After having posted the Trumpet Sonata, I thought I'd post a piece written for my chosen instrument - the trombone - in my case, bass trombone.
Taking inspiration from R. Schumann's Concert Piece for 4 French Horns, (rarely performed because of its difficulty, the orchestral horn player's apex piece, requiring a very competent horn section), I thought there should be a similar piece for trombones. This piece resulted. I am not aware of any other composition of this type for trombones and orchestra.
This was finished in February 2020, before the pandemic shut everything down. A professional trombone quartet with links to some mid-south orchestras was interested in working with it. Unfortunately, pandemic hiatus and the need for income broke the trombone group up. The orchestras shut down. No performance was realized, other than the computer generated one here. (Same old story.)
There are three movements:
- Perpetual Motion
- Bossa Nova
- Finale
Here is the URL: https://soundcloud.com/user-379760088/sets/concert-piece-for-4-trombones
I hope you all enjoy it. Comments are welcome, especially about the music, (not some technical issue please. Thanks.)
Ken
Replies
I know you don't want to hear about technical issues but unfortunately, like one or two others, I have problems separating these out from the music itself as it all sounds much lighter and electronic than is probably really the case. Having said that, there are unquestionably things to enjoy here -- particularly much of the cheerful finale and the interesting string glissando figurations from around 2' in the first movement. I do wish you success in getting a live performance of this which would certainly bring out the character much more.
By the way, I did hear the Schumann Konzertstück live a couple of years ago -- it's always been among my favourite works of his.
Hello David -
I'm glad you enjoyed the Concert Piece for 4 Trombones. I'm looking into the possibility of a new source of sampled sounds compatible with my notation program Notion. Any suggestions? I have checked out some other sources and so far have found nothing as good as those offered by my current software.
I will also continue to try to get a live performance of this piece, a long-shot, but worth the trying.
Ken
unfortunately Notion is not the most flexible software for giving you a choice of VST's to use and doesn't seem to be actively developed any more (presumably because of the free competition from MuseScore). Most people who use it accept the built-in library which was above average when Notion first came out but that was nearly 20 years ago and rather shows its age nowadays, I would say. The current standard of VST3 is not supported at all and there are few libraries which have templates, without which you'll never get stuff to work properly. VSL's Special Edition is supported but I assume that's the old Vienna Instruments version and not the current Synchron. Still, if you're desperate to stay with Notion, that might be worth looking into --- I still use it for some projects.
However, for a combination of decent quality and ease of use, I'd definitely recommend the NotePerformer Playback Engine coupled to a more modern library. This only works with the "big three" notation packages, though. Dorico is by far the most modern and playback-friendly, although I can understand many users sticking with one of the others which they know.