Sunday, February 21, 2016

A New Work and A Confirmed Purpose

On this wonderful Sunday, we return once again to this blog after about a couple of weeks to discuss a wide variety of different and interesting brass ensembles.  The goal of this blog has now been realized, and it is to find as many different combinations of brass instrument ensemble music as possible within the limited amount of posts I shall be conducting.

For this next post on this next set of posts, we will be looking at different homogenous brass ensembles and some of their performances.  The last post dealt with mainly horns and some brass quintet, so today, we shall be looking at two different performances done by trumpet ensemble.  The first piece is an arrangement of O Magnum Mysterium by Martin Lauridsen for Trumpet Ensemble and it is performed by the United States Army Band Pershing’s Own Trumpet Ensemble at the 2014 National Trumpet Competition.  Unfortunately, the source of this arrangement is unclear but the performance is beautiful and is able to work well with this ensemble, especially with the usage of flugel horns, close blend this group has, and the phrasing they use to make themselves sound more like a choir.



The next piece is work composed for trumpet ensemble by Robert Russell called Abstract No. 2 for Seven Trumpets, performed by the trumpet ensemble from Baylor University.  In contrast to the first piece, this one is far more rhythmic and technical in performance, and features an overall brighter sound more commonly associated with trumpet.  I wanted to include this work not only to contrast the work by Lauridsen but to also feature a piece that was specifically written for this type of ensemble rather than an arrangement.

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