Year of the Trumpeter (El Año del Trompetista) is a piece for solo trumpet and band. Duration is 5 minutes, Grade for band and soloist is Grade 3. This is the piano reduction. It was composed in 2010 as an homage to four friends of mine who played trumpet and passed away in 2009.

Fred Mills played trumpet with the Canadian Brass for 24 years. I met him when I performed with Harvey Phillips and his Tuba Consort when we joined the Canadian Brass in a Christmas concert at Carnegie Hall. I arranged a piccolo descant trumpet part for Fred that he played with the tuba group. We also worked together in Cordoba Argentina in 2006.

Linares Rodriguez was a member of the La Armonica Band of Buñol. After he retired from playing, hebecame the manager for the society?s buildings. When I first lived in Buñol in 1996 we became goodfriends and sometimes took walking excursions together.

Bill Maloof was my first boss as he was Chair of Composition during my first ten years as a facultymember at Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Nedo Pandolfi was considered a great musical force in Rhode Island. His last concert with the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra in 1983 was my first performance with the orchestra. At that time heplayed French Horn but his original instrument was trumpet.

Year of the Trumpeter was premiered March 8, 2014 by Antonio Cambres Rodriguez and the CIM La Armonica, David Fiuza, Conductor in Buñol (Valencia), Spain. The version for trumpet and piano was premiered in Magallon, Spain, July 2017 by Antonio Cambres with the composer playing piano. The band version was recorded by Cambres and the CIM La Armonica, David Fiuza, Conductor. It is on the CD Music for Wind Orchestraon La Armonica Records.

Gregory Fritze is a prize-winning composer and Fulbright Scholar, as well as an active performer and conductor. He recently retired from Berklee College of Music where he was Professor and Chair of Composition and tuba instructor, serving on the faculty from 1979 to 2016. He has written over ninety compositions for orchestra, band, chamber ensembles and soloists. He has won over sixty composition awards both nationally and internationally, including First Prize in the 1st WASBE (World Association of Symphonic Bands and Ensembles) International Composition Contest 2017, First Prize Winner of the Reneé Fisher Composition Prize, First Prize Winner in the Concurso Bienal de Composición de Musica para Banda, Ciudad de Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Spain), Menzione d?Onore (highest award given) of the Mario Bernardo Angelo-Comneno International Music Competition by the Accademia Angelica Costantiniana Arti E Scienze (Italy), First Prize in the 1991 TUBA International Etude Composition Competition and several others. His compositions include works published by several publishers in the United States, South America and Europe that have been performed extensively throughout the world.

Gregory Fritze is also a very active tubist. He was Principal Tubist with the Rhode Island Philharmonic for thirty-three years as well as performing with many other ensembles in New England and Florida.

He has been a frequent traveler to Spain since 1993 and has promoted compositions by Spanish composers around the world. He is the only composer who has been commissioned six times by Spanishbands for Certamen competitions, with each band winning first prize.

He has thirty-four compositions commercially recorded on Albany Records, MSR Classics, Crystal Records, Mark Records and others. He has been a guest lecturer, conductor and performer at many colleges, universities and music festivals in the United States, Canada, Japan, South America and Europe. He was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1954 and has Composition degrees from the Boston Conservatory and Indiana University. He now resides in Daytona Beach Shores, Florida.

An American in Valencia was commissioned by the United States Army Band ?Pershing?s Own? in Washington, DC in 1999. The Premiere Performance was May 22, 1999 at the Casa de Cultura in L?Alcudia (Valencia), Spain by Rafael Sanz-Espirt conducting La Filharmonica Band. Woodrow English, Principal Trumpet the U. S. Army Band "Pershing's Own" as was the soloist.

The piece is in three movements in a Spanish style suggesting the grand gesture of Bull fighting.The trumpet soloist portrays a toreador with the splendor of the corrida. The first movement represents theentrance of the toreador with all of the fanfare and showmanship as he bows to the audience. The second movement is a love song in a waltz tempo. The third movement starts with the raging bull coming out ofit?s corral, ready for the fight. The trumpet soloist is able to contain the bull with dashing melodic figures and a cadenza leading to the final bow in victory.

An American in Valencia was awarded Finalist in the Band Composition Competition of the American Prize in 2017. One of only two Concertos with Band awarded that year. It is recorded on Mark Records with Rafael Sanz-Espirt conducting La Filharmonica Band. Woodrow English is the soloist.

Gregory Fritze is a prize-winning composer and Fulbright Scholar, as well as an active performer and conductor. He recently retired from Berklee College of Music where he was Professor and Chair of Composition, serving on the faculty from 1979 to 2016. He has written over ninety compositions for orchestra, band, chamber ensembles and soloists. He has won over fifty composition awards both nationally and internationally, including First Prize in the 1st WASBE (World Association of Symphonic Bands and Ensembles) International Composition Contest 2017, First Prize Winner of Reneé Fisher Composition Prize, First Prize Winner in Concurso Bienal de Composición de Musica para Banda, Ciudad de Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Spain), Menzione d?Onore (highest award given) of the Mario Bernardo Angelo-Comneno International Music Competition by the Accademia Angelica Costantiniana Arti E Scienze (Italy), First Prize in 1991 TUBA International Etude Composition Competition, the IBLA Grand Prize (Italy), several awards from The American Prize, Composition Awards from Standard Awards Panel of American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers and many others. His compositions include works published by several publishers in the United States, South America and Europe and have been performed extensively throughout the world.

He has been a frequent traveler to Spain since 1993 and has promoted compositions by Spanish composers around the world. He is the only composer who has been commissioned six times by Spanish bands for Certamen competitions, with each band winning first prize.

He has thirty-three compositions commercially recorded on Albany Records, MSR Classics, Crystal Records, Mark Records and others. He has been a guest lecturer, conductor and performer at many colleges, universities and music festivals in the United States, Canada, Japan, South America and Europe. He was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1954 and has Composition degrees from the Boston Conservatory and Indiana University. He now resides in Daytona Beach Shores, Florida.

Arranged for Solo Bb Brass & Piano "Garota de Ipanema" ("The Girl from Ipanema") is a Brazilian bossa nova and jazz song. It was a worldwide hit in the mid-1960s and won a Grammy for Record of the Year in 1965. It was written in 1962, with music by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Portuguese lyrics by Vinícius de Moraes. English lyrics were written later by Norman Gimbel.

The first commercial recording was in 1962, by Pery Ribeiro. The Stan Getz recording featuring the vocal debut of Astrud Gilberto became an international hit. This version had been shortened from the version on the album Getz/Gilberto (recorded in March 1963, released in March 1964) which had also included the Portuguese lyrics sung by Astrud's then husband João Gilberto. In the US, the single peaked at number five on the Billboard Hot 100, and went to number one for two weeks on the Easy Listening chart. Overseas it peaked at number 29 in the United Kingdom, and charted highly throughout the world.

Numerous recordings have been used in films, sometimes as an elevator music cliché. It is believed to be the second most recorded pop song in history, after "Yesterday" by The Beatles. The song was inducted into the Latin Grammy Hall of Fame in 2001. In 2004, it was one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. In 2009, the song was voted by the Brazilian edition of Rolling Stone as the 27th greatest Brazilian song.

Ipanema is a fashionable seaside neighborhood located in the southern region of the city of Rio de Janeiro.


Helô Pinheiro, the woman who inspired the song, in 2006.
The song was composed for a musical comedy titled Dirigível (Blimp), then a work-in-progress of Vinicius de Moraes. The original title was "Menina que Passa" ("The Girl Who Passes By"); the first verse was different. Jobim composed the melody on his piano in his new house in Rua Barão da Torre, in Ipanema. In turn, Moraes had written the lyrics in Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro, as he had done with "Chega de Saudade" ("No More Blues") six years earlier.

During a recording session in New York with João Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Stan Getz, the idea of cutting an English-language version came up. Norman Gimbel wrote the English lyrics. João's wife, Astrud Gilberto, was the only one of the Brazilians who could speak English well and was chosen to sing. Her voice, without trained singer mannerisms, proved a perfect fit for the song. Ethel Ennis and Nat King Cole have also both recorded the song.

The song was inspired by Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto (now known as Helô Pinheiro), a seventeen-year-old girl living on Montenegro Street in Ipanema. Daily, she would stroll past the Veloso bar-café, not just to the beach ("each day when she walks to the sea"), but in the everyday course of her life. She would sometimes enter the bar to buy cigarettes for her mother and leave to the sound of wolf-whistles. In the winter of 1962, the composers saw the girl pass by the bar. Since the song became popular, she has become a celebrity.

In Revelação: a verdadeira Garôta de Ipanema ("Revealed: The Real Girl from Ipanema") Moraes wrote that she was "the paradigm of the young Carioca: a golden teenage girl, a mixture of flower and mermaid, full of light and grace, the sight of whom is also sad, in that she carries with her, on her route to the sea, the feeling of youth that fades, of the beauty that is not ours alone?it is a gift of life in its beautiful and melancholic constant ebb and flow."

Ella Fitzgerald recorded this song on her two-disc set of Brazilian music Ella Abraca Jobim, released on the label [[Pablo today}] in 1981.

The legacy of "The Girl from Ipanema" was acknowledged by multiple aspects of the 2016 Summer Olympics and Paralympics held in Rio de Janeiro: the Olympic and Paralympic mascots were respectively named Vinicius and Tom after the song's co-writers by a public vote, while the Olympics' opening ceremony featured a segment themed around the song and the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer. Jobim's grandson Daniel performed the song during the segment, which also featured an appearance by Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen. Spotify reported that the song had been streamed on its service 40,000 times per-day in the days following the ceremony (a 1200% increase), while in the U.S., the song reached #5 on Billboard's World Digital Songs chart the following week.