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Seminar: David Sampson-Composing for Brass
Wednesday 5:15 p.m.
Ezra Adams, Reviewer
David Sampson has composed brass music in a variety of mediums for twenty years. He is currently composer in residence with the Colonial Symphony and is still active as a performing trumpet player.
Sampson was completely at home as a lecturer. He began by discussing his musical career and works. He is motivated to compose from a desire to express the experiences of his life in sound. He has written compositions based upon the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, the experience of turning 40 (and, he mused, to soon turn 50), Tiannemin Square, his family life, and the death of a close friend.
He introduced the Extension Ensemble, an exciting new brass quintet made up of Juilliard graduates (http://home.earthlink.net/~bmcwhorter/extension.html). He invited the audience to keep an eye toward the emotional landscape of the quintet's performance of his 1986 work "Morning Music." After defining the emotion evoked from each section, he instructed the audience to look for the compositional technique used in creating that emotional response.
After the quintet's spectacular performance of the work, Sampson drew the audience into a discussion of the emotions created by the work and the techniques used in creating that emotion. He demonstrated great patience with all suggestions and seemed quite interested in what each person contributed to the discussion. He queried the Extension Ensemble about how they learned the work and discussed the intimacy of playing and performing the piece. He observed that the audience was not interested in the technique of the playing, but in the sound of the work.
Sampson next introduced Don Batchelder, one of New York City's top freelance trumpet players, to perform a unaccompanied work from the third of Sampson's three suites of concert etudes. He commented that he developed these unaccompanied etudes with the etude works of Chopin in mind, fulfilling the need for performable etudes for the trumpet player. Batchelder gave an inspiring performance, and Sampson engaged the audience in a discussion as to the piece's emotional impact and compositional techniques.
Sampson concluded the lecture by telling the story of "Morning Music." The piece was written in 1986, and reflects seven years of Sampson's reactions to his brother's death while participating in an anti-Nazi/anti-Ku Klux Klan demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina, 1979. (Ezra Allen Adams, instructor of trumpet, Carson-Newman College, Jefferson City, TN) |
