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£29.95Prayer to St Michael - Jonathan Bates
DURATION: 4'00". DIFFICULTY: Moderate. 'Prayer to Saint Michael' is a solo for Euphonium, composed for the Wantage Band and inspired by the life of a young Johann Sebastian Bach, who following the death of both parents by the age of only 10 moved to live with his older brother - Johann Christoph Bach - who was the church organist at St Michael's Church in Ohrdruf. It was in this church where Bach spent many hours studying and performing, being instructed by Johann Christoff on the clavichord. Within 6 years, the young Bach had been enrolled in the prestigious St Michael's School in Luneberg. . "St. Michael the Archangel, illustrious leader of the heavenly army, . defend us in the battle against principalities and powers, . against the rulers of the world of darkness and the spirit of wickedness in high places. Come to the rescue of mankind, . whom God has made in His own image and likeness, . and purchased from Satan's tyranny at so great a price. The Holy Church venerates you as her patron and guardian. The Lord has entrusted to you the task of leading the souls of the redeemed to heavenly blessedness. Entreat the Lord of peace to cast Satan down under our feet, . so as to keep him from further holding man captive and doing harm to the Church. Carry our prayers up to God's throne, . that the mercy of the Lord may quickly come and lay hold of the beast, . the serpent of old, Satan . and his demons, casting him in chains into the abyss, . so that he can no longer seduce the nations. Amen.". .
In Stock: Estimated dispatch 1-3 working days
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£34.99Submerged... (Cornet Concerto No.2) - Jonathan Bates
'Submerged..' is a virtuoso concerto for Cornet composed as a response to the 'lost' Derbyshire villages of Ashopton & Derwent,. both of which were drowned in the early 1940's to make way for a new reservoir to aid the ever-increasing water demand from nearby. Sheffield and it's steel industry during World War 2. The work is through-composed but is defined by 3 clear main sections, 'The . Packhorse Bridge, Derwent', 'Ashopton Chapel' and 'Operation Chastise'. Much of the melodic and harmonic material throughout the. concerto is inspired by 3 contrasting sources; an original motif of towering block chords which opens the concerto, the famous opening. fragment of Eric Ball's 'High Peak' (1969) which was composed as a tribute to the district of Derbyshire where Ashopton & Derwent lie, . and finally Claude Debussy's haunting 'La Cath drale Engloutie' or 'The Sunken Cathedral', which was composed in 1910 around the legend of. the submerged cathedral of Ys. . I. Packhorse Bridge, Derwent (1925). One of the most striking features of the former village of Derwent was it's Packhorse Bridge, which spanned the River Derwent. adjacent to the Derwent Hall - a grand, picturesque Jacobean country house. In 1925, the renowned impressionist artist Stanley. Royle painted a striking image of the two in midwinter, with the partially frozen river sat quietly underneath the snow-topped. bridge in the foreground, while the old hall sits peacefully and dark in the background. The opening setion of this concerto paints. this picture in a quite schizophrenic manner; with frosty, shrill march-like material picturing the villagers crossing the narrow icy. bridge, combined with wild and frenzied waltz music of the grand hall and it's masquerade balls laying, for now, quietly mysterious. across the river. . II. Ashopton Chapel (1939). Ashopton was much the smaller and less-populated of the 2 'lost' villages, but still bore home to a Roman Catholic Chapel which was. the focal point of the village. The chapel - along with the rest of Ashopton - was drowned in 1943, but the final service to take place there. was held in 1939, with the final hymn being 'Day's Dying in the West'. This hymn forms a haunting coda to the 2nd section, with firstly the . piano leading the melody before an audio track containing an old recording of the hymn is accompanied by the sound of flowing water and . the rumble of storms as the village hypothetically disappears from existence with the hymn tune still echoing around the valley, before . subsiding into the growing roar of the engine of a Lancaster Bomber as it soars overhead towards Derwent to practise it's 'Dam-Buster' raid. . III. Operation Chastise (1943). The Derwent Reservoir lies adjacent to Ladybower Reservoir (of which Ashopton & Derwent were flooded to make way for) in the . Derbyshire High Peak, and during the 2nd World War was used as one of the central low-atitude practise areas of the 617 Squadron - more . commonly known affectionately as the 'Dambusters'. Before the destruction of Derwent, it's 'Packhorse Bridge' was dismantled stone by stone . and re-assembled upstream at Howden Dam to the north end of Derwent Reservoir. This is where the music begins, with a reconstruction of . the opening material before taking flight into a whirlwind tour of virtuosity from the soloist. .
In Stock: Estimated dispatch 1-3 working days
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£35.00strange geometry
Descriptionstrange geometrywas commissioned by Morgan Griffiths and the Hammonds Saltaire Band for their performance at the Brass in Concert Championships of 2015.As a bit of a space/sci-fi geek, as well as a musician, two events during the summer of 2015 had a particular effect on me. The first was the tragic early death in a plane crash of the famous film composer James Horner. Horner's music, particularly in films like 'Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan', 'Avatar', 'Apollo 13' and even his debut in Roger Corman's 1980 budget film 'Battle Beyond the Stars', defined for a generation the sound of sci-fi at the cinema. Along with John Williams he created the vocabulary for those who wish to express other-worldly wonder in music and his inventive talent will be much missed in an industry where originality has become something of a dirty word in recent years.The second event was the epic flyby of Pluto by the NASA New Horizons spacecraft. There are many reasons to find this mission inspiring - for example, the scientists and engineers behind it created a craft that has travelled at 37,000 mph for nine years and three billion miles to arrive within seventy-two seconds of the predicted time for the flyby. That they achieved this with such accuracy is an outstanding tribute to humanity's ingenuity and insatiable curiosity. However, the most exciting aspect of the mission was the clear, high resolution pictures of this unthinkably remote and inhospitable world beamed back to mission control. The best previous image of Pluto was an indistinct fuzzy blob - suddenly we could see mountains made of ice, glaciers of methane and carbon monoxide and nitrogen fog - features previously unimagined on a world thought to be a slightly dull ball of cold rock. The BBC's venerable astronomy programme 'The Sky at Night' waxed lyrical about these newly discovered features, referring to "the surprising discoveries of mountains and strange geometry on the surface of this cold distant world".I like to think that Horner would have been as inspired as I have been by this real-life science story, and this piece uses some of the vocabulary of the sci-fi movie soundtrack in a tribute to the memory of a great musician and to the inspirational geeks at NASA who have boldly taken us where no-one has gone before.Note: This work comes with a B4 portrait score. Listen to a preview and follow the music below!
Estimated dispatch 7-14 working days