The musical compositions of Richard Burdick
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Opus 91

Night Hawk
for Trumpet and Organ (time)

1995

You can find the trumpet part on IMSLP

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Written for Rizetto and Rosas summer 1995

Premiered December 29, 1995 on Trinity Chamber Concerts, Berkeley, CA

Written for the Duo Rizzetto and Rozas, this work is titled because of the second movement.

Originally I had planned to use a tape loop delay set-up with a localized microphone just for the trumpet. Because of the ease of using the two instruments without electronics, I chose not to use the tape. Instead what I have done is plotted out the solo trumpet part plus three echoes and given the solo player all attacks generated by the four part fugue. I used grace notes when ever two notes would have happen at once, dynamic contrasts help define the echoes but this version makes the trumpet part much more virtuosic. The phrasing is an arbitrary set of phrases from one to five bars long and sometimes backwards. A melody was used but is not arrived at until the last. One note of the melody appears and with each repetition one more note is added. Two modes are used, one in the 9/8 and one in the 10/8 time signatures. The contrast between the two different meters in the same amount of time is a main emphasis of the piece.

Originally I wanted to write four movements, but I am happy with the three. The first movement in minuet trio form was written at the Bear Valley festival in August 1995. It uses the melody of the 2nd movement. I was striving for three contrasting repetitions of a continuation of the trumpet note in the organ, which I never really accomplished.

The first version of the last movement, originally planned to be the first, was too monotonous for my taste, in that we traveled through four modulations of the same material in the organ with an almost improvisatory trumpet part on top. The rhythmic material in the organ is again the same melody form from the second movement put in a pattern where the harmony increases and then put into forward or retrograde motion based on the pattern used for phrasing of the second movement. The scale then is stated in the organ pedals and is of primary importance to me in the movement. The final version of the third movement is just cut in half. Within the four modulations we hear the first part of the first and third keys and the second half of the second and fourth modulations.