Entry #10 TEAMS

 Hello, for today’s post, I’m live blogging class with Professor Manning shading Joan Tower’s Fanfare for an Uncommon Woman. This piece is written for two brass quintets. On the score in the notes it says, the quintets should be separated as much as possible. So although they are playing the same music, and working together to make beautiful sounds, at times it may feel and sound like two teams battling it out, and from an audience perspective you can see two full size brass quintets which is a unique feature. This is the 3rd movement of 6 fanfares written by Tower. The two quintets are the New York Philharmonic and Empire Brass Quintet. 

Joan tower was born in 1938, she is a Grammy award winning composer. She has written music for multiple genres, including Ballet, Orchestra, Chamber like this piece and Solo works for voice and instruments. This piece derives its name from Aaron Copland Fanfare for a common man. 

Today’s game is also all about teams. The game is Disney Codenames. This game sets two teams against each other, and one member of the team knows all the information about certain Disney characters, whereas the rest has to guess which characters belong to them, the trick is you can only give two word clues that can’t involve the characters name, the first team to guess all the characters wins! 

I hope you enjoy Fanfare for an Uncommon woman and get a chance to play Disney Codenames.

Entry #9 CONTROL

 Hello, for today's post, we were asked to scroll through the archives of old ABEL posts and find music that seemed interesting or that caught our attention. I found a blog titled Gorillas in the Mist from 2016. The point of the blog was to find brass players in unusual situations, like Gorillas in the Mist. One post I found was of Robots playing instruments. This peaked a class discussion because, as musicians we are terrified of losing our jobs to robots or to artificial intelligence. So today's theme is control, and the lack of it. 

Here is the clip on Toyota's Robotic Orchestra. It features four Robots who are actually playing instruments, two trumpet players, a tuba player and a drummer. Although this is a short video, I encourage you to find more videos or information by them. It is truly a scary sight as a musician to see Robots making music, however I think they have a long way to go till World Domination.

For today's game, I picked a game with a similar theme of Control. The game is The Resistance, it is similar to other games, such as Mafia or One Night Werewolf. How this game works is you must use your powers of control and manipulation to convince your fellow players that you are trustworthy and work as a team to find the people who are lying. Hand in hand with Robots, who we hope never control us, maybe this game can help us prepare for the eminent Robot Invasion!!

Entry #8 Spanish Music and Games

 Hello for today I am in class during Max Gradisher's presentation. He is presenting a lot of music from different cultures and countries. He presented two pieces one by Rafael Mendez from Mexico and one by the tenThing Brassensemble playing Carmen Suite by Bizet. With the Carmen Suite taking place in Spain, that draws a connection between these two pieces of sharing the Spanish Language, so the theme of today's blog is Spanish Music.

The first piece was composed by Rafael Mendez for him and his twin sons Rafael and Robert all playing trumpet. The piece is called Tre-Mendez Polka. Rafael Mendez is known for his incredible range and technique. He has recorded and popularized many pieces such as La virgen de la Macarena and Flight of the Bumblebee. 

The second piece is by Georges Bizet. He wrote his Carmen in 1875, it is an opera based in Southern Spain, the story follows a solider and Carmen through their love and trials. Tine Thing Helseth a Norwegian trumpet player arranged this recording for the tenThing Brassensemble. This ensemble was founded by Tine Thing Helseth, it is a ten piece all female brass ensemble. They are celebrated for their great outreach and diverse repertoire. 

Finally for today's board game, I picked a game that although is not from Spain or Mexico, it is from Puerto Rico, so the rules are in Spanish, so i thought it would match the vibe of today's post. Puerto Rico is a complicated game where players take turns assuming different roles such as farmer, mayor, builder, artisan and captain. When you are a certain role, you either build farms, put workers on the farms, build buildings, make goods or sell goods for either money or points. Each of the buildings helps you either get more goods, or more points, or more money to buy more buildings. The game requires a lot of strategy, as there is a lot of options of buildings, farms and goods to chose from. Chose correctly and you might just win.

I hope you enjoy today's music and get a chance to play Puerto Rico.

Entry #7 Private Eye and Memes

 Hello everyone, for todays post, I am live blogging from Brady Gell's presentation. His blog is called Brass Music in the Public Eye. His presentation is about different composers and musicians of different brass instruments who write and perform music to be shared in a public setting, or better put, because all music is meant to be shared, these musicians go out of their way to make music accessible to everyone, whether it be from free concerts, or social media!

Brady shared a playlist with multiple songs, but one that I wanted to highlight was Christopher Bill's video. Christopher Bill is a famous Youtube Trombone Player, He publishes videos of him playing the trombone, and playing pop music and different fun arrangements. In this video Christopher Bill recorded 60 trombone players playing an arrangement of his called I will survive by Gloria Gaynor. Christopher Bill is great at advocating for brass players, and using social media to promote his love of music and the trombone.

For today's game, going hand in hand with social media, I picked a game that is based on social media. The game is called What do you Meme. It is a game where one player picks an image, and then other players pick a caption, the judge then tries to match the best caption with the image, whoever matches the funniest meme wins. 

Memes are a great way to spread content over social media. Whereas most memes are funny, some can be informative, and when it comes to promoting brass music, using memes as a platform to reach all ages and all cultures can be super beneficial. So I hope you enjoy todays music and play What do you meme!

Entry #6 Tomasi and Carcassonne France

 

Carcassonne is a city in Southern France, that is fortified, as seen in the picture above, Seeing this, brings one back to medieval times with castles. I'll touch more on this later, but the theme for today's post is France and the beauties therein.

Henri Tomasi was a French composer and conductor. He has written many works for a variety of different instruments. As a brass player, I am familiar with a lot of his music for brass, and on the topic of Brass, here is Henri Tomasi's Fanfares Liturgiques. The score along with the video is below. This work is for a large brass ensemble, with three trumpets, four horns, three trombones, one bass trombone and tuba, along with some percussion parts. This piece was written in 1947 as a part of Tomasi's Opera Don Juan de Mańara. There are four movements, they are titled, Annunciation, Gospel, Apocalypse and Good Friday Procession. This is an exciting piece, with a beautiful trombone solo. 

Returning back to Carcassonne, there is a board game called Carcassonne that is an opportunity for players to build their own fortified city images after the city in France. Each player takes turns placing tiles, that they obtain randomly, and when placed, the player may choose to place down either, travelers, farmers, knights or monks, each that earn certain points depending on the tile placed. You only have a limited amount of pieces to play, so use them wisely, and make sure that you claim big slots of land before your opponent, or else you will be left with little land and few points. 

I hope you enjoy this work by Henri Tomasi. It truly is beautiful and whether or not you play the game, listen to the piece, it will be worth your time!!

Entry #5 Khirkiyaan and Jaipur

 Hello, for my post today I am taking a piece from a classmate's blog. Matthew Dulas gave a presentation today in class about Sacred Brass Music, the piece he shared was Khirkiyaan by Reena Esmail. It's translation from Hindi to English is Windows. Reena Esmail said about the piece 

"So much of my work with brass instruments has come into being because of incredible and intrepid brass players who have shown me new windows into my own music. Each movement is a transformation of another piece of mine for another instrumentation, reimagined for brass quintet."

This piece is unique, not only because of it's name, but because of the complex rhythms. It constantly switches between mixed meter time signatures, requiring the performer to have a good sense of time and a strong ability to subdivide. It also has many Indian based tonalities, from the note bends to the harmonic mixtures between the different voices. 

Here is a recording, I hope you enjoy it!

Because this piece is inspired on Indian Culture, I picked a game today that is named after a city in India. Jaipur. Jaipur is a two player game that is incredibly fun. My wife and I love playing this game. You are a trader and you collect cards from the center of the game center, then when you have at least a pair of matching symbols you can exchange the cards in for a matching token. There are 7 different styles of tokens and within each token there is different point values, so the first person to take each token gets a higher one than the next person. This game requires you to not only save cards so that you can get more tokens, but to be quick so that you can get the first of each one! 

I hope you enjoy both the recording and the game today. Try playing this game and let me know what you think, put on the recording of Khirkiyaan in the background, or just put it on anyway!! 

Entry #4 Alyabiev & Russia

Hello, today in class we are listening to a piece by Alexander Alyabiev called Quintet in Eb. This piece is for standard Brass quintet. One interesting fact about the piece is that it is one of the first works composed for Brass Quintet, dating back to 1847. The composer Alyabiev is Russian and served in the Russian army during the napoleonic wars from 1812-1823 at a very young age, so he didn't compose this piece till he was much older at age 61. 

You can listen along here!!

I really enjoy this piece. I love the triplets in the first trumpet and how the melodic lines contrast each other throughout the ensemble. It has a very "old" sound, but for a musician living in the 21st century it is refreshing and feels like playing the works of Mozart or Brahms, but in Brass Quintet. 

For todays game I was thinking about the composer and his tie to Russia, I picked a game that although it is different timelines, it is the same geographical location. Russia and Soviet Russia. I picked Axis and Allies. It is a World War II game game where you pick between being on either the Axis which contains Germany, Soviet Union (Russia) and Japan, or you can be the Allies that consist of USA and UK. Each turn you can build either soldiers, tanks, planes or ships and you then move across the world map and attack other cities until you have world domination. It is a very long game, that takes multiple hours, and can be anywhere from 2 to 5 players. If you love history and war, you would love this game. While you play this game or just read the rules and find it too overwhelming, turn on Alexander Alyabiev's Quintet in Eb, I know you will enjoy it.