Another Break to Discuss Class

Two days ago was Wednesday, and on that Wednesday I had my second and final listening presentation for the class Advanced Brass Ensemble Literature (ABEL).

For this presentation, I had prepared the following pieces of music to listen to and share with the class:

6’ - Pierre Boulez - Fanfare for the 80th birthday of Georg Solti - Chicago Symphony brass and percussion - 1992

5’ - Hot 8 Brass Band - Sexual Healing (Marvin Gaye Cover) - 2015

5’ (start 42’) - Philip Jones Brass Ensemble - Tyrolean Tittup - Music from St. Georges

3’ - Hypnotic Brass Ensemble - War - 2008

6’ - Kerry Turner - Farewell to the Red Castle - Berlin Philharmonic Horns - at least 2008

3’ - Anton Bruckner - Ave Maria - Brass Septet (Septura) - 2015

3’ - Koji Kondo - Super Mario Overworld Theme - New York Brass - 2016

7’ - Saint Saens - Organ Symphony Brass piano and organ - finale - Chicago Gargoyle Brass - 2015

These pieces are posted in about the order they were performed in (though it may be wrong as I don't quite exactly remember if I had changed up the order at all or not).

There was one not so clear fact that I had discovered in shared in class about the piece Tyrolean Tittup that I would like to clarify a bit in this blog entry.  While the piece, as far as Google can tell, does not exist and is certainly not available for purchase, the name of the piece does give a little information about the nature of the work.  Tyrolean is most likely an adjective describing the location of the genre of this type of piece, either somewhere in Austria or Italy.  A tittup is British word that means to move with jerky or exaggerated movements (an somewhat apt description of what happens in this piece).  

As for the selections themselves, I had two goals in mind when choosing these works.  The first goal was to get more music involved in the listening as the first presentation had around half the amount of the works listed above and I wanted to show a little more variety in the music this time.  The second goal was to get as much different types of sounds and ensembles as possible in this listening presentation, not only to get an eclectic mix of music for us to listen to, but to also better relate to the purpose of this blog, which is to find as many different combinations and types of brass ensembles and music as possible.

It was an interesting, good, and somewhat fun experience and I am glad to have been able to share my findings with my professor and colleagues.