Brass Quintet No. 4 Brass Quintet - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.1546161

2011, op. 22

This is a single-movement recital-length piece in a contemporary style.

I wanted to play with the idea of a 12-tone row, but I remembered that the human ear doesn't hear "music" unless there's some kind of "home base." This is probably the reason 12-tone music never really caught on. The 20th-century French composer André Amellér handled this by using a modified row. One note is omitted from the row, and the tritone from that note is doubled.

For instance, in Amellér's 1957 piece, Kryptos, the modified row omits G and includes enharmonic C# and Db. The repetition of that "base" note combined with the absence of its tritone provide enough of a "hook" for the human ear to hang onto.

I applied the same idea in Brass Quintet No. 4, but I was not satisfied with the result and ultimately included musical elements other than the usual row manipulation techniques. The outcome is a piece of about 6 and a half minutes' duration that offers some challenges both for the listener and the musicians.

The backstory: I challenged myself to write two pieces with certain differences. One was this - Brass Quintet No. 4 - and the other was a set of short movements, accessible for listening and simple in structure. The latter turned out to be Brass Quintet No. 3. I wrote the two at the same time.