Alfred Reed

Othello: A Symphonic Portrait in 5 Scenes for Brass Ensemble After Shakespeare

This concert suite includes five movements, each characterizing musically the mood or feeling generated from William Shakespeare's OTHELLO and prefaced by a quote from the text itself. Resulting from a request to the composer by the Miami Ring Theater to compose incidental music for their 1974 production of OTHELLO, the music for sixteen brass and four percussion reflects the director's conviction that almost the entire play takes place on a military encampment in a time of war, and so is imbued with the tenseness and uncertainty of the time and place of the story. Alfred Reed later took the material and recomposed it for a concert band setting. The present setting, drawn from both the original score and the expanded one for band, retains both the scoring and color of the original instrumentation for its stage use, as well as the purely musical re-working of the material as a developed concert piece. Movements: I. Prelude (Venice), II. Adbade (Cyprus), III. Othello and Desdemona, IV. Entrance of the Court, V. The Death of Desdemona, Epilogue