Beck IN WAIT

JEREMY HOWARD BECK

IN WAIT for Trombone Quartet

(Score) [09.15.13]

Why You Call Me Boo Music

Instrumentation Trombone 1 Trombone 2 Trombone 3 Bass Trombone Mutes required: straight, bucket, and practice mutes Duration: approximately 10 minutes Commission In Wait was commisisoned by î ’e Guidonian Hand. î ’e commission was made possible by a grant from the American Composers Forum, with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation.

Performance Notes = half sharp = half flat = three-quarters sharp = three-quarters flat

Program Note In Wait is a single-movement work for trombone quartet of approximately ten minutes' duration—my second composition for trombone quartet and the second written specifically for e Guidonian Hand. e trombone is my primary instrument, and I have long thought that the brass family has been unjustly neglected by composers, or stereotyped into fanfares, marches, and stunt-arrangements of works for other, more agile instruments that are the musical equivalent of watching an elephant do ballet: the elephant's skill is certainly impressive, but the improbability of it makes the dance itself of secondary importance, if it's noticed at all.

In my first trombone quartet, Awakening, I wished to demonstrate that the trombone quartet can be every bit as expressive as a string quartet. e feelings and ideas expressed in that work could not, I feel, be expressed by any other instrument; the music required joy and outrage, raw physical power and monumental, totemic grandeur, in equal measure. It has its quieter, more contemplative moments, but it is largely music about power: who has it, who doesn't, and what happens when those who don't refuse to accept their powerlessness and dedicate themselves to the higher purpose of justice; the "awakening" of the title is as much a political event as a religious one.

In keeping with my mission to demonstrate the breadth of the full expressive range of the trombone quartet, In Wait is technically and emotionally as far away from the world of Awakening as possible. If Awakening is music of strength, power, brightest day, In Wait is music of weakness, powerlessness, darkest night. And where Awakening was an impassioned cry, a protest chant writ large, In Wait is largely a whisper—equally arresting, but for the opposite reasons, and for opposite ends. In Wait is a "prequel" of sorts to Awakening: if Awakening is what happens after the watershed, what happens before? Where does strength come from, and how and why is it developed?

For most of the piece the trombones use different kinds of mutes, and the piece begins and ends with practice mutes, which reduce the quartet's volume to near-inaudibility. is piece is also my most extensive use of quarter-tones: the arc of developing strength begins in quietest microtonality, then grows in volume and intensity through chromaticism and atonality and finally erupts (without mutes) in extremely loud late-Romantic tonality. e title refers to the moment before an ambush, when powerful and hidden forces “lie in wait” for their prey.