#first suite

The First Suite often gets lumped in somewhat dismissively as "high school band music". It's certainly true that many high school bands can play it, and play it well — it poses no great hurdles in technique or ensemble-wide coordination — but there's no reason to substitute "difficulty" for "musical quality". And make no mistake, this piece is one of the finest pieces that has ever been written for wind ensemble

I've already talked about what happens in my head when I listen to the first movement, but today I want to talk more about the music itself, and why I think it's so great.

This is sunny music. From start to finish, this piece is bathed in a rich, warm glow, radiating round contentment from within. The chords are, for the most part, steadfastly familiar; these aren't sonorities meant to disorient and shock. The genius lies in their arrangement: Usual enough to reach back and speak a comforting, intimately familiar language, but striking enough to seem new and fresh and delightfully unexpected.

I hear this dichotomy running thruout all three movements. It is constantly unfolding, constantly opening up into new vistas — some grand and imposing, some delicate and shrinking — but it's not disjointed, it's an organic, connected whole. Holst weaves a great number of compositional tricks and clevernesses into the fabric of the music, but you never notice them; the music sucks you in and you simply float, awash in affirmation.

And it doesn't hurt. It never hurts. It sings, it dances — like quicksilver in the second movement, with stately dignity in the trio of the third — it marches — it does all of these glorious musical things undimmed by sorrow, loss, and tears.

And it works. When the March reaches its glorious apotheosis, the brilliant moment when both march themes sound at once, there is no doubt that this is an affirmation you can believe. Its joy is a profound joy, a joy that reaches the very foundations of my being. It is a joy that doesn't have to overcome, that doesn't have to fight for a precarious position in a frightening world; it is a joy that just is, that exists — glowing, golden, incandescent — in a radiant blaze of glory above it all.