British composer Martin Ellerby (b. 1957) has distinguished himself as a composer of accessible and sophisticated music in several media, including wind band. His music has been performed in prestigious venues in Britain and around the world, and it has won him several awards. He studied composition at the London College of Music and the Royal College of Music under the tutelage of W. S. Lloyd Webber, Joseph Horovitz, and Wilfred Josephs. He has held many posts throughout his career, including a 7-year position as composer-in-residence for the Regimental Band of Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards, which resulted in much music that continues to be performed for official and royal occasions. Between compositions, he finds time to serve as Artistic Director of Studio Music Company in London.
Paris Sketches was written in 1994 for a commission from BASBWE (the British Association of Symphonic Bands and Wind Ensembles). It was premiered by an honor band at the BASBWE conference that year at the University of Huddersfield. Ellerby provides a detailed sketch of its inspiration on his website, which also includes recordings of each movement (links added by me):
This is my personal tribute to a city I love, and each movement pays homage to some part of the French capital and to other composers who lived, worked or passed through – rather as Ravel did in his own tribute to an earlier master in Le Tombeau de Couperin. Running like a unifying thread through the whole piece is the idea of bells – a prominent feature of Parisian life. The work is cast in four movements –
The Latin Quarter famous for artistic associations and bohemian lifestyle. This is a dawn prelude haunted by the shade of Ravel: the city awakens with the ever-present sound of morning bells.
2. Pigalle
The Soho of Paris. This is a ‘burlesque with scenes’ cast in the mould of a balletic scherzo – humorous in a kind of ‘Stravinsky-meets-Prokofiev’ way. It is episodic but everything is based on the harmonic figuration of the opening. The bells here are car horns and police sirens!
The city’s largest cemetery, the final resting place of many a celebrity who once walked its streets. The spirit of Satie’s Gymnopédies – themselves a tribute to a still more distant past – is affectionately evoked before the movement concludes with a ‘hidden’ quotation of the Dies Irae. This is the work’s slow movement, the mood is one of softness and delicacy, which I have attempted to match with more transparent orchestration. The bells are gentle, nostalgic, wistful.
4. Les Halles
A bustling finale with bells triumphant and celebratory. Les Halles is the old market area, a Parisian Covent Garden and, like Pigalle, this is a series of related but contrasted episodes. The climax quotes from Berlioz’s Te Deum, which was first performed in 1855 at the church of St Eustache, actually in the district of Les Halles. A gradual crescendo, initiated by the percussion, prefaces the material proper and the work ends with a backward glance at the first movement before closing with the final bars of the Berlioz Te Deum.
Ellerby names several famous composers as inspiration in the program notes. The first movement is “haunted by the shade of [Maurice] Ravel“, whose Le Tombeau de Couperin also served as the overarching inspiration for the framework of Paris Sketches:
Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev together provide the impetus behind the second movement. For a representative sample, here is a Burlesque from Stravinsky’s Petroushka:
And a short scherzo from Prokofiev:
The third movement takes inspiration from Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies:
It also throws in a nod to the famous Dies irae melody, befitting its funereal setting:
The final movement evokes the hustle and bustle of Les Halles, with a direct homage to Hector Berlioz via his Te Deum:
You can learn more about Martin Ellerby via his website, Wikipedia, the Wind Repertory Project, and London Music Press. See more about Paris Sketches at the Wind Repertory Project, Rundel Music, Jeffrey Cliff Mathews’s dissertation, and this rehearsal guide by Mark Heron. There is also an online score preview available.