Morceau Symphonique by Alexandre Guilmant, excerpts
What can I say about Morceau Symphonique? This piece is one of the most popular high school solos for a reason. It lays well on the trombone, has a challenging range that works well for serious players, and packs a lot of contrasts in dynamics and style into a short piece, making it great for college auditions.
As with the comments for the 9th & 10th grade excerpt on this site, I add a few dynamics to follow the shape of the lines. The first excerpt is marked piano with con espressione, meaning ‘with expression.’ There are crescendos and diminuendos written in, but every time that there is a specific dynamic written in the first section, it is piano. In order to build contrast, I stretch the dynamics a bit, bringing up the volume slightly in measure 9 in order to give me somewhere to diminish to. I also delay the piano at the end of the first excerpt so that I can finish the phrase with a sense of direction.
Planning out your breaths is also important in this excerpt. The phrase beginning in the 9th measure is just a big long at this tempo for many people to be as expressive as the music dictates, so we naturally catch an extra breath. A lot of people try to catch a breath in measure 11 after the dotted half note. I find that that location often makes the phrase seem a bit lopsided, so I choose to breathe a bar earlier. This gives me the opportunity to push ahead through the crescendo as I breathe and prevents the dotted half note from just sitting still and not having any musical direction.
This is the finale to the work and should be exciting to the end. We see con fuoco (with fire). In addition to the increase in tempo from earlier in the piece, I let the sound and articulation both add a bit more excitement.
You will notice that I do not play the triplets in a totally metronomic manner. By starting a hair slower on these and speeding up, I continue to build the excitement through both entrances rather than just playing fortissimo all the way through the end of the piece.
The excerpt stops just a few bars shy of the end of the actual piece rather than finishing it to the end because the next note is a trill on a D. Some people choose to play this as a valve trill, but I prefer to perform this as a lip trill, as you will hear on the complete recording below.
If you are planning to audition for college, this would be a great choice and you should learn the entire piece rather than just these two short excerpts. The final of the three videos here is a complete performance that I recorded with the Tennessee Tech Symphony Band, directed by Joseph Hermann. It is available through Amazon as well as on iTunes.