Piano,Trumpet - Level 4 - Digital Download

SKU: A0.934482

Composed by Jason Taurins. Concert,Contemporary. Score and part. 18 pages. Jason Allan Taurins #3379657. Published by Jason Allan Taurins (A0.934482).

Moondances is a set of 6 bagatelles for trumpet and piano. Aimed at the advancing high school or college trumpet player, the six movements can be played in their entirety or in subsets. At 8:30 in length, it would be perfect for a recital!

The musical material for much of the piece is based on pieces I wrote for my undergraduate composition courses at Western Michigan University, but reworked and expanded. The fifth and sixth movements are entirely brand new music I composed to round out the suite. Underpinning all movements is a dark and sad feeling, but with rhythmic energy.

Movement I, titled Moondrunk, is a reference to Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. It’s an absurd, dissonant, and drunk-feeling dance. Movement II, A Stroll in the Moonlight, shows off the lyrical, expressive, and reflective nature of the trumpet with cup mute. The title is a reference to Hogwarts teacher Professor Lupin, who, within the Harry Potter universe, is a werewolf. The music does not reflect this. In Movement III, Death Dances in the Dark, I experimented with using a highly-chromatic melody which is incorrectly harmonized by D minor chords. The piano and trumpet combine at shocking points in octaves and rhythmic unison to create an unsettling effect. Movement IV, titled Melancholy Memories, is based on a movement of a song cycle I wrote in college. It is at points lovely and unsettling, with a sense of nostalgia.

Movement V, titled Dimensions (Pablo’s Dream), is a tribute to my love of the paintings of Pablo Picasso. His cubist works attempted to show multiple perspectives of objects simultaneously. The whole movement is a large palindrome, with smaller palindromes placed in it. To accomplish this musically, I used a twelve-tone row, parallelism in the piano part, and various palindromes in the form. The row is intervallically the same forward and backward. I composed the rhythmic material in the first section stream-of-conscious style, and filled in the pitches. The piano accompaniment is in parallel major chords on each note of the row. The melody at letter H uses the row transposed up a tritone, and parallel minor chords in the accompaniment.

The final movement, Chase, shows off the virtuosity of the trumpeter. A common theme of dreams is the chase. These are often quite terrifying, at least in my experience. The back-and-forth nature of chases is explored rhythmically in the opening bars. Phrases of different length and dissonant harmonies are unsettling. A bold cry of terror is heard throughout the movement, harmonized by a chord with a perfect fifth and an augmented fifth. Descending and ascending scales wake up the terrified dreamer, and the music never fully resolves.