Red - Grade 5 - Concert Band - Printed Version
Grade 5 - Concert Band - Third and final Movement of Primary Colors Suite for Concert Band
Whereas “Yellow” was filled with happy sounds from my childhood, and “Blue” was filled with those sad confused feelings of adolescence, “Red” is filled with the sounds of anger and passion and simmering rage.
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I wrote the first draft of “Red” back in 2008. At the time I was a band director in Green Forest, Arkansas. Somewhere along the way I found a frequency of red, or a wavelength, or something like that. I haven’t been able to track it down ever since to verify its legitimacy. Anyway, I used the numbers to create a quasi-atonal melodic fragment to represent the color red in the middle of the piece. It was a very angular and angry sounding series of notes that I felt fit red quite nicely.
Fast forward about a decade. I dusted off the draft of “Red” to finally finish it. Over the intervening 10 years my compositional voice changed significantly. I decided to scrap everything from the original draft, except for the motive based off of the frequency, or whatever it was. Over the next year I worked off and on to finish “Red” and “Primary Colors” as a whole. I guess the ideas had been simmering in my subconscious all that time because once I came up with an opening that I actually liked the music flew out of me. I loved it. There were a few spots I was concerned might sound “too red” or “too angry” but I left them and put the piece away for a few months to work on other things. When I revisited it it brought me to tears. There were a bunch of spots in the new “Red” that were the best music I had ever written. It had anger, rage, passion, heart, it was red.