Seizing Victory

What did you do with your down time during covid lockdowns? We get that question every once in a while and one of the things I did was work on my very first collaborative composition. My son, Alex, and I spent about a year working together on Seizing Victory, finishing up in mid 2021. We then performed it at the church where he is the music minister in late 2021. It is not only the collaboration that makes the Seizing Victory Trumpet Sonata different from most of my other work, the objective was also very different. I rarely just write to express myself. There is always something more to it than that. Yet, with Seizing Victory, I wanted Alex and I to enjoy the creative process together. So, in this case, very much in contrast with how I typically work, the objective was 100% expression. To be clear, I strive to be expressive in every composition I write. By making expression secondary to other needs (such as educational and commercial needs), that expression must be tempered to meet those objectives. Seizing Victory was not tempered in that way. Another very big difference with Seizing Victory Trumpet Sonata is that we were writing it to perform ourselves. This was not for students. It was not primarily commercial. It was something we wanted to do as a father and son project, to write something expressive that we could add to our recital program.