LESSON 2 (continued)
Here is a brief excerpt from a Debussy prelude (transposed into a slightly easier to read key... the original is in 6 sharps):
There are many ways of setting this brief passage for a brass section. The ones that preoccupy us are those that will give the best results when a full orchestra is involved.
Obviously, you could simply take each staff and divide it among the different instrument groups of the brass family: trumpets on the treble staff, trombones on the bass, and the tuba gets to play the bass, as follows:
However, this would be rather crude, and besides, we're still missing the horns.
The best thing would be to examine the material and see where there is
already doubling happening.
Let's examine what would be our trumpet part in the crude arrangement. First and second trumpets in thirds, which is good, and then third trumpet just doubling trumpet 1 an octave lower. It would be more interesting to create a tiny bit of both movement and resonance in the 3rd trumpet. This could be achieved by starting it out on the same note as trumpet 1 and moving DOWN through the available notes at each step:
This gives fullness on the first two notes, then a resonance note at the end of the motif on beat 2 during the crescendo.
For the trombones, we can use only the lowest thirds for trombones 1 and 2, while our bass trombones and tuba play the "low" note. Notice that there are some 16th notes in the 1st measure? Those will be taken by our bass trombone, which in essence is repeating the same bass line we had originally simply assigned to a tuba:
