What is it?

At around 42 seconds from start to finish A Wedding Fanfare is the shortest stand-alone piece of music I’ve written to date, but it packs a lot into that short time. It’s written for solo unaccompanied violin. Although it involves some triple-stopping and a few four-note arpeggios, it’s not as difficult as it might at first appear. No prizes for guessing that it is meant to be played at a wedding.

I wrote this for the violinist Kirtley Leigh (American, now living in Australia). She’s a friend of the guy for whom I wrote A Himalaya Concerto. He and I were exchanging Facebook messages about the concerto when up popped a message from Kirtley that read “You could write me a wedding fanfare!”

So I did. In fact if I remember correctly, I wrote it sitting at a hotel room desk in Hanoi, Vietnam. I'm not a violinist myself, but like all composers I need to understand the technique and physiology of playing the instrument. I knew what sound I wanted and used RJ Miller's Contemporary Orchestration as my reference for the triple and quadruple stopped chords.