Mike Forbes

6 Roundabouts

A few years ago, I had arranged the well-known 'Six Canonical Duets' by Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) for tuba and/or euphonium and greatly admired the skillfulness of this style of writing. When I realized that there is no literature for low brass instruments in this contrapuntal style, I decided to fill this gap. The contrapuntal technique of displacing two identical musical parts was a challenge and my first attempts in the baroque style were not easy. But as I worked on Brian Kiser's order, I took advantage of today's greater harmonic and rhythmic freedoms and gradually found my own compositional style. Although these pieces were written for two bass tubas, they can also be played with (or combined with) euphoniums or trombones. Michael Forbes