brass featured

Dedicated to the Washington Center for the Performing Arts in Olympia, WA in honor of their silver 25th anniversay (II - V).Premiere November 7, 2010 by the SOGO Brass Choir with clarinetist Jeff Brooks; Greg Allison conducting.

3rd prize winner of the 2009 Brass Chamber Music Workshop Composition Contest, Humboldt State University – Arcata, California

 

• Originally for brass septet.  Versions for brass quintet or brass sextet (3 trp, 3 trb)  
• "The best [works on this CD] are two brass septets,  David Froom’s Kick Off! and Robert Patterson’s Fantasy and Stomping Music.  Froom, who teaches composition and theory at St. Mary’s [College of Maryland], gave these outstanding brass players lots to do in a work that says a great deal in four minutes.  The ending, with trumpeter Silberschlag on a stratospheric F-sharp, is spectacular."  (American Record Guide)

    

A mammoth multi-media -musical theater work in 6 sections (Prologue, The Sounds, The Land, The People, The Idea, Epilogue) for orchestra, 2 bands, chorus, dancers, electronic tracks, narrators, visuals (film and slides). Any new production of this work would require new visuals representing the current state of the technology. The narrative is entirely from the poetry of Walt Whitman, which is recorded by the narrators on the electronic (CD) tracks. The work is a celebration of America's Bicenntenial in 1976; the majority of the sounds on the electronic tracks are short excerpts from American music of the previous two centuries, the remaining sounds were created in an electronic music studio. The CD for all the sound tracks is intact and available. The chorus does not sing text, but rather specific vowel-consonant combinations to melodies from other american music.most of the live music is not difficult, but the mounting of the production would be a formidable challenge.