SKU: A0.883769

I recently published Romeo & Juliet Tchiakovsky which is a big bridge musically technically and and needs a big chunk of stamina. Before I did this there was another work on my mind of an opposite challenge for band in the orch rep dep.

An impressionist work of great delicacy, subtle beyond belief, the fabric is fragile like lace with a feeling of transparency and lucidity and must move as if played by one person, colour and timbre, light, lithe, the orchestration a masterpiece, utilising fx from all dep’s often at ppp and most difficult to replicate at all for brass band.

And, it’s a fair cop! The purists outsiders will say that this is the last piece that should be arranged for a brass band. So why arrange the greatest impressionist work ever written, for Brass Band?Well, because it’s there, and I believe it can be played with the above requirements by band. The work was written in the summer of 1894, and finished in the September. Three months later in December the Societe Nationale de Musique conducted by Gustave Doret with Marcel Moyse playing the opening flute solo gave the first performance. The concept of the piece was built around a poem by Stephan Mallarme, who describes the wishes and dreams of a faun in the heat of a summer afternoon. Prep for tres difficile?

SKU: A0.834006

Before he died in 1918, Debussy had been planning to visit the USA. However, it is probable that he became familiar with the syncopated rhythms of ‘Ragtime’ and of the ‘Cakewalk’, used in Le Petit Negre, through the music of Scott Joplin. Le Petit Negre is taken from Debussy’s ‘Children’s Corner’ , a collection of pieces for Piano that he dedicated to his daughter, Claude-Emma, after her death at the age of fourteen. Debussy used language that was in common usage at the time, but some of his titles, including this one, now sound unavoidably racist. In addition to syncopation, Debussy also uses other techniques in this piece that have been adopted by jazz musicians, for example, pentatonic scales and chromaticism.