The origins of this piece begin with a one off comment from my undergraduate band director about a “chromatic hot tub”. Strangely enough, this comment had me thinking generally about color and how it might work as a program for a larger work. Looking at the secondary color wheel I pondered: what would it mean to make two movements that sounded complimentary? How do warm colors and cold colors differ sonically? What does it mean to sound like a color in the first place? All of these questions and more were considered as I drew up a scheme to organize the piece. I also decided the piece should be written for brass, a family that feels underrepresented in contemporary works. The title Iridescence from Six Angles intends to evoke the rainbow shimmer that gleams off of metallic surfaces. Likewise, I aimed to capture a spectrum of colors from different configurations of the brass ensemble.

The piece is composed of six miniatures that each correspond to a color on the secondary color wheel: red, purple, blue, yellow, green, and orange. Each movement also corresponds to two adjacent key centers on the circle of fifths, meaning complimentary colors are in keys most distant from one another. Beyond that, each pair of complimentary colors represent two extremes of some musical element. The frenzied cacophony of Crimson contrasts with the simple peacefulness of Verdant. The harmonically dense, melodically driven Violet contrasts with the harmonically static, non-melodic Dandelion. Finally the barren, minor-key Azure contrasts with the lush, major-key Amber.