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12 Progressive Solos for Trombone and Piano

PERUSALSCORE

12 Progressive Solos for Trombone and Piano

Diversify the Stand is a Colorado-based non-profit that is dedicated to working with diverse musical voices to create accessible educational music. We commission educational works by commissioning composers marginalized by race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and orientation. If you would like to help contribute to the creation of future collections, visit our website to donate or scan the QR code at the bottom of the page. The success of our projects has all been from community support and we hope to continue making change in the music world!

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Winds of Change is a collection of 12 new works commissioned for different levels of performers. Each solo brings something new and unique to your music stand. We challenge students, performers, and educators to diversify their stands and expand the ‘classical repertoire’.

Here are some ways you can continue to support the composers of this project:

• Purchase this book! Profits of each book sale go back to every composer.

• Email the composer(s) a program from your performance. Composers receive money for each performance of their piece from a performance royalties organization. Their emails are listed at the bottom of the solos, and they would love to hear from you!

The biggest thanks to the team of volunteers who helped make this solo collection happen:

Winds of ChangeVolunteer Manager: Chris Fiol

Play-testers: Jenna Bartz, Melissa Brown, Laura Lynn Crytzer, Julie Dombroski, Cassandra L. Everage, Michelle Flowers, Leanne R. Hanson, Joyce Hsu, Angela Johnson, Miranda Lape, Destiny Miskel, Lauren Rudzinskas, Katie Schraeder, Catherine Schule, Jeremy E. Smith, and Lisa Stoneham

Proofreaders: Melissa Brown, Chris Fiol, Leanne R. Hanson, Lauren Rudzinskas, Jeremy E. Smith, and Lisa Stoneham

Recordings of each solo are on our youtube! Thank you to the recording collaborators for being the absolute best people and players - we are so grateful for your musical artistry!

Nikki Abissi, Mattie Barbier, Myles Blakemore, Megan Boutin, Amy Bowers, Christine Purdue Jones, Chris Kaercher, Jose Leon, Natalie Mannix, Gretchen McNamara, Lauren Rudzinskas, and Alex Lopez Velarde

As you practice these works, enjoy the process. Don’t take yourself too seriously, and enjoy the process. These solos showcase the trombone’s different musical sides, and composers want you to enjoy the journey. Only you can play these works with your musicality and phrasing!

Dr. Carrie Blosser & Ashley Killam

We are incredibly grateful for Emma Fell, Dr. Jason Sulliman, and the Troy University TBΣ Epsilon Xi Chapter who lead the fundraising efforts for this expansion!

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Platinum Sponsors

Debbie Baker, TBΣ Beta Xi

TBΣ Epsilon Xi Alumni Association

TBΣ Eta Lambda Chapter

Gold Sponsors

Anonymous, KKΨ Gamma Nu

TBΣ Theta Rho Chapter

Silver Sponsors

Emma Fell, TBΣ Epsilon Xi

Nikki Lyons, TBΣ Zeta Kappa

Madeline Lee, KKΨ Epsilon

Mike Coppola, KKΨ Life Member

TBΣ Epsilon Theta Chapter

TBΣ Epsilon Xi Chapter

TBΣ Gamma Epsilon Chapter

TBΣ Iota Psi Chapter

TBΣ Theta Sigma Chapter

TBΣ Zeta Psi Chapter

Bronze Sponsors

Jared Finkel, TBΣ Iota Chi

Sarah Hall, TBΣ Zeta Tau

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Marcus S. Grant is a professional composer, trumpeter, teacher, clinician, producer, and content creator from Virginia. He is the Co-founder and Director of the Trumpeter’s Multi-Track Competition, contributes compositions and arrangements as a Signature Artist with the world's leading digital sheet music retailer - MusicNotes. com - and serves on the Board of Directors for the National Trumpet Competition. Marcus’s award-winning compositions and arrangements are continually performed and recorded by world-class artists and ensembles all across the globe.

Marcus is driven by the goal to provide transformative opportunities and impactful encounters to all people using his love for music, holding the philosophy that everyone deserves the best experiences in education, and that music is an essential element of those experiences. He seeks to use music to provide education, inspiration, and empowerment to all who are willing to receive it.

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A Castle in the Air was commissioned by Diversify the Stand for beginning trombone players. Even though the simple melody hints at pleasant daydreaming (walking through the clouds), its challenging rhythms (using ties, syncopation, duple rhythm in the triple meter) create an interesting journey.

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Composer Karen Amrhein has written for orchestra, chamber ensemble, wind ensemble, and voice.

“Amrhein is tonally oriented, lyrical, and composes with an insightful sense of instrumental possibility. She is also a fine contrapuntalist who is equally adept at thinking both vertically and horizontally. Her lines are enlivened by quirky rhythms, and the harmonies that their convergences generate at key points are never less than pleasingly surprising.”

- William Zagorski, Fanfare Magazine

“Karen is very sensitive to melody, and quite insightful as to the harmonic structure that will best support it. What results is both engaging and intriguing, as well as emotionally satisfying, not infrequently witty, and quite often uplifting - all characteristics and affects that seem regrettably rare in the work of more recent times.”

- Composer Robert Sirota, former President of the Manhattan School of Music, and former Director of the Peabody Institiute

Among Karen's works are her oratorio The Book of Jonah for soloists, choir, and chamber orchestra; three suites for orchestra: The Eye of Phoebus, Bestiary, and An Avandalian Suite (inspired by The Silmarillion of J.R.R. Tolkien); the ballet Little Nemo in Slumberland for orchestra / wind ensemble (based on the influential early 20th-C. comic strip by Winsor McCay); Symphony of Seasons for wind ensemble / orchestrawritten for and premiered by Harlan Parker and the PeabodyWind Ensemble; five chamber orchestra concertos, including the clarinet concerto Event Horizon, written for and recorded by Richard Stoltzman; seven sonatas for soloist and piano; two string quartets and a string trio; a collection of dances for piano entitled Dance Card; a series of "story scores" for her novels includingTheTower of Kirklees and A Season in Prickleblossom Wood; and works for narrator(s) and musical ensemble including Princess Paliné, The Gift of the Magi, and The Christmas Mirror.

Karen is an award-winning member of ASCAP, a recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Artist Award, and has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her music has been performed by ensembles including the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Susquehanna Symphony, the Hewlett-Packard Symphony, the Peabody Wind Ensemble, and the Mariner String Quartet. She has a B.A. in Medieval History from the University of California, San Diego and is an alumna of the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Maryland. Her music is published by Happy Lemon Music Publishing, and is available for purchase at www.happylemonmusicpublishing.com.

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Fancy Free is a quick and lively jaunt for trombone and piano. The piece is built from the opening motive: a rising minor-third followed by a major-second. Shifting meters and driving eighth-notes propel the music from start to finish. The trombone part is designed for a late beginner/early intermediate level trombone player, but is fun and rewarding for trombonists of all levels.

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Alonso Malik Pirio, Grammy award-winning artist, grew up listening to and writing music from a wide variety of styles, including jazz, R&B, rock, Afro-Cuban, funk, and hip-hop. Classically trained, he holds a degree from UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music, and has since forged a career as a film composer, performer, music director, orchestrator, and educator.

As a film composer, Alonso is most known for his versatile palette. His scores have played at many festivals across the US and online, including NewFilmmakers Los Angeles, Pan African Film Festival, Outfest, Arab Film Festival, and the Matt Groening Fellowship Screening. He wrote the score to award-winning films, such as Special Delivery (2021), Pendulum (2020), as well as for several other animated and live-action shorts, such as Origin (2018), and Clara (2022).

A multi-instrumentalist, Alonso has performed in dozens of pit orchestras, most recently conducting and playing keyboard for the 5-time Tony-winning play, A Christmas Carol, with CenterTheater Group in Los Angeles. He is a Grammy-winning choral artist, for singing onThe Passion of Yeshua, with the UCLA Chamber Singers. He has recorded keys for artists Chloe x Halle, and Andra Day, and has appeared in concert with artists including Alex Newell, J’Nai Bridges, Bradley Whitford, Kenny Burrell, Julius Thomas III, Kate Burton, and Eliseo Roman.

He is an avid hiker and traveler who lives and works in his home city of Los Angeles.

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Gala Flagello (b.1994) is a composer and educator whose work is inspired by a passion for lyricism, rhythmic vitality, and fostering meaningful collaboration. Her music, described as "at times endearingly whimsical, at times ominous, but always moving" (Cleveland Classical), resonates with audiences through its emotional depth and dynamic expression. With over 100 performances of her music each year, Flagello's collaborations with leading ensembles, artists, and institutions on national and international stages are impactful to audiences and performers alike.

Flagello’s works have been featured by prominent ensembles including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Chautauqua Festival Orchestra, Wichita Falls Symphony Orchestra, Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, United States “President’s Own” Marine Band, La Jolla Symphony Orchestra, Sante Fe Symphony Orchestra, DuPage Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Youth Symphony, National Youth Orchestra of Canada, Detroit Chamber Winds & Strings, and the Apollo Ensemble of Boston. She has collaborated with many notable conductors, including Earl Lee, Fouad Fakhouri, Timothy Muffitt, Arian Khaefi, Bruce Kiesling, and Na'Zir McFadden.

Flagello earned her Bachelor of Music in Composition from The Hartt School, and her Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition from the University of Michigan.. She has honed her craft as a Composition Fellow at prestigious institutions such as Tanglewood Music Center, Aspen Music Festival, and the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music. Flagello’s works are published by Just a Theory Press.

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Rylee Short is a composer and horn player from Louisville, Kentucky who is now based in Chicago, IL. They enjoy performing with a myriad of music styles from free noise improv to trash prog to orchestral and chamber settings.They lost a lot of their early media promotion with their name change and transition but have been producing either scores or recorded productions since 2008. A lot of their work explores the collaboration between disciplines while either combining spoken word, written poetry, dance, fluxus, video media, or even a combination of all. Rylee is fascinated in how each individual expression changes under live collaboration. For many years, they produced and hosted events that combined artists to collaborate together for a live audience without rehearsal, Subterranean Phrases. They also served on the Board for Dreamland Louisville, an experimental music venue run by drummer and composer, Tim Barnes, and they served as the Arts and Repertoire chair for Orchestra Enigmatic.

Rylee’s compositions undergo motivic exploration and are generally programmatic in nature, while often the programmatic elements are not obvious by listening alone. Their two most important pieces to date are collaborations with spoken word artist and writer, Hannah Drake, (“Holding Space” orchestrated for her poem “Spaces”) that highlights marginalized representation in predominately white male spaces & their collaboration with author, Jacinda Townsend (“946” orchestrated for an excerpt from her novel John Loves Ruth) that explores police brutality and its disproportionate impact on the Black community. Rylee was thrilled to work on this project by Diversify the Stand and hopes that future endeavors will strive to celebrate the myriad of composers that can serve the community with their artistic expressions through notation.

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I began my approach to my piece for this project with a clear goal of exploring the solfeggio frequencies of ascension and restricting my pitch collection to those frequencies. This really helped me generate some early material, however that plan also came with several challenges, one being that westernized tonality is not pitched to the solfeggio frequencies and therefore I was approximating pitches to fit to my model. Further up the line of the “giving” and “receiving” frequencies, the pitch options became very sparse and limiting. The piano represented the giving frequencies and the trombone represented the receiving. The idea was for each to inform the other as they “came to awareness” along the way to resonate in harmony. The tension gives and pulls with each transitional integration to the next section (four of them). Eventually, in the third and fourth sections, the pitches were too limited to carry the virtuosic elements to constitute a trombone solo, especially at an intermediate level. I chose to abandon my pitch collection restriction and inform the remainder of the piece from the previous language that was established. I do feel the piece still gives a sense of growth for the individual with the piano being representative of the collective, so I did choose to keep my title, Awakening.

I hope to explore this idea again with a larger instrumentation and with instruments that can more easily tune down a few degrees, which can be an endeavor for a piano. It’s important to remember as a composer that just because you set out with an intention, you don’t have to stick with it if it’s not working. Sometimes it’s hard to let go, but isn’t life a series of letting go?

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Lara Poe is a Finnish-American composer who is currently based in London. She has worked with ensembles such as the London Symphony Orchestra and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, and her works have been performed across a wide range of venues throughout the US, Europe, and Asia. Her piece Kaamos, which she wrote for the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, was nominated for a 2021 Ivors Composer Award in the Large Scale Composition category. Kaamos was also selected byYLE Radio Finland to represent Finland at the International Rostrum of Composers 2021 in Belgrade, Serbia. Current projects include a large-scale song cycle for the mezzo-soprano Virpi Räisänen, which is a co-commission between the Oulu Symphony and Lahti Symphony orchestras.

Poe has received recognition in several competitions, most recently receiving a BMI Student Composer Award in 2021, and the Theodore Holland Intercollegiate Composition Prize in 2020. At the RCM, Poe won the RCM Concerto Competition in 2018 and her orchestral piece Taivaanranta was subsequently performed at the RCM Amaryllis Flemming Concert Hall, conducted by Martin André. In 2017 she was the first female winner of the William Schuman Prize in the BMI Student Composer Awards, and in 2016 Poe won the American Prize in Chamber Music Composition, Student Division.

Poe is currently pursuing doctoral studies at King’s College London under the supervision of Sir George Benjamin and Silvina Milstein. Previously, she received an artist diploma and Mmus with distinction from RCM, where she studied composition with Kenneth Hesketh and Simon Holt for ArtDip. Kenneth Hesketh for MMus, and electroacoustic music with Gilbert Nouno. Prior to her studies at the RCM, Poe studied with Martin Amlin, Richard Cornell, Joshua Fineberg, Paavo Korpijaakko, Rodney Lister, Alex Mincek, and Ketty Nez. She received her Bachelor of Music degree from Boston University, and studied at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School while in grade school.

This was a fun and interesting challenge! I’ve written for trombone before, both in a solo context (without piano) and in a chamber and larger ensemble context. However, I’d never written a piece for just trombone and piano, and I’d also never written specifically for intermediate trombone. There’s an interesting tension between the trombone and piano parts in this piece – they occupy quite different landscapes a lot of the time, and the piece notably begins with a long solo trombone passage before the piano enters.

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An aiguille refers to a needle-sharp mountain peak. While the piece has long melodic lines, it has a jagged quality to it as well, especially apparent in sparse piano writing. The piece should feel distant, as if it is being heard from somewhere far away, carrying over mountains and valleys.

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Song for the Lost was written in early 2021 when the U.S. had reached 500,000 deaths from COVID-19. At the time, there had been no true national reckoning with the devastating loss of life and connection we all experienced. This piece was written as a memorial to those who died in the pandemic, and as a tribute to everyone who experienced personal loss. It is a cyclic piece, employing an ABA form which starts in a subdued minor key. The melody contains frequent unexpected large leaps that signify cries of mourning. As the piece progresses and we deal with our pain, the music grows to a hopeful climax, signifying that there can be healing as we acknowledge loss. The piece comes full circle as it revisits the opening material – this time in a calmer and more resolved fashion. The composer hopes that Song for the Lost can be performed and heard as a way of expressing difficult emotions, remembering loved ones, and working through trauma to a place of peace and acknowledgement.

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Yukiko Nishimura is a Los Angeles-based Composer and Pianist. Yukiko graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts as a composition major. She also studied at the University of Miami and Manhattan School of Music.

Among her honors are the special mention at the 15th and 26th International Competition for Original Composition for band in Corciano, Italy, the 6th Aoyama Award in Kyoto, Japan, the nominations in the category of Contemporary Classical for the 8th, 9th, 10th, and 12th Hollywood Music in Media Award.

She has composed music for various instrumentations for commissioning, publications and theater works. The commissioning works include Music for the silent film “Edison’s 1910 Frankenstein”, “The Water Magician” directed by Kenji Mizoguchi in 1933, theatrical work “Fantasy of Kenji”, “Chiko”, and the collaboration project with Japanese Noh play “Kazuraki”.

Yukiko has studied composition with Atsutada Otaka, Alfred Reed, Richard Danielpour, and Giampaolo Bracali, studied piano with Ivan Davis and Sara Davis Buechner. Yukiko is a member of the Society of Composers and Lyricists, the American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers, the Alliance of Women Film Composers, the Academy of Scoring Arts, and ASCAP.

The title Golden Trees refers to Autumn. When the leaves turn gold, our feelings also turn bright or lifting. I think the shiny sound of the trombone fits these upsurging feelings. On the other hand, there is also a melancholy side in Autumn.The leaves fall and change the phases to the next season.Trombone can express the mysterious and jazzy atmosphere as well. The composer included those feelings or colors in this short piece.

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The piano part is very important in this piece. It is not just an accompaniment. The trombone melodies are always floating with the harmonies that the piano creates. In any section, both lines between trombone and piano will be harmonized in a good way. Listening to each other is a very important point, as there are so many volume balance possibilities for each instrument. The composer recommends for players to think through and try different versions to see which is most appropriate for the piece.

This is a rather short piece but the player will be facing so many varieties of the way of trombone playing.

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Noctilucent for solo trombone was written for Carrie Blosser and Ashley Killam as part of their Diversify the Stand project. Noctilucent takes the trombone player on a journey of nuanced colour exploration through single tones that are interrupted with explosive moments of colour. The piano picks out notes from the trombone’s melodic line as though capturing and pulling threads to form new shapes and colour. The process of the composition, and the shapes and colours it explores, are inspired by the imagery and formation process of Noctilucent clouds.

Noctilucent clouds are extremely rare.They are very high clouds seen in the night sky, usually on clear, summer nights. They become visible about the same time as the brightest stars and are usually bluish or silvery. They are formed of ice crystals that refract the colours to create a beautiful spectrum of blues and other colours. Noctilucent clouds are only visible during astronomical twilight, which is where the geometric centre of the Sun is 18 degrees below the horizon in the evening.

Performance notes:

1) DL - Doodle tonguing

2) Flt - Flutter tonguing

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3) O+O+ means the mute or hand alternates between open and closed positions as fast as possible for the length of the bracket above. O = open; + = closed.

4) Harmon mute (no stem)

Straight mute (preferably a wooden straight mute)

5) → - gradually move from one technique to another.

6) Valve trems are notated as a tremolo between the same note.

7) - Vibrato/oscillation of the pitch where the amplitude gradually increases and then decreases

8) - wide vibrato

9) - Initially slow gradual glissando that then becomes a faster, more dramatic glissando towards the end of the note.

10) - sustained note with a glissando down and then up, returning to the original pitch.

11) The rhythmic value of stemless noteheads should be interpreted very freely. These are indicative rhythmic values which serve only to give an approximate representation of the proportional length of the note to others.

12) Changes in vowel sound should be done in the player’s own accent; the main purpose is to create a subtle shift in timbre. You may need to exaggerate the difference between your vowels.

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DIVERSIFY THE STAND

Diversify the Stand is a Colorado-based non-profit dedicated to working with diverse musical voices to create accessible educational music. We commission works by composers marginalized by race, ethnicity, gender, and orientation. If you would like to help contribute to the creation of future collections, visit our website by scanning the QR code at the bottom.

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diversifythestand.org