ONE DAY WONDERS

Project 300: One-Day Wonders – A Challenge for the Ages!
OK, so now that Mackris v. O’Reilly has been given a kick-ass performance by all assembled musicians, singers and soloists, what happens next?  Well, my delusions of being whisked away to Hollywood to write film scores did not materialize.  Not a huge disappointment.  That’s not going to stop me from writing music.  The important thing to remember – and yes, this is a total cliché – is that if you want to write music, you have to write music.  Get stuff down on paper as quickly and competently as possible.  If you don’t have the time, stay up late.  If you don’t have the inclination or inspiration, big deal; very little of what’s done in any genre of music is based on inspiration.  Most of it is just plain work.  Inspiration seldom strikes on either a daily or weekly basis.  In fact, I found with Mackris v. O’Reilly that the real interesting stuff began making its way onto the page when I was completely out of ideas.

I would start writing an opera tomorrow if there was the slightest chance of it being performed, but there aren’t any takers and I can’t finance something of that magnitude even if I spent the next five years writing grant applications or panhandling out in front of Bill Gates’ mansion.  Plus, I really don’t want to put myself through the tumultuous production process if it isn’t completely necessary.  That’s not really my happy place.  I’d rather just write music.  At this point, I don’t really care about getting anything performed, so my basic plan involves a challenge: write a piece a day for as long as I can.  Of course, the longer I can do it, the better.  If I finish, say, 10 pieces and then lose interest, it won’t mean much.  But if I amass 100, 200, or perhaps 300 pieces within the span of a year, that’s quite a different matter, even more so if the majority of them are good.  Initially, I planned to write only short fanfares for brass orchestra.  That lasted a week.  After that, I just wrote whatever I wanted to – waltzes, polkas, galops, marches, Balkanesque stuff, standard meter, odd meter and the like.  My only criteria are that it has to be for any configuration of brass ensemble, that I would only spend one day on it and that it would have to convey some sort of complete musical thought.  So far, that’s held up pretty well for the most part.  There have only been a few that have taken me more than my one-day allotment.  And so they continue, one a day, every day.  I plan on posting all new pieces weekly, instead of daily.

Note that these are robo-tracks from Finale; they’re not a real ensemble.  A real brass ensemble would make these pieces sound 10 times better, but since I don’t have one handy, the robo-tracks will have to do for now.  Please enjoy!

P.S.  If you hear something you really like, it’s totally not cool to steal it and use it under your own name – especially if you want to use it for commercial purposes.  These pieces all have copyrights, so steal at your own peril.  If you’d like the use of any piece, email me.  We’ll talk.

One Day Wonders #1 - 20

One Day Wonders #21 - 40

ONE DAY WONDERS #41 - 60

One Day Wonders #1-20
One Day Wonder #1 – For 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, tuba and timpani; it’s big, it’s ponderous, it’s short.  And its audio is a little wonky.  I can’t be too judgmental, because we’re just starting the process.  All in all, it’s a good beginning.
One Day Wonder #2 – For 4 trumpets, 4 trombones and tuba; another big fanfare.  This is a little repetitive, but it does offer a little variation toward the end.                             
One Day Wonder #3 – For 1 horn and 1 trumpet; let’s shrink the ensemble and see what happens!                        
One Day Wonder #4 – For 3 trumpets; going small again!  This is the shortest of all pieces, clocking in at just 26 seconds.
One Day Wonder #5 – For 1 horn, 1 trumpet and 3 trombones; it’s the horn and trumpet in sixth harmony versus the trombones.  Who wins?  Who cares!  It’s very PBS.                             
One Day Wonder #6 – For 4 trombones and tuba; this ended up sounding like the theme music to a seventies BBC production of King Lear.  It’s probably the close-harmony trombones that do it.  It’s still a nice, dark number.                              
One Day Wonder #7 – For 3 trumpets, 3 trombones and tuba; escape from the fanfare!  Wow, that plan didn’t last very long.  Well, I was intending to write a rhumba sort of fanfare and this is what came out.  It’s one of my favorites.                          
One Day Wonder #8 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 1 trombone and tuba; I revisit my old neo-baroque stomping grounds.  I hope that nobody notices that it’s just the same 8 bars repeated 6 times. 
One Day Wonder #9 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 horns and 3 trombone; it’s a pretty square-sounding samba.  But I did manage to sneak in a rhythm bridge for a little harmonic lift.  Later on, I go modal all over the place.                             
One Day Wonder #10 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; this is a nice little canon that I really tried hard to keep in E minor.  Unfortunately, I was applying jazz theory and setting it in E dorian mode, so it only wanted to resolve to D major.  Oh well, live and learn.                             
One Day Wonder #11 – For 1 horn, 1 trumpet and 1 trombone; I wanted to have the trumpet follow under the horn without asking for anything unrealistic from either player.  The result sounds pretty strange – and busy.  Strange and busy.                        
One Day Wonder #12 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; I was fresh out of ideas for this one, so I just started writing.  I was really surprised by the results – a weird, snaky echo-like semi-minimalism.  This is among my favorites.  It may even be my favorite of the whole bunch.    
One Day Wonder #13 – For 4 horns, 2 trumpets and 2 trombones; I ended up completely scrapping my original premise and making this piece something that started out in one place and ended in another.  It does that.                           
One Day Wonder #14 – For 2 horns and 2 trumpets; I was really hoping to venture away from tonality for a bit.  I also wanted to find better ways for horns and trumpets to interact.  What I got sounds like incidental music from the original Star Trek.                           
One Day Wonder #15 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones and tuba; what we have here is something I call a “galop.” It’s kind of a reverse polka that veers pretty close to sounding like film music, and then veers sharply away.  This is also one of my favorites.
One Day Wonder #16 (audio link) – For 1 trumpet and 2 trombones; the galop really exhausted me, so what followed is a short something that tries to deal with divergent lines and ends up returning to the classic territory of the fanfare.                            
One Day Wonder #17 – For 3 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones and tuba; sometimes, you just want to write something big, loud and ugly.  Mission accomplished!                        
One Day Wonder #18 – For 1 trumpet, 2 trombones and tuba; it’s always fun to write in odd meters!  It’s even more fun to find an odd-meter groove.  This piece seizes that groove and tries to be as cheerful as possible.  I really like this one.                        
One Day Wonder #19 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; it’s a funky march!  I liked the “join in” (separate parts emerge one-by-one) aspect of this so much, I used it again and again in other pieces!                          
One Day Wonder #20 – For 2 trumpets, 3 trombones and tuba; this little rag began life as the soundtrack to a 28-second-long film that my girlfriend made in hopes of winning a pair of SIFF passes.  (She didn’t win, but I still really like her film.)  It was originally for cheesy-sounding, Finale-generated piano, but this version is for cheesy-sounding, Finale-generated brass ensemble!.

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One Day Wonders #21-40
One Day Wonder #21 – For 2 horns, 1 trumpet, 1 trombone and tuba; this is a solemn little chorale in passacaglia form.  That means that it just follows the same chord progression a few times, and then ends.  And speaking of that, I’m aware that it ends strangely.  I’m still thinking about changing it.  Give me some time                               
One Day Wonder #22 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones and tuba; I wanted to write a spacey, whole-tone-sounding bossa nova, but I couldn’t figure out how to present it so that the melody wasn’t completely overwhelmed by the harmony.  The answer: mute everyone except for the lead horn and tuba!  (Well, one trumpet un-mutes in the middle.)  That’s why it sounds like frogs croaking.  Keep in mind that Finale only offers one muted sound for trumpet, so a trombone with a Harmon mute and a stopped horn will sound different than depicted here, but again, not unlike a bunch of frogs.                               
One Day Wonder #23 – For 2 horns, 2 trombones and tuba; a nice little outing in 5/8 that hits its groove early on and uses contrasting dynamics to avoid being monotonous.                               
One Day Wonder #24 – For 1 trumpet and 1 trombone; at first, I hated this piece more than anything.  After writing all this full-on stuff, I couldn’t handle its starkness.  But nowadays, I like it fine precisely for that reason.  I particularly like the insistent nature of the muted trumpet.
One Day Wonder #25 – For 1 horn, 1 trumpet, 2 trombones and tuba; I meant for this to be a “call-and-response” type of piece.  It didn’t work so well.  This is definitely not one of my favorites.
One Day Wonder #26 – For 1 horn, 1 trumpet, 2 trombones and tuba; I wrote this with the purpose of using a regular rotation of odd meters – 7/8, 5/8 and 3/8 – and attempting to make it sound somehow normal and coherent.  I think I succeeded.
One Day Wonder #27 – For 2 horns, 1 trumpet, 2 trombones and tuba; I wanted this to be a minuet in the classical sense in both form and style.  Unfortunately, there are some things that brass ensembles cannot do – that being sounding like a classical orchestra – so I cut my losses and wrote whatever the hell I wanted.  It ends up sounding like a lilting waltz-like creature with occasional harmonic surprises thrown in to muck up its agreeable nature.  I like it fine anyway.
One Day Wonder #28 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones and tuba; a return of the fanfare.  I wanted this one to build up for a while then cut loose in a real big way.  As far as fanfares go, this would be ideal for the unveiling of something large and relatively lifelike.                                
One Day Wonder #29 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; oh, just your typical polytonal tango.  Each section is in a not-too distant key, which accounts for the rather sour-sounding accompaniment.                               
One Day Wonder #30 – For 1 horn, 1 trumpet, 2 trombones and tuba; I don’t have much patience for minimalism, but was willing to give it a try if I could throw it into an odd meter.  I wasn’t too displeased with the results.                               
One Day Wonder #31 – For 1 horn, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; well, I finally got around to writing a march – and a very peppy one at that.  It sounds like something the British army would play as they marched into Khartoum or Kabul or some other very foreign place in order to strike terror into the hearts of the locals.                               
One Day Wonder #32 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; another example of a “join-in” piece.  This one tries to sound as jazz-like as possible.  I’m happy I was able to work a shout chorus into the last part.                               
One Day Wonder #33 – For 2 horns, 1 trumpet, 2 trombones and tuba; although it sounds pretty Balkan, it isn’t authentic.  The equation for this to sound as such is an odd meter (in this case alternating 7/8 and 9/8), the use of the harmonic minor scale (with a raised fourth), lots and lots of ornamentation, short phrasing and much repetition.  What you get sounds like it could pass muster in Plovdiv.  But no, a real Bulgarian could tell the difference.  Still, this is also one of my favorites.                                    
One Day Wonder #34 – For 3 horns, 1 trombone and tuba; after #33, I relaxed a little with a horn-lead chorale in 5/4.  It’s rather dour in a sort of early 20th-century, Percy Grainger way.
One Day Wonder #35 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; honestly, I wasn’t trying to recreate #12.  My goal is to write something competent and move on, not dredge up past successes.  OK, so I’m lying.  I wanted to approach this piece similarly, but add some harmonic spice.  I still like #12 better, but this one is fine.                                    
One Day Wonder #36 – For 2 horns, 1 trumpet, 2 trombones and tuba; I wanted to visit the neo-baroque environs again, but this doesn’t quite reach it.  That’s OK.  Instead, you get a very sober lamentation that will sound about 100 times better when handled by real musicians.  All you need is a capable trumpet player and you’ll really feel the lament, I tell you what.                        
One Day Wonder #37 – For 2 horns, 1 trumpet, 2 trombones and tuba; the tuba is an easy instrument to overlook.  Sure, it’s massive and shiny, but nobody really thinks of giving it a tune.  I give it a tune.  The key is to keep the rest of the group as light as possible and eventually let the trumpet have its day.  That’s all there is to it!
One Day Wonder #38 – For 2 horns, 2 trombones and tuba; I was hoping for this to sound like a tonally-drifting round.  Instead, it’s not quite what I had envisioned.  There’s a little moodiness at the end which salvages things somewhat.  This just goes to prove that all days can’t be great days.  This might possibly be my least favorite piece of all, though.                             
One Day Wonder #39 – For 2 horns, 1 trumpet, 2 trombones and tuba; I love hard bop. It’s my jazz of choice.  You can throw blue notes just about anywhere and they usually sound great.   Sure, it’s a note-for-note arrangement, but that doesn’t mean it can’t sound spontaneous.  It was a lot of fun to write.  Now all I have to do is find a french horn player who can swing and I’ll be set!
One Day Wonder #40 – For 2 horns, 1 trumpet, 2 trombones and tuba; I also love doo wop, but the brass ensemble is a poor choice for presentation of it.  All I had to do for this one was alter the time signature slightly (I took out an eighth note, putting it in 11/8) and concentrated on keeping the melody either terse or flowing and voila, a new piece is born.  My apologies to the trombones; I know you guys like to breathe, but this tune does not allow for that.

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One Day Wonders #41-60
One Day Wonder #41 – For 1 horn, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; when in doubt, write a march!  This one’s in G minor and a bit quicker than #31, but the form is the same – that is A B A C A, or some such.  This is probably my second favorite of all, but ask me again when I get to #200.
One Day Wonder #42 – For 2 horns and 2 trombones; this is another problem ensemble; the ranges of the instruments are so close together, more or less, so you need to approach with care.  One of the solutions is to use the two to contrast each other and slow the thing down.  This is something like a saraband, a slow dance that got everybody grinding 350 years ago.  Like all these tracks, it’ll sound much better with live musicians.                                  
One Day Wonder #43 – For 2 horns, 1 trumpet, 3 trombones and tuba; this is another example of a piece beginning in one place and ending in another.  I like what goes on here, but I’m not quite happy with the sum of its parts.                                  
One Day Wonder #44 – For 1 horn, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones and tuba; I wanted to write something melancholy and off-kilter, so I decided to decided to divide up two bars of 4 into 3+3+2 for a weird feel and phrase it in 8-bar chunks in 4, and this is what came up.  The muted trumpets gave me a lot of harmonic freedom.  I originally wanted them to sound like an accordion, but they’re trumpets, for Pete’s sake!  They don’t sound like an accordion!  Sorry about that, guys!  I still like this piece a lot.
One Day Wonder #45 – For 1 horn and 2 trumpets; my previous efforts with this type of smaller ensemble have been a little disappointing.  There’s no bass voice to anchor to, so I’m generally a little at a loss as to what to do with all those treble voices.  Well, my solution in this case was to feature the trumpet and horn in unison in a lot of the passages.  I also incorporated a lot of fanfare baggage.  I’m very pleased with the results.  I mean, it could have been much worse.
One Day Wonder #46 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; my original intention was to write a swinging, half-time feel join-in, but what emerged is something that sounds like a missing track from the Casino Royale soundtrack (the old mess of a James Bond parody from the sixties, not the new one).  I didn’t intend for it to mimic Herb Alpert, but I only realized it after I was finished.  I really like this one. 
One Day Wonder #47 – For 3 trumpets; I didn’t have a lot of time to write today on account of a funeral, so I wanted to dwell on the “cascade effect” in the trumpets and move on.  I explore it again in #48.
One Day Wonder #48 – For 2 horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; one thing I learned from Mackris v. O’Reilly was that I can write one hell of a dirge.  I wrote this to mark the passing of my godmother (whose funeral I attended the previous day).  It employs a very slow tempo and derives a lot of power from the key of F minor.  One interesting thing that happens is lots of diatonic dissonances and suspensions that occur and resolve as the lines collide with each other.  This was another chance to use the “cascade effect” in the trumpets.  Towards the end, the whole thing starts to sound like a pipe organ.    
One Day Wonder #49 – For 2 horns, 1 trumpet and tuba; this is a lilting little number in 5/8 that walks the line between fanfare and oom-pah tune.  I’m always trying to get trumpets and horns to play nice together, because I haven’t succeeded too well in the past.  This is another installment in that effort.  
One Day Wonder #50 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; this is the first in a series of three versions of the same tune.  They all share the same main melody, basic form and 3/4 time signature, but this one’s secondary and tertiary themes are so different that it feels like they’ve been yanked from something else.  Sure, it’s fun to mix things up, but I wanted to have some sense of unity in a piece that only lasts two and a half minutes.  Instead, it keeps sounding like the tempo’s constantly changing, even though it remains the same.   
One Day Wonder #51 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; the second and best version of the three.  I just modified the intro and gutted the inner parts of #50, and, hello, a new piece.  This one works much better.   
One Day Wonder #52 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; the last of the series.  I chose to do some modal stuff with this.  I brought down the main theme a step, making it in G major.  In a major key, the thing sounds totally weird.  I put the secondary section in A major.  That also sounds weird.  All in all, it was a bold and strange experiment. 
One Day Wonder #53 – For 1 trumpet, 3 trombones and tuba; after all that dwelling on one piece, I just wanted to do something quick and breezy, so I just built a unison jazz solo on a non-existent set of chord changes.  The trombones come in occasionally to punctuate things.  It sounds nice and random.
One Day Wonder #54 – For 1 horn, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; I had the urge to write a march, so I did.  This one is in 6/8.  It’s got that “football feel” precisely because it’s in 6/8, plus there’s a little chromatic movement.  Out of the two other marches I’ve done, I like this one exactly as much as the others.  By now, things are falling into a pattern: intro, theme A, theme B, theme A with counter-melody, transition, trio, theme A with different counter-melody, outro.  That’s how it works.  I’ll write another one soon. 
One Day Wonder #55 - For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; this was an experiment.  I wanted to write a chorale and then join the primary voices a fifth apart and have them all joined by the tuba.  The result is something that sounds almost like a parody of a chorale.  There’s some kind of grotesque and unsettling aspect to this piece that I really like.  It probably has something to do with those drifting fifths, but honestly, if this sounds like the Roman army on the march, then I’ve failed at what I was trying to attempt.
One Day Wonder #56 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; the first in a series of two.  Whatever I was trying to accomplish with one, didn’t quite hit the mark.  I couldn’t quite get decide to make it a march or a weird bossa nova.  And then there’s that mod shout chorus.  I kind of hate it, but at least I know how to write something I hate.  More of this in #57.
One Day Wonder #57 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; the second, and better, of the series.  Better intro, better pacing, and better content.  Like what I did with #50, I gutted it and took what I could use.  I chucked that terrible shout chorus and only preserved the last measure (which I should have also chucked, but too late) and the result is much better.  It’s got that ambiguous march/bossa feel to it that really comes through in the later choruses.  I’m quite happy with this version.  And this just proves that even though I’m out to write a piece a day, some things can’t be rushed.  
One Day Wonder #58 – For 2 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones and tuba; my intention here was to right a minor-key fanfare.  Wow, how I failed!  Nothing seemed to fit into the mold.  I might be able to pull it off someday, but not now.  What you have here is just a robust minor glop that goes from one place to the next without offending anyone.  I tried…
One Day Wonder #59 – For 1 horns, 2 trumpets and 3 trombones; I return to the tango, but this time, there isn’t a tuba to anchor things down.  Hopefully, the rhythm is compelling enough that it doesn’t need one.  Sure, it’s a little simple and repetitive – I prefer to call it “straightforward” – but dance music is often like that.  With 241 pieces till my goal, I’ll probably revisit it again.      
One Day Wonder #60 – For 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba; alternating odd-meters return!  The last time I did a 7/8-7/9 combo, it was in #33.  That was a fake-Balkan-thing.  This is a slick number that reminds me of the prog-stuff from the early seventies that distinguished itself only because it was in an odd meter.  Everything else about it is entirely inoffensive and unremarkable, and hey, it even has that “California” sound during certain parts of it.  Of course, “California” means vaguely latin rhythmic combined with some aimless noodling.  Please enjoy.

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