A Wood Sprite's Muse

A Wood Sprite’s Muse was written in 2017 for the Bluebonnet Trumpet Trio, a group that consisted of Tamara Vaughn, Rebecca Ortiz, and myself. I was approached by Tamara and Rebecca about playing in a trio with them that would compete at the 2017 International Women’s Brass Conference. I agreed and offered to write a piece for the competition, in addition to playing a Beethoven oboe trio transcription. The hours of hard work paid off as we ended up winning second place in the chamber competition!

         The name for the piece came after the fact. As I write these program notes nearly seven years after composing the piece, I can’t recall exactly what the inspiration for the music was, other than that I wanted the piece to be challenging… and I’m pretty sure I succeeded one way or another. The music is very deft and agile, which, thanks to years of playing fantasy video games, brought about images of a faerie darting about an enchanted forest. I tried to implement passages that sounded incredibly difficult, but would actually be relatively idiomatic to the trumpet, such as the fast lip slurs towards the end of the piece.