Walter S. Hartley (b. 1927) has long been one of the most prolific composers of music for winds in the United States. He began to compose at the age of five and decided to make it his profession at sixteen. His entire academic education was at the Eastman School of Music, where he earned a Ph.D. in composition in 1953. His teachers at Eastman included Burrill Phillips, Bernard Rogers, and Howard Hanson. From 1956 to 1964 he taught piano, theory, and composition at the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan, and he served as professor of composition at Fredonia State University, where he is now professor emeritus. Hartley has been a member of ASCAP for many years, earning citations for achievement in concert music every year since 1962. Among the ensembles that have performed his music are the National Symphony Orchestra, Oklahoma City Symphony, Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, and the Eastman Wind Ensemble. Hartley has received commissions from the Koussevitsky Foundation in addition to many musical organizations at the college and high school levels, and armed services bands. Hartley's approximately 300 original compositions include works for many different combinations of instruments. Hartley has shown great interest in American music from the early Federal period, especially pieces from tunebooks by such composers as William Billings and Jeremiah Ingalls. These musicians worked in a tradition that had started in the British parish churches, but their efforts have become recognized as some of the first compositional activity in North America. Billings is the most famous of these "tunesmiths," but there were many, and Hartley has placed a number of pieces from the repertory in his compositions. He freely transposes the tunes and alters them as needed to make them fit into the texture that he creates, but Hartley tries to retain as much as possible the modal chord structures and voice-leading. Fantasy on Vermont Tunes, scored for trombone or horn and piano, was completed on 15 March 1993. Hartley used tunes by Jeremiah Ingalls and Justin Morgan that were originally published in collections by those composers between 1790 and 1805. He identifies the tunes that he quotes in the score, which appear in the following order: Northfield and The Young Convert by Ingalls, Symphony and Sounding Joy by Morgan, Christian Song by Ingalls, and Huntington by Morgan. He reprises Northfield in the coda of this short and lyrical piece.Brad Edwards,
Leonard Bernstein's notable gifts as a composer were often overshadowed by his multifaceted career and ubiquitous place in American music of the twentieth century. Bernstein (1918-1990), the son of a Boston-area barber and beauty products supplier, showed considerable talent as a pianist during his teens. He earned an A.B. in music from Harvard College and then studied conducting for two years at the Curtis Institute of Music, graduating in 1941. In 1943, Bernstein became assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, for which he made a storied debut as a last-minute substitute for Bruno Walter, launching one of the most auspicious conducting careers of his time, including his tenure as music director of the same orchestra from 1958 to 1969. Bernstein's extensive recording catalog with the ensemble remains commercially viable, and he was also famous for his many television appearances, especially the Young People's Concerts. Bernstein was also a fine pianist who frequently appeared as a soloist. Few composers have managed to straddle the commercial and concert worlds in the way that Bernstein did. He wrote scores for five Broadway musicals, including West Side Story, one of the masterpieces of the genre, but also a number of successful orchestral works, such as three symphonies, the Serenade after Plato's Symposium for Solo Violin, Strings, and Percussion, and other works. His output of chamber music is small but includes noteworthy compositions, including a clarinet sonata and Brass Music (1948), the latter primarily scored for various combinations of brass instruments and piano and commissioned by the Juilliard Musical Foundation. Bernstein dedicated the works to his brother Burton, but the titles of all five pieces refer to pets owned by his brother, actress Judy Holliday, and Bernstein's conducting mentor Serge Koussevitzky. Members of the New York Philharmonic premiered the complete set at Carnegie Hall on 8 April 1959. "Elegy for Mippy II," one of three works in the suite named after a mongrel dog owned by Burton Bernstein, is for unaccompanied trombone. The player provides rhythmic accompaniment by tapping a foot four times per bar. Bernstein put the movement in 12/8 and uses the triplet motion and rich chromaticism to provide a jazzy feeling, also making use of frequent slurs as one often hears from jazz trombonists. As Bernstein often demonstrated in his musicals and concert works, he possessed an excellent understanding of jazz and invoked it convincingly in a variety of settings.
Robert Richard Trevarthen (b. 1933) was a long-time music faculty member at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, teaching there from 1957 to 1991. He also founded the Smoky Mountain British Brass Band in April 1981, an ensemble that he directed in both local and various conference performances until his retirement in 1992. He held a Master of Music degree from the University of Michigan, where he completed his thesis in 1957 on orchestration in the symphonies of Franz Joseph Haydn. In addition to this sonata, his output as a composer and arranger includes a number of arrangements for band, piano music for children, and Road Map for Larry, a work from 1974 for up to 73 different percussion instruments composed for his former student J. Larry Stockton at Lafayette College. Trevarthen remains represented at Western Carolina University by his arrangements of the alma mater and fight song. Trevarthen published his Sonata for Trombone and Piano in 1966. It is in three short movements and demonstrates the composer's propensity for triads with added tones and quartal harmonies, both common harmonic practices in twentieth century music. The work is in an approachable style for both performer and audience, featuring lyrical melodic writing and energetic rhythms. Trevarthen wrote the sonata for tenor trombone and included a good bit of writing in a high register. The opening Presto includes the consistently highest tessitura in the entire piece and alternates fast, moving lines with more expansive melodies based on longer notes. Of special rhythmic interest are several occurrences of the Latin American tresillo rhythm (3+3+2). The Andante is in a brief ternary (ABA) form and features a lovely melody over a varied accompaniment. The Giocoso, also in ternary form, flies forward with reckless abandon and again includes prominent use of the tresillo rhythm. Trevarthen unified the work by recalling material from the first movement in the coda.
Dr. Bradley Edwards (b. 1963) is a graduate of Peabody Institute of Music, Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and the Hartt School of Music. He has taught trombone at the University of South Carolina for a number of years and also plays second trombone in the Augusta Symphony, in addition to performing with the South Carolina Philharmonic. His teaching career has also taken him to Franklin and Marshall College, the University of Northern Iowa, and other institutions, and he has played with the United States Air Force Concert Band in Washington D.C., the Charleston Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, the Kennedy Center Opera Orchestra, and other major ensembles. His teachers have included Henry Schmidt, Ronald Borror, Tony Chipurn and Jim Olin. In 2007, Edwards was selected as a participant in Alessi Seminar V, led every other year by famed New York Philharmonic trombonist Joe Alessi. Edwards has published two books on trombone pedagogy, and as a composer he has written several fanfares for International Trombone Weeks. Blue Wolf (1999) for unaccompanied trombone is in the virtuosic and aggressive tradition of Mark Phillips's T. Rex, but without the electronic component. The composer reports that he was inspired by "The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey" by Joni Mitchell, from her 1979 Mingus album, a collaboration with famed jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus. In that song, Mitchell's lyrics and what Edwards describes as her "somewhat unnerving guitar playing" combines with actual recordings of wolf cries. Edwards states that his secondary inspiration was the background bluesy guitar music from Blues Clues, a children's show on Nickelodeon, producing the evocative title Blue Wolf. Edwards captures a blues feeling in this work, most of which is in Aeolian mode on B-flat with considerable ambiguity in the third of the mode between D and D-flat, and frequent use of the flat seventh as well. An opening slow segment with a number of special techniques is followed by a faster section in shifting meters and many repeated B-flats, followed by a modulation to C minor. After a return to the opening Aeolian mode on B-flat, Edwards closes the work with a bluesy, wandering passage. The player performs the entire work with the F attachment tuning slide removed, meaning the sound comes out of the tuning slide when the player employs the trigger. Among the special techniques in Blue Wolf are: singing pitches, singing the same pitch while playing it, creating a bell-like tone by placing a strong attack on a pitch and then snapping the slide into the trigger position without tonguing, falling to an indefinite pitch, and various glissandi.
John Davison (1930-1999) was born in Istanbul, where his American parents had been living three years. They soon moved to upstate New York, and began to live in New York City in 1939. Davison's musical talent manifested itself early, and he studied piano and theory at the Institute of Musical Art (later Juilliard). His undergraduate work at Haverford College included compositional study with Alfred Swan, and in subsequent master's study at Harvard and doctoral training at the Eastman School of Music he worked with Randall Thompson, Walter Piston, Bernard Rogers, Alan Hovhaness, and Howard Hanson. Davison began to teach at Haverford in 1957, where he became the Ruth Marshall Magill Professor of Music and remained on the faculty there until his death. His awards and honors included a Ford Foundation-MENC Fellowship in 1964-65, when he served as composer-in-residence in the Kansas City, MO Public Schools, and he also received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and Paine Traveling Fellowship from Harvard. Davison's compositions include works in many different genres that have been performed throughout the United States and in Europe and Asia. Davison writes in an accessible style, perhaps to be expected given his training with traditional composers who valued pitch centricity and lyrical melodies. His Sonata for Trombone and Piano dates from 1957, when he lived in Rochester. The work includes vibrant interplay between the two instruments. Both parts carry considerable melodic importance, especially in the first movement, a "Fantasia" marked Allegro that was inspired by the imitative writing prevalent in Renaissance genres, a period that especially interested Davison. The movement is based in the tonal center of B-flat and includes several musical subjects, similar to sixteenth-century ricercar. The second movement, entitled "After An English Folk-Song," also bears the inspiration of Johannes Brahms (another strong influence on the composer), who tended to compose the middle movements of sonatas as combinations of a scherzo and a slow movement. Davison called one element of the movement a Scherzando, which opens and closes the movement and appears as a major section in the middle. The Andante evokes the pastoral mood of an English folk-song, but the melody is of Davison's invention. At one point both ideas sound together with the two performers playing in different meters. The third movement, "Rondo with Chorale" (Allegro deciso), the main theme of which becomes combined in counterpoint with the Advent chorale "O Come, Emanuel," a tune Davison also refers to earlier in the movement.
Musical nationalism, an important trend of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, appeared in England through the use of actual folk music in compositions, or writing original music of similar spirit. The leaders of this movement were Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) was a generation younger. He drew considerable inspiration from folk song and the music of Vaughan Williams, but he developed a personal style that included influences from the English Romantic composer Edward Elgar as well as the counterpoint of Bach. Finzi studied music first with Ernest Farrar, who was killed in France during World War I. Finzi lost his father at age eight and three of his older brothers also died, bitter experiences that seem to have deeply affected a composer who tended to work in isolation and approach music and life with a sense of urgency. After working alone in the Gloucestershire countryside from the age of 21, Finzi moved to London in 1925, where he taught composition at the Royal Academy of Music from 1930 to 1933. Finzi married artist Joyce Black in 1933 and "retired" with her to the country in 1935, where he lived frugally and composed for much of the rest of his life. Finzi became especially well known for his songs and choral music, but he also wrote successful instrumental works. Finzi was especially interested in setting the poems of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), the noted novelist whose verses started to become known only late in his career. A Young Man's Exhortation for tenor and piano, composed in the late 1920s, was Finzi's only true song cycle, although he did publish other songs in collections. Hardy's poems involve, among other themes, the transience of life, an idea that resonated deeply with the composer. The lovely melodies and interesting interplay between vocal line and piano make them a natural for instrumental performance. The opening song, based on a poem with the same title as the cycle, is a pastoral Andante featuring considerable ebb and flow in the tempo and a recitative-like close. "Ditty," the cycle's second song, is direct in its appeal, with a folk-like, wandering, and largely stepwise melody. "Transformations" is a more energetic piece full of sixteenth notes in both the vocal line and piano, underlining a text that speaks of vibrant growth in plants as a metaphor of change in human life. The cycle's finale is "The Dance Continued," based on a text that moves from sleeping to lively activity with varied music that nonetheless stays within the cycle's pastoral mood.
The Conservatoire National de Musique de Paris, founded in 1795 in the waves of reforms throughout French society that were part of the Revolution, has a long history as a the center of French musical education and performance. A number of its instrumental studios have been occupied by some of the world's finest pedagogues who have produced generations of fine players with a particular strength at various times being instruction in brass and woodwind instruments. A number of instrumental professors at the Conservatoire have published influential instrumental methods, and some that are a century or more old remain in constant use by students today. Another major contribution by these studios came out of the annual concours, when students competed for prizes at the end of the year, often playing a short work composed for the purpose, ensuring that one could not have studied the piece before that moment. Although written as occasional works, these morceaux de concours have often been of sufficient quality to remain in the instrument's repertory for later generations of players. Such is the case with this work grandly titled "His Majesty the Trombone." Composers of morceaux de concours for studios at the Conservatoire have included famous composers, such as Gabriel Fauré, but more often it is somewhat less famous musician called upon to fulfill the duty that year. René Duclos (1899-1964) performed this service for the Conservatoire's trombone studio in the late 1940s; his Sa Majesté le Trombone appeared from famed Parisian publisher Alphonse Leduc et Cie in 1948. Duclos studied at the Conservatoire with Paul Dukas, one of the institution's important composition teachers early in the twentieth century and also composer of the orchestral tone poem The Sorcerer's Apprentice, made infamous by Mickey Mouse and so many magical broomsticks in Disney's original Fantasia. Duclos composed other works for solo wind instruments, including Fagottino and Quadrille for bassoon and piano and Pièce breve for saxophone and piano. Duclos presents the trombone with the French royal treatment in Sa Majesté le Trombone, with a "Molto lento ed sostenuto" based upon the haughty double-dotted rhythms that one associates with the French overture, a Baroque genre that originated at the French court of King Louis XIV. The piece is in one continuous movement, proceeding through a lyrical "Allegretto" in a rolling 6/8, a transitional "Moderato," and a closing march-like "Allegro." Harmonically the piece is diatonic with frequent chromaticism, making it musically a conservative work for the immediate postwar period.
Dr. Sy Brandon holds the rank of professor emeritus of music from Millersville University, Millersville, PA. First prize awards include WITF-FM's 25th Anniversary Composition Contest, Franklin and Marshall College's Wind Ensemble Composition Contest, and the New England String Ensemble Composition Competition. The Czech National Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Bulgarica, and the Kiev Philharmonic have recorded his music. Featured performances include the United States Army, Navy, and Air Force Bands, and NPR's Performance Today. He was recently commissioned by the Arizona Commission on the Arts to compose a band composition to celebrate Arizona's 100th anniversary of statehood. His Sonata for Trombone and Piano is filled with lyricism and jazz harmonies. The opening movement is a moderato in sonata form that is followed by a slow second movement that varies a two part theme. The last movement is more angular and agitated.
