Great Expectations
ENS.1994.1 | 11′
2 Flutes, 2 Clarinets, Tenor Sax, Horn, 2 Trumpets
I. The Convict
II. Pip
III. The Fight
IV. Satis House
V. Little Britain
VI. Herbert Pocket
VII. Miss Havisham
VIII. Apotheosis
Great Expectations
Great Expectations is a suite for wind instruments composed in 1994 as an assignment for my freshman high school English class. Though it was my intention to have friends from the school concert band perform the piece, unfortunately that never happened. This was due in part to the difficulty of the work and in part because I had a … let’s call it “shaky” grasp of transposition and instrumention, repeatedly confusing written and sounding ranges (especially of the saxophone and horn) with consequences that are visible in the original score.
Twenty-five years later I engraved the score in Sibelius and took the opportunity to rework the piece to make it performable. This entailed moving parts up and down octaves into more comfortable ranges, renotating measures, fixing harmonies, and generally fiddling with things here and there. I do not think of it so much as recomposition—or even really revision—so much as repairing the errors of youth and finally making audible what I had heard in my head but could not yet quite put properly onto paper.
There are eight movements roughly following Dickens’s novel. First we meet The Convict in the churchyard, followed by Pip, and The Fight between convicts. Next we travel to Satis House and meet Miss Havisham and Estella, before traveling to Little Britain where Jaggers and Wemmick reside alongside Herbert Pocket. Eventually we learn the story of Miss Havisham, and the story comes to an end with Pip’s Apotheosis.