Description
Three Spider Fanfares for Trumpet Quartet
Three Spider Fanfares is what you want for your event when the traditional trumpet fanfares just won’t work. Traditional trumpet fanfares tend to be tonal and based on simple chord structures. These Spider Fanfares are atonal trumpet fanfares based on a twelve tone serialism technique. They have the rhythmic impact of traditional trumpet fanfares, but deliver a certain degree of dissonance.
Use Three Spider Fanfares as an event opener or program it for a serious concert. Mix it into your fanfare collection for herald trumpet gigs. I used it just before my three biggest works on my Trumpet Quasi Master album and you can always do something like that with your music program.
Three Spider Fanfares Skill Level
The skill level on these trumpet fanfares is not straight forward because the highest note is optional. It is a high D, but you can take that one note down an octave. That said, we have decided to put it in our Trumpet Master skill level because of the atonal harmonies.
I would normally say that it’s best for students of lower skill levels to avoid this piece, but as I said, this is not straight forward. There are three fanfares here and the highest note in the one is optional. So, if you think you can play all of the notes, then performing the piece should not be too difficult.
Experimental Compositions
Three Spider Fanfares is one of the very first compositions in my “experimental” series. The very first (of those that have been published so far) was my brass quintet composition titled Three Famous Soldiers. Three Famous Soldiers does not use the same technique, but it is the earliest of my more experimental pieces.
Three Spider Fanfares is from about a year or two after Three Famous Soldiers. All of the more experimental pieces are just a little less “inspired” and more “thought out”. My experimental process follows rational ideas to their fulfillment, instead of following inspired musical thoughts to their fulfillment. Thus, the results are more technical.
There is a place for this sort of writing. Without out the experimental writing, my other compositions would stagnate. I truly believe this. And the experimental stuff has a certain pizzazz that my more “heart felt” compositions may never achieve.
Modern Trumpet Fanfares
Three Spider Fanfares gets it’s modern sound from the harmonies. These are chromatic harmonies based on a compositional technique that I call Spider Chords. Spider chords are harmonic progressions based on twelve tone rows. Each of these trumpet fanfares is based on a different twelve tone row.
The Spider Chords are an outdated version of the technique. I invented Spider Chords in the mid 1980’s and wrote one composition using that technique. It required so much time and effort that I didn’t revisit it again until I began writing my own computer programs. That was in the mid 90’s. I wrote a piece of software that did all the number crunching for me and this collection of fanfares is one of the first compositions I wrote with that original software.
Today I have a much better version of the same technique, but I now call the harmonies the technique produces, Love Chords. For an example of a more recent trumpet piece which uses Love Chords instead of Spider Chords, please check out my Bait Suite (the second of the three fishing suites). Can you hear the similarities and differences between these two trumpet pieces?
Three Spider Fanfares Score Video
We have a score video for this collection of modern trumpet fanfares. That way you can see for yourself how the compositions are pieced together.
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