Always and Faithfully Beginner Trumpet Quartet

Description

Always and Faithfully Beginner Trumpet Quartet

By Eddie Lewis

Always and Faithfully Beginner Trumpet Quartet is my favorite trumpet quartet for the beginner level. It features four note chords (seventh and sixth chords) throughout and even has a few suspensions. It’s a hauntingly beautiful melody in A minor, sixteen bars long, and gives your students an opportunity to play music that really sounds like something.

My wife, Pearl, says that the title sounds religious. It’s not, but it could be. Naming a composition can often be the most difficult part of this process for me. The naming technique I used for Always and Faithfully is to take the melody and “hear” what words go with that melody in a natural, unforced manner.

The composition was already completed when I heard the words, “Always and Faithfully” in the opening statement of the piece. So I kept it!

I have said many times that I do not dummy down music for beginners. Instead, I try to be just as creative within the parameters of this skill level as I am at the higher skill levels. In that way, I strive to write music for the beginners that I am proud to perform myself.

Always and Faithfully Beginner Trumpet Quartet was so exciting for me when I recorded it’s demo, that I had to get onto Facebook and tell everyone how excited I was. In that post, I tried to explain what it means to me to take a very simple piece of music and make it sound wonderful. And that, with Always and Faithfully, that wasn’t very difficult, because the composition itself is already something special.

In our society, we make a great error when we only judge the quality of music according to how difficult it is to perform. We even do this with simple music. A great musician will say something like, “as a virtuoso, you soon learn that the simplest music is often the most difficult to perform correctly”. And that’s true. But I think we overdo that sometimes. Sometimes simple is just beautiful in it’s simplicity and there’s no more need for it to be deceptively difficult.

I hope that makes sense. Always and Faithfully is THAT to me. It’s a simple piece of music that has a certain beauty that doesn’t need to be propped up with pedantic condescension.

Trumpet Pioneer Skill Level

As already stated, Always and Faithfully is an original composition for beginner trumpet quartet. I can tell you that it is difficult to write for beginners anything larger than a trio. The parts get very cramped, which is why I am using four note chords in a lot of them. This would typically take it OUT of the Trumpet Pioneer Level, but I believe it’s okay with the beginner stuff.

Our beginner level limits all rhythms to whole-notes, quarter-notes, and half-notes. The range is limited to C in the staff (written). The length of the piece is limited to 16 to 32 bars (there are a few exceptions). Key signatures are limited to C, F and G (trumpet keys).

Practice Suggestions

Here are a few recommendations for working on this trumpet duet of Always and Faithfully.

• Practice with fermatas to help the students hear the four note chords.
• Breathe together every four bars.
• This sounds best with legato tongue.

Always and Faithfully Beginner Trumpet Quartet Play-Along

We have a play-along video for Always and Faithfully that you can access with the following button:

Always and Faithfully Trumpet Play-Along

If you are interested in play-along videos, then the best way to access Eddie Lewis’ is on our other website, EddieLewis.com.

Score Video

We do have a score video for Always and Faithfully beginner trumpet quartet that you can access by clicking HERE. The score video allows you to view all of the parts and can even be used as an alternative to the play-along video.

Always and Faithfully Beginner Trumpet Quartet Performance Video

Below is a performance video of Always and Faithfully Beginner Trumpet Quartet. The purpose of the performance video is so that you can see that the parts are genuinely playable. In our modern times, it is too easy to write music on computers without ever knowing if the music works. We make these live performance videos to demonstrate that the duets are indeed accessible.