Listen to James’s original composition submitted with his entry.
James Trevor (Age 16, WA)
FANFARE: Celebration Fanfare
Hi. I’m James (JT) Trevor and I’m currently a Year 11 Student at Perth Modern School, in Perth (obviously).
The earliest memory I had of music was an old electronic piano my parents had bought me when I was around 2, in an attempt to mould me into some sort of child prodigy. Unfortunately for them, I would only interact with it to make Animal noises on the “SFX + other” option, and quickly got bored. But much later on, I would start taking up real piano lessons, and would start to arrange video game music for me to learn and play for my friends.
The first real composition I would do was apart of my Year 9 music course, in which I arranged a Bach chorale into a piece for a rather bizarre quartet – Alto Recorder, French Horn, Sheng (a Chinese mouth-organ), and Cello.
Since starting the ATAR Music course, I’ve been surrounded by gifted teachers and the works of great composers such as Bach, Haydn, Mahler, Schubert, and more to come.
As well as playing the Tuba in my school’s Senior Wind Orchestra, and of course composition, my interests range from Politics, to MMA, to Survivor.
Composition Inspiration:
My composition originated from a short composition exercise I had recycled , in which I wrote 4-8 bars of a melody from a given set of chords. Upon hearing the news of this Competition’s existence, I immediately realised that it would serve as a perfect start to my fanfare. Despite the fact that I had never composed a fanfare before, I quickly scrambled the internet and consulted my composition teacher to inform myself on what made a good fanfare. As the name implies, a celebration, whether it be for a royal event or for the start of the concert. When creating it, I had in mind various elements that would spark a feeling of anticipation and excitement in the audience.
Celebration fanfare includes a strong brass section which drives the rhythm and flow forward, along with a flowy countermelody. It also includes strings which both enhance the piece rhythmically in some sections, as well as providing an uplifting, ornamental aspect to the piece. I was inspired by fanfares such as Copland’s Fanfare for the common man, for it’s heavy use of percussion, and Williams’ Olympic Fanfare for it’s use of rhythm and glittery use of the glockenspiel.