strings – Jason Taurins

My new orchestra work Triple Threat has a solo section in the middle. Why? I believe it is important for young musicians to begin composing and improvising early on. Click here to sign up for more info about how you can be a part of bringing this piece to life!

Solo Section

Underneath the soloist is a simple four-bar vamp over two chords: E minor, D major, E minor, D major. This repeats ad lib. to accommodate as many soloists as needed. Non-soloists play the vamp pizzicato, so the soloist can be clearly heard.

Measures 40-43 of *Triple Threat*, piano reduction.

Supplemental Materials

I want this piece to be adaptable to as many situations as possible. Some groups rehearse once a week, or twice a week in block schedule, or every day. As such, I am putting together supplemental materials for the educator to allow some flexibility. Students can improvise the solo, compose their own solo, or use the pre-composed solos. The pre-composed solos are four measures long, and can be combined to however long you want each soloist to improvise – I suggest either 4 or 8 bars each. The solo section can include every performer (which I would prefer!), only some performers, or be skipped (which I do not prefer!).

Suggestions for Educators

I have some suggestions for educators approaching teaching composition and improvisation.

First, give your students limitations to guide and focus their composing or improvising. A blank sheet of paper is overwhelming. In this case, stick to just the notes of D major. Consider improvising/writing for just one string. String crossings can be awkward.

Use rhythmic and melodic motives from the work. Encourage your students to use rests, but sparingly.

The *Triple Threat* motive, “tri-ple threat,” eighth-eighth quarter.

Develop a simple motive – for example, in sequence, or inversion.

This takes the first three notes of the melody and inverts them! Rising stepwise motion becomes descending stepwise motion,

Combine two or more of these options.

The rising motive of the melody is combined with the *Triple Threat* motive.

Or, have your students compose their own from these principles. The included supplementary material has 8 blank bars the students can use to write down ideas, with the following instructions (or, perhaps, guidelines) included:

Composition pro-tips included in the supplementary materials for *Triple Threat.*

“Pangrams” (2024) is a brief suite for string orchestra that I recently composed. The idea struck me that a series of miniatures based on the linguistic concept of the pangram – a sentence or verse containing all letters of a language’s alphabet – might yield some interesting results using musical cryptography. Each movement is a short musical cryptogram where the letters of the pangram are converted to musical notes. Containing all letters of the alphabet, the musical equivalent uses all twelve tones; this yielded some surprisingly tonal-sounding musical material to develop. Thus I wrote four movements, totalling about six minutes of music:

I. Sphinx of Black Quartz, Judge My Vow
II. Pack My Box with Five Dozen Liquor Jugs
III. The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog
IV. The Five Boxing Wizards Jump Quickly

The work divides the violin section into four parts, and features the principal players of the violin and cello sections in two of the four movements. It was named a finalist in the “Musica Per Archi” international composition competition, and was premiered by the KLK String Orchestra in Lviv, Ukraine on June 17, 2024.