Frank Ticheli’s “Peace” is a fabulous little gem of a piece that really pops with a simple melody in the trumpet parts and throughout the brass. It really is a delightful fanfare of styles and sorts and is perfect for middle school and high school players. It just shows that the composer can compose for any level and the limitations of the players yield great realms of possibility for writing.
Ticheli’s knack for writing pieces that are aesthetically pleasing to the ear is phenomenal. Listening to this piece in E-flat major really does bring a feeling of peace to the ears, to the mind and to the heart. It really fills the soul with joy. We need many more of these. Peace and love will be what wins out in the end. No other thing will suffice.
This is a fabulous peace for a small band or an ensemble that may be just past getting their stage legs together. I recommend that you go and get a copy of the work and spend some time listening to it over and over until it fills your soul with peace. Take it to your ensemble and see how they recreate it.
There are brief periods where the texture goes into the minor key, only to come right back around to the major key and surprise us with simple bliss. At the very beginning of the piece we can hear the tinkling of mallets and tubular bells resounding in a single E-flat note while the woodwinds and brass exchange the main melody back and forth. There’s even the intervals of sixths going on in the clarinets in the woodwind sections of the main melody—beautiful! The brass sections of the main melody offer a little different intervalic relationship. They have the sixths starting out climaxing in the lower brass a second between each trombone part. There is also another melodic section that seems to be going in a G minor tonality with striking G minor chords that repeat in eighth notes going into a B-flat major tonality that ends in symbolizing the piece’s namesake. The piece is very simple in the fact that it goes back and forth between the main and secondary melodic phrases and then ends. It is a good concert opener or side-filler to set a tone for a concert. I could definitely see this being done live and it is pretty simple for the conductor to conduct. Again, I would recommend this piece as a meditation to all the suffering in the world and also to help take individual people’s pain away.
