cloudmass (2025)

General Information

Commissioner: The Los Angeles Brass Alliance
Written: February – March, 2025
Duration: ca. 7’
Instrumentation: Twenty brass instruments in four groups: five soprano (e.g. trumpets, cornets, flugelhorns), five alto (e.g. horns, mellophones Wagner tuben), five tenor (e.g. trombones, bass trumpets, euphoniums, baritones), five bass (e.g. bass trombones, tubas, contrabass tubas). Optionally, the whole ensemble can be doubled or even expanded further.

Performance History

May 4, 2025: Los Angeles Brass Alliance at Glendale First Baptist Church, Glendale, CA (World Premiere)

Program Note

cloudmass explores the idea that small amounts of movement in air – individually, extremely gentle and harmless – can, when combined, lead to physical phenomena that are incredibly violent and destructive. Four choirs of brass instruments each play similar material to each other. At first, the material is hushed, and each group’s entrance is staggered. Over the course of the piece, the material grows in force and the entrances of each group grow closer and closer together – until, at the work’s climax, every instrument aligns in a powerful mass of sound. The entrances of each choir are precisely structured, though, so that the iterations of each entrance can be thought of as the final pulses, and then ultimate alignment, of an extremely large polyrhythm – one that began far, far before the beginning of the performance of the piece, in the same way that (to reference the ‘butterfly effect’) the stroke of a butterfly’s wing might perhaps be the triggering factor for a tornado, many months later, thousands of miles away.

Recording available upon request. Please use the contact form linked in the menu above, or email me at ben.beckman@yale.edu.