Balkan Brass and Brass the World Over

After digging through older blogs, I've located a few pieces that I want to highlight as some of my favorites. Tomasi's Fanfares Liturgiques features a distinctly 20th-century sound, skirting around atonality and flirting with it quite heavily. However, this isn't in the 12-tone or serialist style, instead being its own impressionist or expressive piece. Anthony DiLorenzo's Fire Dance for Brass Quintet is a fantastically energetic piece, sitting well into the programmatic side of music. It wouldn't be a far leap to imagine this in any movie soundtrack. The Seraph Brass has long been a favorite ensemble of mine, and paired with Jan Bach, one of my favorite composers for brass, you have a winning combination to my ears! (Adding Jeff Luke's arrangement of Hungarian Dance no. 2 for fun.)

Many thanks to Professor Manning for showing me the ensembles from all of these links!! Moravian Trombone Choir A trombone ensemble used in Moravian worship services. Jaipur Kawa - Indian brass band. Bollywood Brass Band Gangbê Brass Band - brass band from Africa. Kenny Carr and the Tigers

This post is a little more emotional than any of my other blogs. As I finish this semester, the last bits of coursework of my Master's degree stretching out before me, I've got a lot of feelings going around. Putting it frankly, 2019 and 2020 have been ridiculous years. My dad was suffering all of Spring 2019 and died last April, and this March we saw the beginning of the US wave of a global pandemic. I know we all have our struggles and face hardships, but sometimes I don't know how I've been able to do it. I'm just glad that I have. I was diagnosed with depression in 2014, and correctly diagnosed with bipolar disorder type 2 sometime in 2016. Getting my undergrad and first grad degrees have without a doubt been the toughest years of my life, and it's hard not to reflect on all that as this degree is coming to a close. I've learned a lot about being a musician, being a decent human, and just kind of life over the past 5 years at Iowa. It's bee

Schoenberg's string quartets are some of my favorite 'crunchy listening', so discovering his works for brass was one of my favorite parts of this class. Twentieth-century 'classical' brass writing, with its various influences, and coupled with the developments made in both brass manufacturing and performance, make it some of the most interesting listening out there. Today's post will reflect on various major brass compositions from 20th-century avant-garde composers. One of the pieces that we listened to ages ago in ABEL that I fell in love with was the Lutoslawski Mini Overture. Another that I've performed before, which isn't specifically for brass ensemble, but has massive brass parts, is Hindemith's Symphony in B flat for Wind Ensemble. While at the Atlantic Brass Quintet Seminar, I performed Plog's Four Sketches for Brass Quintet. The performance experience is just as energized as the listening experience is - the chromaticism and ti

Balkan Trafik A yearly 5-day festival in Brussels, Belgium, the Balkan Trafik features numerous artists from around the world. Their 15th anniversary festival will be in April 2021, and their website has the numerous artists that they promote and will have. While this isn't exclusively Balkan Bass, the numerous Balkan arts that they feature often include brass ensembles. Guča na Krasu There's not much available that isn't behind paywalls or in another language about Guča na Krasu Pehcevo Festival of Wind Bands A similar case is true for this festival as the above - except there isn't an obvious video available as well! I guess the moral of this blog is not to trust Wikipedia.

This embedded video is the entirety of my Balkan Brass playlist on YouTube. It's a continuously updated playlist of absolutely everything I can find Balkan Brass related! After all is said and done, I won't be surprised if this playlist has hundreds of videos. !

Above is a recording of Bregovic and his Wedding and Funeral Orchestra playing two of their classics, Bella Ciao and Kalashnikov at the 2012 Sziget (Island) festival in Budapest, Hungary. Goran Bregovic, born in 1950, is a Yugoslavian musician with many credits to his name. He's recorded and performed with a number of ensembles, such as his above Wedding and Funeral Orchestra, as well as Kodeksi and Jutro, two bands he participated in during his youth in Naples and Sarajevo. Bijelo Dugme was his main musical gig for a while, but I have him on Trubatalk here because of his involvement with Emir Kusturica on the 1995 film Underground , winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and because he has a massive output of Balkan Brass music deep in the Youtube algorithm. While this sits somewhat off the beaten path of Balkan Brass, I cannot recommend Underground enough. Make sure you're ready to watch it, and do your reading on it beforehand - it's a fairly dark

For readers entirely unfamiliar with the tradition, this is a great place to start. Balkan Brass is a style of music originating in the Balkan region in Europe, including Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. Occasionally, Moldavia, Greece, and continental Turkey are added to the list of Balkan Brass' origins. The Romani minority community in Europe is the primary origin of this style of music. It must be acknowledged that their musical style has been influenced through cultural exchange with other communities in the region, such as the Muslim and Jewish peoples in Europe. The music is a fusion of military and folk influences. After the liberation of Serbia in the early 1800s, the military brass performance traditions in the region were inevitably 'brought home,' and people began performing their own cultural music and folk tunes using variations of trumpets, brass ensembles, and percussion. Balkan b

Like the Guca festival, there are numerous other Balkan brass festivals around the world. The Roma Truba Fest , usually in September, features Roma brass bands playing in their style in Kumanovo, North Macedonia. The video above features the band Uska Kan, one of the prominent Balkan brass bands in Macedonia. There are multiple other videos of the Roma Truba Fest online as well, but this recording features a particularly popular band. They have numerous recordings up on YouTube, performing in various venues and locations, including Turkey, and at the Guca festival in 2013, which they won. Their performances include arrangements of popular tunes as well as their own music. For New Yorkers, another famous Balkan brass ensemble hosts the Zlatne Uste Golden Festival every year in Brooklyn. The 2020 festival (before the Coronavirus) was their 35th anniversary, and was lead by the band Zlatne Uste . While it's a little difficult to find great recordings of them online, their

Another one of my favorite bands in this style is New York based Slavic Soul Party! They've played Carnegie and have toured the world's stages and bars, performing with their stylistic, virtuosic playing. Their most recent album is Slavic Soul Party Plays Duke Ellington's Far East Suite, and it is a wild ride. It's an incredibly stylistic interpretation of Duke's well-known suite. My personal favorite is their schmaltzy interpretation of the sensual Isfahan. Singing multiple songs in Roma, my first introduction to their playing was Opa Cupa, one of the few songs I know all the lyrics to (including those in English). Their instrumentation is 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, saxophone, drum battery of 3, and tuba. This also occasionally includes accordion, such as in their song Teknochek Collision. Their music sits well within the characteristic altered scales of Eastern Europe, including flat seconds, 6ths, and 7ths, with a major third and the occasional major 7, a

The Guča Trumpet Festival is a yearly Balkan Brass band festival which takes place in the provincial town of Guča, Serbia. It's entirely free to attend, and a festival promoter estimates that 900,000 people (more realistically 600,000) come to the town of 2000 every year to partake in one of the largest musical parties in Europe, and certainly the largest of its kind. Groups from all over Serbia, and from all over the world, travel to compete, with no monetary prize in sight - only the fame that comes with winning the Golden Trumpet. In the documentary above, it's asserted numerous times that winning at the festival (and even placing well) can make an entire band's career. The documentary follows the life of one trumpet player, then the entire band, as they make their way to the festival, rehearsing in an impoverished town. For a brass group at the festival, the documentary notes that this group is particularly inclusive - the tubist is blind, the group has the only wom

In my time in Iowa City, I've joined the brass funk/pops group Brass Tower. The group plays arrangements of tunes by Too Many Zooz, Lucky Chops, the Youngblood Brass Band, and many others in this style. Over the course of my time with the group, I've introduced my own arrangement of the piece Underground Cocek, the first track on the album above. The arrangement is linked here , and I'll describe my arranging process! The melody itself was fairly simple to transcribe, and once I had that and the bassline down, I figured out the inner chords and their rhythm and voiced them appropriately. The one thing I would like to change from this arrangement and moving forward is that the horn and trombone parts are relatively boring compared to trumpets 1 and 2, considering the inner voices are entirely accompanimental. The tuba part should also include changes to give the tubist more freedom, but I wrote a bassline that I thought would be in the style, as it is almost a direct tran