Disagreements will Never Go Away

Hello, and welcome to this blog!  

As part of a class requirement, I will be updating and posting to this blog regularly regarding brass and brass ensemble music.  There will be a wide variety of different styles in this blog, and the idea is to feature a different type of brass ensemble for each post, in order to get the widest amount of variety.  

Apologies for the late start by the way (this is part of the controversy :P)

Anyway, to start of this mild weathered, Iowa caucus day, I wanted to get this particular group and topic out of the way immediately, not only because it is fresh on my mind, but this type of conversation seems to go well with problematic nature that comes with discussing politics.  

In one of our first meetings, and slight debate occurred where two of our members discussed the pros and cons of homogenous and heterogenous ensembles and writings.  I had never really thought of this issue before myself, so I wanted to delve a little deeper.  For your consideration, I have two recordings of the same piece produced by two different ensembles.  It is called Casbah of Teuton and the recordings are for Horn Quintet and Brass Quintet.  

I believe there are definitely pros and cons to the two different recordings as well as to the different reasons for the existence of these different ensembles as well.  It will obviously depend on what you are interested in and what type of music you plan performing for the rest of your life as well as the specific instrument that you play.  Let me know of any thoughts that come to mind to whomever is reading this and I hope you all have a good day!