John McCabe

Designed to ease the transition between learning an instrument and playing 'real' music these dances by John McCabe have been given a grading between grades 5 and 6 ABRSM standard and cover a variety of styles. Played as a suite performance time is approximately 10 minutes.

For Trumpet And Piano-This Sonata by John McCabe was commissioned by Simon Debruslais and derives its underlying material from William Byrd’s motet 'Haec Dies' from his 1591 collection of Cantiones Sacrae. An outline of the motet is “hidden” within the texture of the music but never stated directly. The Sonata employs that beautiful instrument the Flugelhorn (beloved of Vaughan Williams and Miles Davis) for the first two main sections switching to D Trumpet (familiar from Baroque music) for the final part which is faster than the earlier ones. The first section is moderately-paced and obsessively circles around particular intervals notably parallel ornear-parallel fifths (possibly my revenge on the academic world). The middle part of the work is slow framed by very brief scherzando trio-like sections. The piece lasts about 17 minutes.

Floraison is a terrific 1975 composition by John McCabe from The Goddess Triloigy for Horn in F and Piano accompaniment. Floraison translates as 'flowering' or 'blossoming' and this piece depicts the flower maiden and love goddess Blodeuwedd ('bloom maiden') who is also an owl goddess. She was made up of nine kinds of flowers and in one pagan ritual her husband was sacrificed ascending after death into the skies in the form of an eagle. This composition is cast in the form of a passacaglia in which there are nine variations but perhaps more important than this is the initial image behind the piece which was that of a flower graduallyopening and then closing. This image governs the shape of the music with its increasingly elaborate and intense growth towards its climax and then a return at the close to the opening ideas.