Trombone quartet arrangements

[rwallace7]

What are some of your favorite trombone quartet arrangements? Especially those that tend not to place all the high notes only on the first part.

[Neo Bri]

What are some of your favorite trombone quartet arrangements? Especially those that tend not to place all the high notes only on the first part.

I can't remember most of them since it's been so long.

Scarborough Fair by Bill Reichenbach sticks out.

[hyperbolica]

I don't know about the high note requirement, but my favorite quartet pieces are:

ain't misbehaving (arr bob morris?)
georgia on my mind (arr ingo luis)
achieved is the glorious work
crazy (arr morris)
misty (arr morris)
drei equali (beethoven)
passtime with good company (arr matt smith)
somewhere over the rainbow (arr elkjer)
NY, NY (arr morris)
on a hymnsong of philip bliss (holsinger/harbison)
be cool (jeff bauer)

We have excerpts from Holst Planets and Mussorgsky Pictures that aren't really performance length, but include some great 4 part harmony.

There is a mix of styles here. Bob Morris is disproportionately represented because our quartet gained access to a lot of his quartet stuff. And we bought a lot of Elkjer and Uber stuff. We have a couple hundred tunes, but only 80 some in the book. Some stuff we haven't read through yet, or is just too much to work up, or simply insane (some Elkjer and almost all Christopher Bill fit into this category). This list doesn't account for our Christmas music.

And then we have some homegrown stuff. I've done arrangements of Just a Closer Walk, Lords Prayer, Mendelsohn Equali #2, Mozart Allelujia, Crazy little thing called love, other quartet members have done Simple Gifts, and some hymn arrangements that I really like.

Our group has 3 people who can play high, 2 who can improvise, and a bass trombone trainee. I think it's the bass player (me) that holds us back. I got elected basically because no one else wanted to do it, but I was the least opposed to playing bass. Plus, everyone else either showed up with a straight horn or a 525 bore. Also in our group, we mix the parts up (except the 4th part when it goes below the staff), everybody gets to play lead here and there, so the high notes are spread around. Almost every time we look for a new player, they'll say "I don't mind playing bass, but I don't want to get stuck on it". My feeling exactly .

Tbone quartet is the most fun playing I do, bass or not. It really hones your ability to listen and play in tune and in time. I personally really prefer four different sounds rather than a homogenous sound. We have a dixieland player, a jazzer, a legit guy, and a talented casual player. It makes the sound more interesting, to me. Like singing voices.

For literature, there are tons of great arrangements and originals. Just look at the Hickeys library sometime.

[Gribnes]

Anything arr by Bill Reichenbach..Sarum Suite and a book of Christmas Music (McGinty Music)

[BflatBass]

Finlandia by Jean Sibelius, arr. by Mark McDunn
Pretty simple stuff really. Barely college level. Like it none the less

[BostonChops]

Bach chorales - Benjamin Coy has arranged all of them(!) for trombone quartet, they're available for free on his website, along with other paid (nice looking) arrangements.

In my experience, they're great for dialing in intonation, breathing and tone. Also, good for some nostalgia for my A level music 20 years ago...

[hyperbolica]

Bach chorales - Benjamin Coy has arranged all of them(!) for trombone quartet, they're available for free on his website, along with other paid (nice looking) arrangements.

In my experience, they're great for dialing in intonation, breathing and tone. Also, good for some nostalgia for my A level music 20 years ago...

Oh, very nice stuff. Thanks for that. Here's the link for the too-lazy-for-google - http://www.tenorposaune.com/sheetmusic/

[torobone]

Add anything / everything by Jack Gale. Off the top of my head:

Alexander's Ragtime Band (goes through many styles of jazz)
St. Louis Blues (need a strong bass bone)
Tiger Rag

Also, there are a couple of arrangements of the Hallelujah Chorus.

[rwallace7]

Thank you for all the posts. If you come across anything special please let me know. My email is: [email protected]

[thombone]

There is a mix of styles here. Bob Morris is disproportionately represented because our quartet gained access to a lot of his quartet stuff.

Where can I find these? Can’t seem to find any record of Morris’ stuff anywhere other than this thread.

[wwright]

Robert Elkjer has a lot of really nice stuff: https://robertelkjer.net/TrbnQuartetPage12.html. He doesn't generally take it easy on the lead player, though. The highest notes tend to be in the first part. That can be addressed with some copy/paste work, which can help.

[hyperbolica]

Robert Elkjer has a lot of really nice stuff: https://robertelkjer.net/TrbnQuartetPage12.html. He doesn't generally take it easy on the lead player, though. The highest notes tend to be in the first part. That can be addressed with some copy/paste work, which can help.

Our quartet bought several of these books. We generally like one or two tunes out of each book. Some tunes are nice, but they're just a little insane from time to time. Like insane key signatures, or a variation that just steps way out there. WWright is right about the lead player, but the same is true for the bass player in some situations. Anybody can blat out a big pedal G, but this stuff requires control and finesse under the staff.


We bought these books:
Patriotic
Traditional Jazz
Latin
Ellington
Classical Vol1
Gershwin
1960s pop

Our favorite of those is probably the Latin book, then Traditional Jazz. Some of the 60s pop is good.
It helps if you're not looking for straight forward arrangements that are 100% recognizable.

Christopher Bill is not in the same league as Elkjer, but he does some of the same stuff. Bill tends to annotate soloistic syncopation, which drives me nuts, because the only thing it achieves is make the stuff impossible to read. Plus, Bill has this tendency to write everything 1 or 2 octaves higher than anyone can play. And, he seems to revel in keys with 5 or more sharps or flats. Because, you know, that's easy with software.

I don't know how, but I wish someone would write nice arrangements of interesting tunes that you could actually play without rehearsing 5 days a week. The Bill Morris stuff did that, and he seemed to have a hit rate of greater than 50%. Elkjer is about 25% and CB is less than 10%.

I used to love Musescore until they went subscription. There's so much amateur music in the world. It's really hard to get good charts unless you write them yourself. I've done some of that, but I don't always have time or energy.

[KingOfDreamland]

Christopher Bill is not in the same league as Elkjer, but he does some of the same stuff. Bill tends to annotate soloistic syncopation, which drives me nuts, because the only thing it achieves is make the stuff impossible to read. Plus, Bill has this tendency to write everything 1 or 2 octaves higher than anyone can play. And, he seems to revel in keys with 5 or more sharps or flats. Because, you know, that's easy with software.

I don't know how, but I wish someone would write nice arrangements of interesting tunes that you could actually play without rehearsing 5 days a week. The Bill Morris stuff did that, and he seemed to have a hit rate of greater than 50%. Elkjer is about 25% and CB is less than 10%.

I used to love Musescore until they went subscription. There's so much amateur music in the world. It's really hard to get good charts unless you write them yourself. I've done some of that, but I don't always have time or energy.

I'm not familiar with Elkjer's arrangements, and I'd like to have a look at them to see how difficult they really are, but I can't really justify spending money on pieces that our group may never play if they're too hard. I didn't get much of a chance to poke around his website, but does he offer any previews of his arrangements so people can see what they're getting into? Being able to listen to the pieces helps, but for me, it's easier to gauge difficulty by seeing the music itself.

I donated to Chris's Patreon awhile back and looked over most of the sheet music he had available at the time, and I share your frustration. I was hoping I could find several pieces that were in an easy-to-play key/range, but that's definitely not his style. To Chris's credit, he can certainly play that stuff, but the average trombonist, and most above-average trombonists for that matter, can't.

I've resorted to doing my own arrangements, or doing adaptations of others, for our band's music. I arranged a lot of stuff for three trombones and a tuba to start out, but since then we lost our bass trombonist, added a tenor, and also added two trumpets, so the arranging has changed substantially. If anyone's curious, I'd be happy to share some of my arrangements. They're nothing too spectacular, but they sound pretty good for the group we have, and aside from some of the stuff I wrote for our monster lead trumpet player, none of the parts are insanely difficult.

[SGlong]

If you go to the home page of trombone chat, the 3rd forum down is 'performance'. Click on that and go to the 6th topic down called 'suggestions of what to play during lockdown' and click on that. scroll down to the 8th post by Mr. Miller. he has a link to a google drive with a ton of quartet music you can get.

[hyperbolica]

I just wanted to update this list a little and comment more on Elkjer. Some of his midi recordings on his website (robertelkjer.com) sound ok, but when you play try to play them with real humans and real trombones, it doesn't really make it. We had a Veterans Day gig today, and tried This Land Is Your Land. We might have been able to pull it off, but after one run through, we agreed to ditch it. Also My Country Tis Of Thee - It didn't seem like it could be played (on a trombone) in a way that sounded professional between the way too low and sustained bass solo that required a set of 6 lungs and the Arbans book backgrounds, we just didn't think we could pull it off musically or believably. We did play God Bless America and America The Beautiful, both of which had some beautiful writing with patriotic fanfares.

Elkjer really can write beautifully, it's just that most of the time he seems to choose not to do it, or to mix it with something other than beautiful. If you know the guy personally, I can see why you'd defend him, but we get optimistically a 25% hit rate on his tunes. That's not bad, still. We do use a lot more of his stuff than any other arranger, but don't buy a book and expect to perform every tune in it. Also be aware that the midi recordings on his site force you to use your imagination, and your imagination probably renders stuff optimistically, at least mine does.

Maybe his stuff is really meant for academic settings where you just play what is set before you. I can see that, and where this would be very instructive stuff to play. insane key signatures, licks you won't see anywhere else, crazy range requirements all point to academic leanings. If you had a typical audience of - uh - "deplorable garbage" and worried about what they thought of you, you'd probably tread lightly on the Elkjer section of your library.

And it might just be that our little tbone quartet isn't up to the challenge. The other members tastes in music do tend to run a bit conservative. We play exactly zero contemporary classical type tunes. That stuff works in academia and metropolitan settings, but not in semi-rural music clubs.

Anyway.

Believe it or not we didn't have much of a patriotic section in our book. We had a home grown Armed Services Parade and National Anthem. We also had the Stars & Stripes w/piccolo solo plus the Elkjer stuff mentioned above. So we added a National Emblem (musescore arrangement) and got a very nice Nagle arrangement of Battle Hymn of the Republic. We recently added the March from Holst Suite in F (sounds very military) and a George M Cohan Medley (includes many patriotic tunes) I think arranged by Holcombe. These are all published charts that you should be able to find.

[tbdana]

I'm one of those who knows Elkjer and and defends him.

I play in a trombone quartet in a small market setting. We are the best four trombone players in the region. We play a LOT of Elkjer. Yeah, they can be challenging, but we like that. And every once in a while he writes something a little too awkward, but we find it always sounds good, and we have a whole huge book of Elkjer arrangements. We never really practice them, as we probably should; we just read through them, even on the gigs.

My only real criticism of him is that he doesn't always mark triplets, which leads to some uncertainty, and he seems to end a lot of his arrangements on a minor-major 7 chord (what I call the James Bond chord).

Anyway, I just had to get in the obligatory defense of Bob Elkjer.