SEN

SEN is the first trumpet ensemble I ever composed. During my first year of graduate school at UT Austin, I asked trumpet professor Ray Sasaki if I could write a piece for members of the UT trumpet studio to perform at one of the studio recitals. He happily agreed, and this piece was the result. This would then lead to commissions over the next three years to write the pieces that the UT trumpet ensemble would perform at the National Trumpet Competition, two of which helped the ensemble win second place.

The title of the piece comes from the Insen scale, which is a tuning system used for the Japanese folk instruments shamisen and koto. The scale includes the root, minor second, perfect fourth, perfect fifth, and minor seventh, which lines up with those respective scale degrees in the Phrygian mode. This scale is featured heavily in the beginning of the piece, giving it a fairly distinctive Japanese sound. Title aside, there is no specific program for this piece, and mainly served as an outlet for experimenting with some aleatoric ideas for trumpet ensemble.