Review

Harry Freedman
Courtenay Fanfare: for Brass Ensemble and Tenor Drum
3 B-flat trumpets 4 horns in F 3 trombones (1st in tenor clef) 1 tuba tenor drum

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Publisher: Cherry Classics Music
Date of Publication: 1978 / 2023
URL: http://www.cherryclassics.com

Score and parts

Primary Genre: Brass Ensemble - 6+ brass (choir)

Harry Freedman, OC (1922 - 2005) is one of Canada’s most important composers. He was born in Poland. His family moved to Canada when he was 3, and from the age of 9 he lived in Winnipeg, where he began clarinet lessons at the age of 18, and was introduced to symphonic music by his teacher Arthur Hart. At that time he was enrolled in the Winnipeg School of Art. During WW2 he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force, afterwards studying with John Weinzweig at The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, and then with Olivier Messiaen in Paris and with Aaron Copland. He subsequently played English Horn in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, taught at the Toronto Conservatory, and was the composer of more than 200 works, many of them performed internationally. He wrote a substantial quantity of chamber music, and numerous film scores, including The Bloody Brood, Isabel, The Act of the Heart, The Pyx and The Courage of Kavik the Wolf Dog. He was named to the Order of Canada in 1982.

Courtenay Fanfare was written in 1978 for the Courtenay Youth Music Centre in British Columbia. It’s an appropriately extrovert piece of writing and has the same instrumentation as Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man written in 1942 : 4 horns in F, 3 trumpets in B-flat, 3 trombones, tuba, and tenor drum (12 parts). It’s written in an extended tonal/bi-tonal style, beginning with an upwardly arpeggiated E-flat7 chord played by horns, followed by trombones with an A-flat arpeggio, trumpets with a B-flat chord, and then a bi-tonal tutti chord. All parts are then fully occupied throughout in an exhilarating tonal/bi-tonal dialogue. The piece ends on a tutti chord of D-flat major spread over four octaves.

Trombone 1 is given in tenor clef (e-flat – g-sharp1), 2nd and 3rd in bass, topping out at f1 and c-sharp1 respectively. 1st trumpet tops out at a-sharp2. The score is written without key signatures, and in the second half of the piece the writing is highly chromatic - all parts have many accidentals. There are no significant difficulties in any part; the work is indicated as being ‘suitable for moderately advanced performers’ and was clearly well-crafted for the young musicians for whom it was written.