SKU: SU.32040020

Solo Trombone, Band parts - picc, 2fls, 2 obs, EH, 2bsns, 3 cls, bcl, 2asx, tsx, bsx, 4 hns, 3 tpts, 3 tbns, euph, tba, timp, 3 perc Duration: 17' Composed: 2013 Published by: Amy Mills Music, LLC …the audience loved Red Dragonfly. Definitely a keeper in my repertoire! Dr. James Bicigo, Associate Professor of Trombone, University of Alaska, Anchorage Virtuoso piece, the dramatic first movement opens with a Bold statement followed by the beautiful love theme. It reaches up to the Cry of the Heart, then everything ruptures and crashes. Now the trombonist must rebuild and gain strength through dramatic cadenzas until reaching the recapitulation where the opening Bold melody is transformed into a majestic march in 3/4 time. The love theme returns, and the movement ends in triumph. The second movement is a setting of the famous Japanese folksong, Red Dragonfly. The trombonist and pianist play the lovely song amidst the sound of fluttering wings that appear and disappear like memories of the heart. Thank you to the Nihon Gakugeki Kyoukai Foundation for permission to use the melody in this trombone sonata. A solo glissando opens the third movement in American folk dance style with tongue in cheek and twinkle in both eyes. The subsequent variations include a perfect triple canon, a taste of New Orleans jazz, and a dramatic augmentation which spills into a flashback of the first movement’s love theme. This melts away and we recapture a glimpse of the Red Dragonfly melody, this time growing to the Triumphant restatement of the first movement’s main theme. And finally, the exuberant coda drives to a spectacular ending. Difficulty Level: Trombone 6 (Professional) Band 5 (Advanced) See also Red Dragonfly, Sonata for Trombone and Piano for the version with piano accompaniment. See composer website for audio sample. Performance materials available on rental only:.

SKU: PL.1032II

* Soaring lines for all parts with a lyrical treatment of the brass * A creative vision of awe with the famous Crashaw text.

SKU: FG.55011-372-5

ISBN 9790550113725.

Images of the sea figure prominently throughout my life and memories: from holidays on the Atlantic coast during my Canadian childhood to my current Baltic home, and the imagined, only later experienced Mediterranean of my ancestral heritage. As an immigrant (son of an immigrant) bound to two northern countries, the sea is emblematic of my twin homelands, from the expanses of water surrounding them to those separating them. A Mari usque ad Mare. The sea is also an enduring image of the unknown, of expanses unexplored, of the raw power of nature and, for too many currently, of terror holding a hope of refuge - or the pain of loss.
Such disparate ideas were captured for me in the seascapes of the New York painter MaryBeth Thielhelm, whom I met in 2008 during a residency on the Gulf of Mexico. Her vast, abstract, nearly monochromatic depictions of imaginary seas in wildly varying moods were the catalyst for a concerto where the piano is frequently far from a hero battling a collective, but rather acts as a channel for elemental forces surging up from the orchestra, floating - sometimes barely so - on its constantly shifting surface. There are few themes to speak of, beyond a handful of iconic ideas that periodically cycle upward. Rather, the piano's material is largely an ornamentation of the more primal rhythmic and harmonic impulses from the orchestra below - a poetic interpretation, if you will, of the more immediate experience of facing the vastness of some unknown body of water.
The title Nameless Seas is borrowed from one of Thielhelm's exhibitions, as are those of the four movements, which are bridged together into two halves of roughly equal weight - one rhapsodic and free, the other more single-minded and direct, separated only by a short breath. The opening movement, Nocturne, is predominantly calm, if brooding, darkness and light alternating throughout. Lyrical arabesques sparkle over gently lapping cross-currents in the strings and mirrored timpani, the piano's full power only rarely deployed. The waves gradually build, drawing in the full orchestra for a meeting of forces in Land and Sea, a brighter, more warmly lyrical scene that unfolds in series of dreamlike, sometimes even nostalgic visions, which for me carry strong memories of sitting on rocks above surging Atlantic waves. The third movement, Wake, is a fast, perpetual-motion texture of glinting, darting rhythms and sudden shafts of light, with a prominent part for the steel drums, limning the piano's quicksilver figurations. An ecstatic climax crashes into a solo cadenza that grows progressively calmer and more introspective rather than virtuosic. Much of the tension finally releases into Unclaimed Waters, a drifting, meditative seascape in which the piano is progressively engulfed by a series of ever-taller waves, ultimately dissolving into a tolling, rippling continuum of sound.
It has been a great privilege to realize such a long-held dream as this piece, and to write it for not one, but two great pianists. Risto-Matti Marin and Angela Hewitt, both of whose friendship and support have been unfailing and humbling, share the dedication. Nameless Seas was commissioned by the PianoEspoo festival and Canada's National Arts Centre, with the premieres in Ottawa and Helsinki led by Hannu Lintu and Olari Elts. Thanks are due also to the Jenny and Antti Wihuri fund, whose generous grant provided me with much-needed time, and Escape to Create in Seaside, Florida, the source to which I returned to do a large part of the work.