Review

Herb Schoales
Advanced Duets: (2 volumes)
2 trombones

Massapequa, New York, United States
Publisher: Cor Publishing Company (Wiltshire Music Company)
Date of Publication: 1999

Etude book.

Primary Genre: Study Material - etude
Secondary Genre: Trombone Ensembles - 2 trombones

Herb Schoales’ Advanced Duets are an engaging collection of 22 duets for tenor and bass trombone or tenor trombone with F-attachment. Although billed as advanced duets for trombones, bassoons, celli, or bassi, these duets were composed by a bass trombonist with the express desire to challenge his trombone students with materials that had trombone-specific technical demands AND rewarding musical substance. A former music copyist for Bernstein, the printed music preserves Herb’s meticulous musical penmanship; including many extended slide position suggestions. Composed throughout the mid-late 1990’s while I was one of his students, these duets explore a wide assortment of musical styles, rhythms, and pitch collections. Although written as pedagogical materials for his collegiate students, their technical and musical demands command attention for all. While the upper line is primarily in tenor clef and the lower part in bass clef, there are sufficient clef changes to keep one honest, especially the upper part. The music is predominately tonal, although there is a 12-tone duet to pay homage to non-standard conceptions of pitch-space. The rhythmic domains explored in these duets involve the use of a decaying 14/8 meter (5+4+3+2), the use of 19/8 meter (6+6+4+3), and various triplet and quintuplet patterns that rival the metrical complexities I aspire to cover in my own collegiate aural skills classes!

-Peter Fielding
Oberlin College Conservatory of Music