WELCOME TO BRASS QUINTET FORUM
TO FOSTER THE ADVANCEMENT OF BRASS CHAMBER MUSIC
HOSTED BY MEMBERS OF THE ANNAPOLIS BRASS QUINTET 1971-1993
HOSTED BY MEMBERS OF THE ANNAPOLIS BRASS QUINTET 1971-1993
First, welcome to you: Brass players, brass quintet members, brass teachers, and all brass chamber music enthusiasts! The Annapolis Brass Quintet was organized in 1971 in hopes of functioning as a full-time performing ensemble.
Formation of our quintet was inspired by the New York Brass Quintet, established in 1954, and the American Brass Quintet, founded in1960. These two extraordinary ensembles played critical roles in establishing the brass quintet as a respected chamber music medium. New York collectively retired in 1984; American--the High Priests of Brass--willl celebrate its 60th Anniversary in 2010!
When we launched our quintet as a full-time performing chamber ensemble, little did we know we were not alone. In the 1970s, new professional chamber ensembles were springing up in record numbers across the country as evidenced by this front page Wall Street Journal article: "Chamber Ensembles Multiply as Interest in Their Music Swells."
In 1976, we met in New York with many of these chamber ensemble musicians to share ideas as to how we might initiate new funding programs for chamber music in support of ensemble residencies, educational programs, concert tours, composer commissioning programs, and in building new audiences for chamber music in non-traditional performance venues.
These discussions led directly to the establishment of:
Over its twenty-two year career the Annapolis Brass Quintet performed thousands of concerts on four continents and in all fifty states and recorded sixteen commercial albums. The ABQ unearthed and performed a large body of early brass music and commissioned and premiered some seventy-five works by many leading composers. See: Timeline of ABQ Career Highlights
On April 23, 1993 the ABQ performed its farewell concert -- a program which included the world premiere of a work commissioned especially for the quintet's final performance--Our emphatic symbolic statement that this concert was not an end, but rather just part of a collective continuum in the advancement of brass chamber music.
One of our most important decisions was in making our music library easily accessible to the greatest population of brass players and scholars and selecting an institution that would manage and care for the collection for the benefit of future generations. It took us 15 years to make that decision, but the perfect solution was realized in 2008: Oberlin Conservatory Library Special Collections
Annapolis Brass Quintet Music Library--Available for Performance & Research READ ALL ABOUT IT
Now, and over the past several months, we have come upon many heretofore undiscovered recordings of Annapolis Brass Quintet historic live performances that we have digitalized, and will become ancillary to the ABQ's Special Collection at Oberlin.
But first, we'd like to share these recordings with you. There may be no other recordings of many of these works, and we hope you might find compositions of interest for future study and performance. Here is the first of these historic live performances--ironically, Selections from our quintet's 1993 Final Concert including the aforementioned world premiere of Michael Brown's Symphony for Brass Quintet.
We also hope that this website might be able to turn into a real forum for all to share ideas and pieces that deserve wider recognition, with the goal of affirming the rightful place of the brass quintet on the chamber music concert stage.
Formation of our quintet was inspired by the New York Brass Quintet, established in 1954, and the American Brass Quintet, founded in1960. These two extraordinary ensembles played critical roles in establishing the brass quintet as a respected chamber music medium. New York collectively retired in 1984; American--the High Priests of Brass--willl celebrate its 60th Anniversary in 2010!
When we launched our quintet as a full-time performing chamber ensemble, little did we know we were not alone. In the 1970s, new professional chamber ensembles were springing up in record numbers across the country as evidenced by this front page Wall Street Journal article: "Chamber Ensembles Multiply as Interest in Their Music Swells."
In 1976, we met in New York with many of these chamber ensemble musicians to share ideas as to how we might initiate new funding programs for chamber music in support of ensemble residencies, educational programs, concert tours, composer commissioning programs, and in building new audiences for chamber music in non-traditional performance venues.
These discussions led directly to the establishment of:
- Chamber Music America by 34 chamber musicians in 1977, and
- National Endowment for the Arts' first chamber music grants program in 1980
- Brass Chamber Music Society of Annapolis (1979-1993)
- International Brass Quintet Festival (1980-1992)
- The support of these organizations resulted in two annual composer commissioning programs, which contributed to expanding the repertoire, not only for brass quintet alone, but in combination with orchestra, chorus, vocal quartet, vocal sextet, string quartet, woodwind quintet, harp, mezzo-soprano, percussion, dance, electronics, piano, organ, narrator, and jazz. These new works led to many rewarding collaborations with a wide variety of other noteworthy artists.
Over its twenty-two year career the Annapolis Brass Quintet performed thousands of concerts on four continents and in all fifty states and recorded sixteen commercial albums. The ABQ unearthed and performed a large body of early brass music and commissioned and premiered some seventy-five works by many leading composers. See: Timeline of ABQ Career Highlights
On April 23, 1993 the ABQ performed its farewell concert -- a program which included the world premiere of a work commissioned especially for the quintet's final performance--Our emphatic symbolic statement that this concert was not an end, but rather just part of a collective continuum in the advancement of brass chamber music.
One of our most important decisions was in making our music library easily accessible to the greatest population of brass players and scholars and selecting an institution that would manage and care for the collection for the benefit of future generations. It took us 15 years to make that decision, but the perfect solution was realized in 2008: Oberlin Conservatory Library Special Collections
Annapolis Brass Quintet Music Library--Available for Performance & Research READ ALL ABOUT IT
Now, and over the past several months, we have come upon many heretofore undiscovered recordings of Annapolis Brass Quintet historic live performances that we have digitalized, and will become ancillary to the ABQ's Special Collection at Oberlin.
But first, we'd like to share these recordings with you. There may be no other recordings of many of these works, and we hope you might find compositions of interest for future study and performance. Here is the first of these historic live performances--ironically, Selections from our quintet's 1993 Final Concert including the aforementioned world premiere of Michael Brown's Symphony for Brass Quintet.
We also hope that this website might be able to turn into a real forum for all to share ideas and pieces that deserve wider recognition, with the goal of affirming the rightful place of the brass quintet on the chamber music concert stage.