TromboneExcerpts.org

In the horn world we have been blessed for a number of years with a great interactive horn website, HornExcerpts.org. If you have never visited, you need to! Bruce Hembd has a review here. Lots of students use it to print out excerpts but the real value is in the interactive aspect of the site, where you can listen to a number of representative audio clips of every excerpt, which is hugely helpful in learning excerpts on a high level. We have to listen to music!

Here at Horn Matters, as noted at the upper right hand corner of every page in the site, we look beyond the horn often to brass related topics and the business of performing classical music. As a professor at Arizona State I have the opportunity to work closely with students outside the horn studio. I am always on several Doctoral committees and one of the three students graduating with a DMA this semester will be bass trombonist Seth Vatt.

His Doctoral project related to the development of a website, TromboneExcerpts.org. You guessed it: a trombone website with recordings and selected music for major tenor and bass trombone excerpts. It sounds a lot like  HornExcerpts.org, and there are similarities for sure (there are only so many ways to lay out something like this), but Vatt did actually start working on ideas toward this trombone project as early as  2001 and he has gone beyond the horn website in size and scope. On his About page we read:

The idea for this site came about during my undergraduate studies at the University of Kentucky in early 2001. In the fall of 2008, the Graduate and Professional Student Association at Arizona State University selected this project as one of its Research Grant Competition winners, awarding a generous grant to fund this project in part as terminal doctoral research.

The number of actual recordings on the trombone site is quite a bit higher than on the horn site. Note also his disclaimer:

According to Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law, the content of this site falls within the boundaries of “fair use” because it is a non-profit, educational resource, and presents only a part of a whole regarding each recording and printed excerpt.

This content is intended for educational use only. TromboneExcerpts.org receives no monetary profit from the operation of this site. Please support classical and orchestral music by purchasing theses quality recordings.

This type of project is great as an academic, educational project; many people will find it really useful. There is no direct commercial side to this project either, as if there were it would run into copyright issues as indicated above.

He defended his project this past week and passed! We congratulate him on this accomplishment.

The site itself has been online for several years and is the #1 hit if you Google “trombone excerpts.” Still, I am sure many trombonists don’t or barely know this site exists and have never used it. Check it out yourself and mention it to your trombone friends, it is a great site.