Program Notes

Variations for Brass Quintet, like (nearly) all theme and variations pieces, features a musical theme’s succession through various guises and characters. At the piece’s opening, the first trumpet presents the theme while the other instruments, muted, accompany it. Around a minute long, the theme is a meandering melody that begins with fragmentary gestures and lengthens into slower melodic lines toward its end. In its stream of melodic events are a descending perfect fifth at its beginning, an augmented triad arpeggio that follows, a brief flurry of low notes shortly after, a descending whole-tone scale, several melodic high points approached with varying degrees of tension, and an ascending perfect fifth at its end. These various features lie across a series of tempo changes that are fluid rather than abrupt, often reinterpreting an unexpected rhythmic value within the theme as the new pulse. As it progresses through seven variations, the theme’s various components are recast as exaggerated, embellished, beautified, or underscored—as its character ranges from pensiveness to jest to majesty.

Complete Theme

Score and Parts