The Four Swords

The Four Swords is a commission from the Mid America Freedom Band, as a result of their Call for Proposals to write the ensemble a new piece for the concert band's 2018-2019 season, "Colors". The tune for The Four Swords goes back to the summer of 1990, when my younger brother and I started writing and illustrating our fantasy book, "The Adventures of Zaropeth and Zorogis", the story of a warrior and a dwarf with a penchant for eating meat and corn, on their circuitous route to Death Mountain to free their parents from imprisonment by the evil and merciless DEATH=ADDER. Over the course of a year, my brother and I wrote the first book and got a few chapters into the 2nd volume, and then the notebooks disappeared until the summer of 2017, when I found them in a box of my old stuff from childhood. I read the books to my niece and nephew, who were the same ages as my brother and I when we started writing the books. My niece and nephew promptly decided that it was time to continue the story, and so they did. The stories got funnier and weirder and more complex, and then we began Volume 3: "The Tale of the Four Swords". The swords of Vengeness, Hoodlums, Justice, and Chaos are represented in the music with color and rhythm themes. The low brass are gold and silver, the high woodwinds are yellow and red, the high brass and low woodwinds are blue and green, and the percussion is a bright purple. The colors weave and starkly shift until they all come together at the end as a giant 60-plus piece rainbow! This music is a tribute to the enduring and hilarious adventures of childhood imagination.