Festal Brass with Blues, Michael Tippett. Brass Band Score
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A note about the work
Although Sir Michael Tippett has in the past writte four short fanfares for brass instruments and a four-movement Sonata for four horns, Festal Brass with Blues is his first ever composition for Brass Band. It was commissioned by the Hong Kong Arts Festival for a concert at the 1984 Festival, given by the Fairey Engineering Works Band conducted by Howard Williams.
Composed between July and September 1983, Festal Brass with Blues is in one continious movement, and could be described as a fantasy on themes from Tippet's Third Symphony. This certainly has come bearing upon the title and musical contenct of the piece. For in the second part of the Symphony, Tippett produced a contemporary ironic commentary upon Schiler's Ode to Joy and Beethoven's setting of it in his Ninth Symphony. He achieved this by first building up an elaborate interplay of musical ideas, a festal rumpus which leads, via a quotation from the Ningh Symphony (the noisy opening of the finale, in fact) to a sequence of blues and a dramatic scena for soprano and orchestra.
A similar procedure canbe observed in the brass band composition. The music starts quietly, gradually accumulating ideas (some of which are derived from the Thirs Symphony), with a mixture of counterpoint and antiphonal contrasts for differend ensembles within the band. A festal mood, of sorts, is engendered by fast, rushing semiquavers and repeated notes, around which are interwined ardent lyrical melodies. At its climax, the Beethoven quatation used in the Thirs symphony is incorporated, and the music continues with a transcription of the slow blues (plus the quiet linking episode that precederes it) that from work, whith the flugelhorn takin ght main solos (as in the Symphony). As this is developed, the texture often thins considerably, and though the earlier music returns, the polarity established between festal outbursts and reflective blues remains right up to the quiet end of the work.
1983, Meirion Bowen
