I’m writing this post as my Music Appreciation class takes an exam. With the quiet time to think about the class as a whole, I started to wonder why we don’t teach it to music majors. The way most appreciation courses are taught, much of the material is duplicated in musicology courses designed for majors, […]

Here’s an interesting game: pick your nine favorite symphonies without repeating a composer, and with each symphony sequentially numbered in a conventional sense. Prokofiev 1: Elegantly constructed. As close to Bach as I can get in this list, since he didn’t write conventionally numbered symphonies Brahms 2: Efficient motivic development makes this (and Brahms’s other […]

The Springfield Symphony closed out its season this spring with Saint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony. Of course, this piece contains one of the most interesting orchestral excerpts for trombone in the literature. It is not high, fast, or loud — but in my opinion it is even more descriptive of a trombonist’s skills than the more typical excerpts. Saint-Saëns asks […]

Every instrument has its “calling card” solos that are asked on every audition. Violinists play the Tchaikovsky and the Sibelius. Trumpet players have the Haydn and the Hummel. Trombonists have the David and the Grondahl. Most trombone solo literature is relatively recent, due to the trombone’s historical role as an ensemble instrument. Grondahl’s Concerto, composed in […]