Giant Moose is an original composition for Big Band. Recently, through performing in a jazz quintet, I developed an interest and love of jazz music and particularly of Big Band music, where ensemble writing is interspersed with improvisation. 

The compositional process was quite challenging for me, since I had never written for a big band before and I had to dedicate significant time to understanding the nuances of jazz harmony and big band orchestration. To do this I listened to and looked at the scores of many Big Band composers, like Stan Sulzmann, Tom Green and more classic Big Band arrangers such as Sammy Nestico. 

The piece tries to illustrate a Giant Moose running in the Jungle and the opening section is very energetic and tries to capture a childlike sense of fun. As the piece develops the harmony becomes more exciting and a more melodic section is exposed (when the Moose is napping) and here I felt it the best opportunity to allow for improvised solos. As the piece concludes I tried to experiment with various combinations of free improvisation and extending the original melodic material, centered around a strong blues tonal centre. 
I was lucky enough to have the piece workshopped by a professional Big Band and in this process I was able to improve the orchestration hugely and work out the capabilities of certain instruments in a Big Band setting. I found it particularly difficult to write for the rhythm section and have learnt a lot about the best way to give suitable information to these instruments. The resultant recording captures the essence of my vision for the composition.

Giant Moose

My composition, The Clown, is inspired by the novel Arabian Nights, which is a folktale about a girl who manages to postpone her execution for 1,001 nights.  Each night, Scheherazade
tells the king a tale which ends with incredible suspense and the promise of resolution the following evening: each night’s ‘resolution’ becomes the beginning of a new tale. In my story, John - much like Scheherazade - convinces his captor (a psychotic clown) to delay his execution. 

My choice of instrumentation is two bassoons and string orchestra. The bassoon is sometimes known as the “clown” in the orchestra due to its strange timbre, thus I felt it would be suitable for representing the clown in my story. I also use a string orchestra because of the possibilities of variations of sounds it can make. For example spiccato, harmonics, pizzicato, glissando and double stops. These are helpful in representing the different emotions of the music and adding interest into the variety of sound. Another reason is that in preparation to this composition I studied the second movement of Prokofiev’s second string quartet. This can be seen by the syncopated, spiky and repetitive accompaniment figures of the strings in the first section. 


The structure of my composition is coherent to the narrative- I use a rondo form (ABACADA) in which A is John postponing the tale to the next night and B, C, D etc are the tales John tells the clown. 

Harmonically I wanted the composition to be experimental, exploring many dissonances and to mix the simplicity of theme A with complex harmonic, textural and rhythmic language, which I hope would be entertaining and engaging for an audience.

The Clown

Debussy Arabesque No. 1 by Maris Lam

Bach Prelude and Fugue No. 2 in C Minor by Maris Lam

First Year music student in University of Manchester.