festal outbursts and reflective blues remains right up to the quiet end of the work.
