Availability Available Published 13th September 2017
Cat No.JM75858 Price
£22.50 Composer: Kevin Norbury Category: TEST PIECES (Major Works)
Set as the Championship Section Test piece for the 2018 Regional Brass Band Championships of Great Britain.
Duration 12.30
Kevin Norbury’s powerful major work was selected as the Championship Section test piece of the 1999 European Brass Band Championships held in Munich. The piece was inspired by the ancient Celtic hymn “Be Thou My Vision” and Dante’s Inferno. The mood of the music at its commencement is brooding and troubled, with angular melodic lines, dissonant harmonies and pounding rhythms. The work undergoes a number of stylistic changes in the course of its progress — from the seriousness of the opening to exuberance and triumph at the end.
Kevin Norbury is currently employed by The Salvation Army USA Eastern Territory as Music Editor, a position previously occupied by, among others, Erik Leidzen, Peter Graham, Brian Bowen and James Curnow. He moved to the United States at the beginning of 1998 having previously been Senior Editor in the SA’s Music Editorial Department based in London for nearly five years. An active Salvationist, he attends the Montclair Citadel Corps just outside New York City in New Jersey.
He is a faculty member of the famed Star Lake Musicarnp and is frequently invited as an instructor to other music camps ~ he enjoys working with young musicians.
Kevin has had a large number of brass and vocal compositions published by The Salvation Army and is now beginning to have music published in the wider musical world. Having started composing relatively late, he still feels he has a lot to learn from the more experienced and established composers and is always open to new influences. His real musical loves are choral music (both as a participant and conductor) and being an accompanist. He has no favorite composer but admires
and reveres J.S. Bach and Mozart above all others. His hobbies are reading, walking, birdwatching and listening to all kinds of music.
As a composer of works for brass band he is also well known outside the UK. His work Odyssey was chosen as a mandatory work for the European Brass Band Championships in Munich in 1999. In 2005, he received the assignment of the North American Brass Band Association to write the honorary section of the North American Brass Band Championships . He is the Composer of the Army of the Salvation International Staff Band and works as a publisher of the Army of the Army in London , New York City and Toronto .
