Jenkins: Cereal Bars - Solo Bass Trombone

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https://warwickmusic.egnyte.com/dl/CcS5ZXxUIS/TB1066_sample_score.pdf_


Cereal bars are a thing nowadays. Little crumby ingots of appley goodness or revitalising strawberry sawdust to satisfy those nibbly moments in your day. This piece has nothing to do with any of that, but it’s the right title for this piece.

This is 99 bars of serial music. Serialism is a genre which strikes hesitation into the hearts of most music lovers, myself certainly included, and strikes directly at that common criticism of modern techniques: is this music or maths? The apprehension is just; in western music, how can a strict 12-note row be a tune? We just don’t deal in tunes with chromatics so closely packed together, and tunes are very important to me. But as I say, I faced the wall of serialism. So what I’ve tried to do is make a single twelve note sequence acceptable and, hopefully by the end of the work, recognisable by the audience.

So we have the twelve note line, the sequence, immediately repeated but in gentler form, and interrupted. The first tune starts from the interruption, and is martial and proclamatory. When this fades, the next material of the sequence is given to a waltz, which is simply the same tune repeated three times, with ever-increasing leaps given to the solo line, but it’s the same tune.

The next two notes of the sequence are a diminished 5th, and I took them very much in the style of West Side Story, complete with finger clicks and a dangerous feel. A low F# keeps interrupting, announcing its own end of the story, the last three notes of the sequence. (Incidentally these last three are pinched too, from the end of the Bass Trombone and Tuba line after the huge climax in the first movement of Shos 5. There’s no shame in this pilfering: from sitting next to many Bass Trombonists at that moment I’ve always loved the end of that phrase, so it’s the end of mine too).

The streets of New York, the finger clicks and the F# subside, and lead to the last independent section of this piece, ruminative yet wary. There’s a brief return to the gentle version of the serial sequence, before the opening statement, the sequence itself, when my hope is that the audience will relate to it more strongly than the first time, having heard its expositions. A final fast burst through the sequence is the ending.

Dan Jenkins
2020

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SKU: TB1066
Composer: Dan Jenkins
Difficulty: Advanced
Instrumentation: Solo Bass Trombone
Year Published: 2020