One day I woke up to a message from my good friend, Jason Carr, who said he had felt inspired to write me and my wife, Rhiannon, a duet! We were thrilled to receive such a lovely, personal gift, and even more delighted to discover it was influenced by our rescue dog, Dillon (Husky x Labrador) who we rescued back in January 2020, a few weeks after we'd got married!
Thank you Jason for this piece, we hope we do it justice for you!
The sheet music for the whole suite will be available for purchase soon at:
www.MarkHarrisonTrumpet.com
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Composer's note:
Mr & Mrs H Walk The Dog In The Rain
I met Mark Harrison in 2019 at Manchester’s bijou Hope Mill Theatre, where he was playing trumpet in my seven piece orchestration of Jerry Herman’s Mame. Mark not only plays fabulously, but also has a deep love of classic musicals, so we got on famously, and I was pleased to be able to plan a reunion for 2020 at the same address for Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, this time also to feature Mark’s new wife Rhiannon on trombone. Alas, these plans were scuppered by the pandemic, but Mark proceeded to produce a sequence of videos of numbers from Cinderella, featuring my arrangements and the planned Hope Mill cast and band. By way of thanks - and as good mental exercise during quarantine - I thought I’d attempt composing a duet for the newlyweds.
I remembered my first tasks as a student composer at Guildhall had been to write instrumental solos and duos (excluding polyphonic piano or harp etc), which had seemed an exactingly monastic proposition at the time. I hoped I would fare better 35 years later - I can at least say I felt less self-conscious!
It was my intention to treat the two brass players even-handedly. In the end, the trombone took the lion share of The Ungrateful Riff, while the trumpet gets more of the jazzy tune. If I ever expand this into a suite, I’ll try to redress the balance.
For the record, the title came AFTER the music - I just wanted to make it personal to Mark and Rhi, and including their new four-legged family member only seemed polite. In a slightly esoteric way, the title is my sly tribute to Bernstein’s Mr & Mrs Webb Say Goodnight.
And now this introduction is much longer than the piece in question.
Happy music-making!
Jason Carr
August 2020
17 сен 2024
