Cat No. JM41818
Price £70.00
Composer / arranger: Martin Ellerby
Category: TEST PIECES (Major Works)

A symphonic Tone Poem for Brass & Percussion.
Duration 13.18

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Composer’s programme notes:
CHIVALRY, with its various associations, is a title well suited to a brass band contest piece. I have taken the two principle themes of love and war and allowed them to compete against each other in what can be broadly described as a cinematic structure. The secondary title symphonic tone poem serves to enhance this reasoning. The art of courtly love, the devotion of knights to their ladies, the acts of heroism in the arena of the tournament and on the field of battle are presented here in a musical format in which the individual and the collective interest are represented by the deeds of musicians engaged in friendly combat. To assist both performers and audiences I have indicated a series of internal subtitles to illustrate, or suggest, the scene in question at each given moment in the journey. Although the work is presented without any breaks these are:

Fanfare and Overture,
Combat,
1st Romance,
Pageant,
2nd Romance,
Tournament,
To the Warres,
Honour (to Lucasta),
1st Crusade,
3rd Romance,
Cortege,
2nd Crusade,
4th Romance
Finale.

These sequences and their associated imagery should be broadly recognisable and part of the test is to bind them together in a progressive and convincing whole. To aid this, the romance element returns at various points as a common denominator. Other aspects have their moment, but do not reappear. I have deliberately eschewed incorporating cadenzas for the key soloists, though this is no way deprives anyone from their moment of special attention at some time during its progress. Rather I have aimed at the dramatic and the lyrical, engaged in a language comparable with the golden age of Hollywood cinema, placing this within a concise framework, designed both to challenge and entertain.

One note of explanation — To Lucasta is a poem by Richard Lovelace written in the midst of the age of Chivalry, the final lines of which encapsulate the whole concept of the term:
I could not love thee (Deare) so much,
Loved l not Honour more.
With this in mind let battle commence and may love prove to be the greatest victor of all!