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Digital

Jeffrey Agrell

Temperamental Suite

for bass trombone solo

intermediate Duration: 6'

Printed version

TB47

CHF 13.00

Digital version with

D-TB47 Digital

CHF 11.00

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Jeffrey Agrell (*1948)

Jeffrey Agrell is a professor at the University of Iowa, USA where he teaches undergraduate horn, directs the Horn Choir, coaches chamber music, and performs with the Iowa Brass Quintet. He earned a B.A. at St. Olaf College and a Master of Music in horn at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He did further studies at the Institut de Hautes Etudes Musicales, Montreux, Switzerland and at the...
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About Temperamental Suite

The «four temperaments»

The inspiration for Temperamental Suite came from bass trombonist Johannes Bigler, who asked for a piece of moderate difficulty to use in his master classes. The great challenge in writing a piece for a solo instrument is finding a way to vary the mood and colors enough to maintain the listener’s interest. Musically illustrating the «four temperaments» proved to be an ideal way to do so.

In the European Middle Ages it was thought that a person’s temperament was determined by which of the four «fluids» of the body was dominant. If ‘yellow bile’ was predominant, the person would be choleric (movement 1), i.e. angry; too much ‘phlegm’ made the person phlegmatic, stolid, sluggish, apathetic (movement 2); an excess of ‘black bile’ gave rise to the melancholic or gloomy personality (movement 3); and if the blood was the dominant humor, the person would be sanguine, that is, have a ruddy complexion and be cheerful, fun-loving, optimistic (movement 4).