Cat No. JM68672
Price £38.60
Composer: Nic Mills
Category: LIGHT CONCERT MUSIC

The composer writes :

Over Christmas I was in New Zealand visiting family and on a day trip we went to an area near Wellington, which had stunning natural beauty. Very late in the afternoon the sun fell behind the mountains in just the right place to produce beautiful shadows of the mountains of the lake contained in the valley. These amazing views inspired me to write Mountain Shadows Stretching Across the Lake.

As I compose for both Wind and Brass ensembles I wanted to amalgamate the two styles together. I wanted to make this piece one of the most harmonically complex pieces I have written and I decided to use one of the most basic ideas and to have a concert Eb continuously playing (not always in the same octave) throughout the piece. This enables different harmonic progressions to come through and this gives the overall emotional’ effect I wanted. The only melodic ideas which come from this piece begin at rehearsal mark A and B. These themes play out over the harmonic changes and create something for the audience to hone in on with all the harmonic change going on underneath. My pieces usually finish with loud dynamics or seem certain to have finished. However, with Mountain Shadows Stretching Across The Lake, it was always my aim to make the ending seem uncertain and leave the audience wondering whether to clap or not. This is also true of the beginning, where it starts very quietly and gradually builds over a couple of minutes before it comes to any louder dynamic. The beginning does not move around very much and almost like setting the scene for the main theme at rehearsal mark A. If this piece is thought of as accompanying imagery, the opening represents the sun slowly falling over the mountains into the angle, which will create the shadows stretching across the lake, which incidentally occurs, musically, at rehearsal mark A. Finally, there is little melodic development and the underlying factors, which create this piece are therefore, harmonic. 

Grade C

Duration 5:40

This publisher rates grade difficulty as follows:

A = very easy
B = easy
C = medium
D = difficult
E = very difficult