Fragments of a March (“Katowice”)
Lucas Werkmeister, .I wrote these “fragments of a march” in January 2020, inspired by some other march music I had listened to (such as Unter dem Doppeladler, which ContraPoints used in some of her videos and I had previously transcribed an arrangement for, or the Entrance of the Gladiators). It seemed to me that these marches frequently had three distinct parts: a beginning with the whole band (“A”), a middle part with the low brass instruments taking the lead (“B”), and an end in a different key (“C”); I had a “B” part and a “C” part in my head, and I wrote them down, but a matching “A” part never materialized. (These parts probably have real names in music theory – a part of me wants to call the “C” part a “trio”? – but I don’t know and don’t really care enough to look it up.)
More recently, I attended Wikimania 2024 in Katowice (maybe I’ll write a separate blog post for that later), where I was part of the WikiOrchestra; this inspired me to record some more music, and I figured that I might as well record these fragments of a march. Since there should be something to disambiguate them from any other march-like music I might record in future, I am dedicating them to Katowice. (Naming marches after geographic places feels like a reasonable thing to do; compare, say, the Florentiner Marsch.)
In terms of the composition, I like the “B” part well enough, and I’m quite happy with the “C” part: I enjoy the way the melody and chords are mixing in the right hand. The accelerando in the bridge between them is a bit annoying, but I can’t really help it: to my ear, the “C” part needs to be rather faster than the “B” part, so we have to get from one to the other somehow – unless I eventually write more march parts and can graft these two parts onto other bits with matching tempo. (I actually found a fragment of an alternative “C” part in the LilyPond score I had written back in 2020 when I came back to this now, but the “B” and “C” part recorded here is what has stuck in my head over the past four years, so that’s what I recorded.)
In terms of the notation of the composition (the PDF / LilyPond below)… it’s really not great, but I don’t want to spend too much time perfecting it either. I have no idea if the time signature makes sense, or if this should be (say) 2/2 time instead of 4/4 time – this is something that I never pay much attention to when reading a score, but find surprisingly difficult to figure out when writing one. But hey, it’s better than nothing.
The performance isn’t flawless, but it’s good enough – if I tried to perfect every recording I upload, I would never upload anything, so I’m trying to be less obsessive about that. A few missed notes are annoying, but I think you can imagine what they’re supposed to be; the other major flaw is the tempo: even though I had already slowed down compared to some earlier test recordings, listening back to it I now think I was still too fast in the “C” part (and didn’t even hold a consistent tempo either). In my defense, the accelerando in the bridge makes it impossible to play with a metronome 😅