Lamentations in Extended Patterns

Written in 2023 for brass quintet (22 minutes)

After spending most of my time during undergrad writing pieces that were unwieldy and for strange ensembles, I focused more of my energy in grad school on covering most of the major genres. Some of these I really thrived with: I feel very comfortable with piano trios and string quartets; Pierrot ensembles are probably my strongest, but a good piano quartet is probably my favorite just from a sound quality (even if I've only written one). Still, writing for brass ensemble got away from me for some time.  

I struggled enough with writing my woodwind quintet Erb Study, considering my dislike for woodwind quintets, but with Lamentations I have found many amazing brass ensemble pieces that I really love, and I’ve discovered some ensembles, specifically low brass ensembles, that champion contemporary music and have done some absolutely amazing pieces. So, more than anything, this is a me-problem: not really knowing much about writing for brass in the first place, not being very good at writing for brass in the second place, and never really taking the plunge to see what I could do with a piece in this genre. Because of this, I didn’t actually take the dive until the end of my PhD, right when I felt like I was running out of time.

Originally, I had planned to pen a short piece: perhaps something I could submit to regular calls for scores, perhaps shop out to a few ensembles as a “slow movement” part of a program, but as I kept working on it, it kept getting bigger and bigger and needing more and more time, more and more space to breathe. The final form of the piece is quite long, quite difficult, pretty unwieldy, but exactly what I wanted to do.

 The piece is full of patterns, some obvious, but most less-so. For a long time I’ve been interested cubism and thinking about how you could “view” – in our case “hear” – a piece from many angles and perspectives at the same time. Whether or not this comes across in the actual experience of the piece is anyone’s guess, but it set up the lens through which I worked on the piece.

 The other big factors I considered with Lamentations were strictly musical. Brass is just such a good sound for chorales, especially hymns and church music. There are no specific references throughout this piece, but I was listening to a lot of church music, a lot of Renaissance music, and a lot of chorales to get this sound in my ear. Musically speaking, I also consider this piece something of a “sibling” to Erb Study, so there are a few sections and ideas that build a bit of a relationship between the two pieces.