Repertoire for Double Brass Quintet?

[Z-Tuba Dude]

Hey Guys,

I admit total ingnorance about the rep. for double quintet, but am interested in finding out more. I assume that Gabrielli tunes are out there, but what else is there?

[Ben]

Craig Gardner @ dorm40music has been arranging transcriptions of stuff for a few years. They are available for download, typically very good arrangements.

[Ted Cox]

Years ago, around 1990, Sam Pilafian asked me to transcribe Arnold Shoenberg's "Verklarte Nacht" for double brass quintet. I recieved permission from the Shoenberg estate and after a solid year of working on this project, it is now published and available for rental through Belmont Music. This isn't some watered down transcription; it's complete, from beginning to end. Due to the fact that most brass players don't even know this work and the physical demands required to perform it, it sits. Sam predicted correctly that it would be "ahead of its time". I've had face to face meetings with some prominent brass ensembles over the years but no one has cared to take this on.

Sam asked me one summer out at Tanglewood, promising to help me. I completed the first 50 measures, (there are 418) sent it to Sam and he said, "keep going, it looks great." The University of North Texas brass choir performed it in the mid 90's, but to my knowledge no one else has. If someone does rent it, the parts are in my manuscript, not from a computer, so it's not all that pretty. It's an amazing work and after spending a year working on it, it may be my number one favorite compostition of all time. What's also amazing is that it's Shoenberg's opus 4. Be sure to check out the poem from which it was inspired.
Ted

[BVD Press]

Some solid ceremony repertoire can be found here:

http://www.aardworks.com/

[KevinBock]

Polarities by Jim Self

[Richard Perry]

The Canadian Brass album "Brass in Berlin" has some good double-quintet transcriptions of Baroque and late Renaissance pieces, including chestnuts like "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" and Pachelbel's "Canon" along with some less familiar pieces by Gabrieli, Lasso, and Palestrina. All of them work very well.

About ten years ago our faculty quintet shared a concert with the Capital Brass from Jackson (Wade Rackley plays in that group now but didn't at the time). We played four or five of the Canadian Brass pieces along with a couple of the Philip Jones ten-part arrangements (giving the first trombone part to one of the horns and the fourth trombone part to one of the tubas). All of those arrangements should be fairly easy to find.

Sometime in the early 1990s I played David Sampson's "Fanfare for Canterbury Cathedral" for double quintet, which is available through Editions BIM. That's about the extent of my double-quintet knowledge, I'm afraid.