A Downland Suite

Composer: IRELAND, John
  • Ireland originally composed A Downland Suite for brass band in 1932, as a test piece for the National Brass Band Championships of Great Britain.1
  • Ireland arranged the suite’s movement 2, “Elegy,” and mvt. 3, “Minuet,” for strings in 1941. Ireland felt that both movements were better suited to string orchestra than band.2
    • Gustav Holst composed his Moorside Suite for a different year of the same brass competition in 1928.3
  • The string version of “Elegy” premiered on a BBC wartime broadcast on May 2, 1942. 4
  • *A downland is an area of open chalk hills. This term is especially used to describe the chalk countryside in southern England.

Sources

  1. Hugh Ottaway, “Ireland, John,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed October 30, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000013905.
  2. Lewis Foreman, ed., The John Ireland Companion (United Kingdom: Boydell Press, 2011), 210.
  3. Roy Newsome, Brass Roots: A Hundred Years of Brass Bands and Their Music (New York: Routledge, 2018), ebook, accessed October 24, 2019, https://books.google.com/books?id=7ciWDwAAQBAJ&dq=brass+roots+major+british+composers+of+brass+band+music:+gustav+holst&source=gbs_navlinks_s.
  4. Lewis Foreman, ed., The John Ireland Companion (United Kingdom: Boydell Press, 2011), 210.

Cut IDs

44048