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- Piers Hellawell
Bone Fragments
- Peters Edition Limited (World)
This set of three pieces for solo trombone was premiered by Kenneth Thompkins of the Detroit SO, at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival in June 2018. Each piece is preceded by a familiar ‘manual gesture’ that accompanies English-speaking discourse, which the player performs as a ‘visual’, to open that piece. In this way these are character pieces that (like Hellawell’s All About Snoob for bassoon, 2020) lean heavily toward the pronounced dramatic character of the instrument.
Programme Note
Bone Fragments, a set of three short pieces for trombone, was written in 2018 for Kenneth Thompkins, as one of the Birthday Candles celebrations to mark 25 years of the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival.
The three pieces acknowledge the theatrical tradition of the trombone (and, often, of its virtuosic exponents). Each short piece is preceded by a familiar manual gesture from English-speaking discourse – for example the two-fingered ‘quotation marks’ sign that puts the speaker’s words in parenthesis. The behaviour of each piece in some way reflects its gesture, but it doesn’t matter if the link escapes the listener; with or without their gestures, the pieces are hoped to project strong individual characters, along with varied facets of this ancient instrument.
Piers Hellawell 2018