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longcatislong microtonal

This is a piece I wrote in mid 2024 for concert band. I wrote it to explore my feelings around my girlfriend's difficult to manage diagnosis with a chronic illness which made her quite sick. Thankfully she's got it better under control these days. The program note reads as follows:

I set out to write this piece to play a small part in righting an injustice: the tragic lack of repertoire for the solo bass trombone. My incredible girlfriend and touchstone on all things bass trombone Molly commented that there is all of about three concertos for bass trombone are in the standard repertoire. In fact, bass trombonists play more concertos written for other instruments than written specifically for the bass trombone! By writing for bass trombone hopefully I was able to write in service of an underappreciated instrument which hopefully increases the appreciation of it by those who play.

The first movement is titled 'the thing with feathers' which is of course in reference to Emily Dickinson's famous poem Hope. If you are lucky enough to have the privilege of reading Hope for the first time I will include a copy here so you may ponder its meaning while listening to the concerto:

Hope is a thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

The second movement 'chronic—not curable' is about relentless sickness. The quartertonal harmony in this movement constantly planes around as if dazed, nauseous and weak. Huge chords crash in like streams of light too bright for our eyes—

yet unasked; unrelentingly; the call is still there. The third movement 'hunting for the glad things' (of course, from the children's novel Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter) posits that our bird will find any and all reasons to be glad—no matter how small those reasons might be. Hope has a way of prevailing.

Thank you for listening to my piece. I put much time into it.

The full score and parts is available on my website: https://aaroncottle.au/concerto-score-and-parts.pdf

For a high-quality render instead of this compressed 12.5MiB sadness see my website also: https://aaroncottle.au/concerto-for-bass-trombone.mp3

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