Program Note
Brass can be profoundly lyrical, and to me, a simple trumpet and piano piece can take one out of the moment and into another world, time, or place. There is something romantic about the sound of a lyrical and expressive trumpet and piano duo that evokes feelings of imagined nostalgia, stillness, sensitivity, and significance. When I was a high school trumpet student, I found those qualities in the sonatas of Halsey Stevens and Kent Kennan, in Eugène Bozza’s “Rustiques,” and on trumpeter Raymond Mase’s “Vocalise” album with music by Villa-Lobos, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Copland, and others. I have been waiting to write a piece in response to my experience with that music, and here it is. The piece begins with slowly swaying piano accompaniment patterns and a lyrical trumpet line that develop into a cadenza for the trumpet. The second part of the piece takes the same idea with different lines, but instead of a cadenza, the music leads to a more active expression with a bit of aggressiveness leading to the ending section with a new trumpet line and an ostinato-type figure in the piano. The harmonic landscape utilizes blues coloring and sparse modernist harmonies, with a nod to 20th century American romanticism, impressionism, and late European romanticism.
- Gilbert Galindo