Sinfonietta
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Trumpet Quintet |
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Five trumpets in a multi-storey fire escape
Program note:
Brass practice rooms at the Elder Conservatorium of Music (Adelaide) are located in the university’s 12-storey Schulz Building, which may look fairly ugly on the outside, but is home to a wonderfully reverberant set of fire stairs. There is an obvious attraction of such an acoustic to brass players, and after much enjoyable experimentation (to the bemusement of everyone else in the building), this Sinfonietta was composed. It was premiered in 2008 to an audience gathered on various levels of the Schulz stairwell.
The piece is slightly ‘weird’ by necessity – situated on five different landings, the trumpet players could not see each other, or a conductor, and so I had to find alternative (and less strict) means of synchronization. Following a preludial march, the work is in four movements, all making use of the spatial arrangement of the musicians. There are several unusual effects (like breath and mouthpiece sounds) and in many places the trumpeters are free to play ‘whenever’ they like. This ‘organised chaos’ reaches a kind of resolution in the final movement, before the trumpet players gather together once more and march out the way they entered. © David John Lang 2016 Sinfonietta was premiered in 2008 by Sarah Butler, Shaun Zander, Lisa Pointon, Angelo Valdivia and Olivia Dow. It was revisited (and recorded) in 2016 by Timothy Frahn, Carly Cameron, Angelo Valdivia, Hayden King and myself.
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Duration: 15 minutes
Difficulty: Advanced Instrumentation
5 Trumpets in B-flat NOTES:
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