Concert Band

Three Dance Miniatures

Grade 5 | 8 Mins

Three Dance Miniatures was commissioned by Toyoshi and Keiko Namikawa to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the founding of their Tokyo-based music dealership, Teine Corporation. Composer Philip Sparke has been a friend of the firm’s owners for many years and was delighted to be asked to write this celebratory work for them.

The piece is in three movements, which play without a break. The first opens with a rhythmic woodwind flourish, which takes its time to find a tonal centre over ambiguous brass chords. Eventually the home key is reached and a perky woodwind tune sets the tone. After a short bridge passage, this is taken up by the full band. A motif based on consecutive fourths changes the mood and introduces a second subject played by soprano saxophone. This builds to a brass fanfare under florid woodwind figuration and leads back to the original woodwind tune.

The music dissolves into the second movement, which opens with echoes of the ‘fourths’ motif accompanying tuned percussion. A chorale featuring the horns builds slowly to a full-band climax, followed by a short recitative for the soprano saxophone. Flutes and clarinets then briefly whisper the horn chorale until a solo clarinet brings the movement to a peaceful close.

The third movement enters quickly and quietly with a sinister theme on low woodwinds, which gathers momentum and leads to an energetic passage for the full band. Over a rhythmic accompaniment, oboes and clarinets quietly introduce the movement’s bustling main theme, which is repeated by the brass under flashing woodwind scales. The mood subsides until tenor instruments intone a noble second subject, which is then repeated by the high woodwinds with a brass accompaniment. The opening theme suddenly re-emerges to introduce a recapitulation of the main subject, before the opening of the first movement returns to bring the piece full circle.