Program #159, August 14 2003: Works for trumpet.

Why am I doing so many instrumentation-focused programs lately? Well, they are kind of easy to whip out quickly, and the wacky schedule I've had lately (how in bloody hell did I ever get anything done when I actually had a job?) has probably made that an attractive quality. On the other hand, one possibility is that an increased emphasis on thinking through instrumental resources might mean I'm finally moving toward getting some musical products of my own out into the world -- witness the trumpet piece I keep threatening to finish, which might have stimulated me to put together a trumpet program for Prisms. I suppose the near future will tell us the answer.

We began the program with a set that pulled together a variety of American Big Names: Copland's Quiet City for trumpet, English horn (isn't that a great combo?), and orchestra, as performed by his friend (and fellow composer) Leonard Bernstein; Earle Brown's rendering of John Cage's solo pieces for trumpet; and Miles Davis doing the Gil Evans orchestration of I Loves You, Porgy from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. And as part of the run-up to next week's celebration of the 75th birthday of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the last hour of this program featured a long trumpet-centered piece by him -- a section from one of the seven operas of his not-yet-complete cycle Licht, each named for a day of the week.

In between the more strictly thematized beginning and end of the program, I mixed together a variety of styles, composer identities, and levels of experimentation, including pieces involving electronics (Mobberley, Dodge, Douglas), extended/noncanonical techniques (Scelsi, Moryl, Hassell), and solo juxtapositions against small chamber instrumentations (Shapey, Ligeti, Léon).