Witold's Brass CUBE

Brass instruments were made for fanfares, and any fanfare without one is so lacking it may as well be a waltz.  Late in his career, Witold Lutosławski, one of my favorite composers, was commissioned to write a short series of fanfares for various organizations, and one of them leafed its way into my grasp.

Lutosławski was known for a number of different styles and techniques in the course of his career, including populism, serialism and aleatoric methods, but Fanfare for CUBE uses none of those styles and is perfectly well off doing its own thing.  Mostly written in Debussy's Lydian/Mixolydian mixed mode (a major scale with a raised fourth and a lowered seventh), the brass quintet shows how nice it is to hear the first five notes of a Lydian scale played at once.  It naturally expands and contracts, only breaking the scale in bars 6, 7 and 8 to make a semi-VI-V-vi dim-I resolution.  There's not much more to say, and why bother?  Sometimes a CUBE is just a CUBE.  Here's a recording, along with Witold's Fanfare for the University of Lancaster as a chaser.

~PNK