Acrostic Sounds: RCBQ’s Spring Recital
Contemporary brass music decrypting cultures, concepts, and composers.
On May 23rd, join RCBQ for a powerful evening of bold and expressive brass music from across the world.
Our Second Album Is Here!
Rose City Brass Quintet’s Pan-American Expressions weaves a vibrant tapestry of brass soundscapes, celebrating underrepresented composers and diverse musical voices from across the Americas in one poetic, exhilarating journey.
Excellence in Chamber Brass
Audiences at recitals have come away raving about Rose City Brass Quintet’s brand of chamber music, and the depth of detail and care taken to create riveting experiences of the best brass quintet literature. From Renaissance to modern repertoire, RCBQ finds their own unique take and commits to providing an exceptional, inviting, and close-up look into this commanding music.
Our first recording, Disquiet
Disquiet was a project conceived during the global pandemic of 2020. While much of the world was shut down due to the spread of the novel coronavirus SARS-COV2, a cultural upwelling was simultaneously occurring throughout the United States around racial unity and justice. Living in an epicenter of this alchemical moment, Rose City Brass Quintet used this challenging environment to incubate: finding our voice as an ensemble and developing new art to help us understand the world we found ourselves now inhabiting.
Four of the pieces on Disquiet were written during this period: some focusing on the isolation of the pandemic, others around the racial inequities that permeate our society. Pairing these new works with existing brass quintet literature that speaks to the themes of oppression and isolation via the tragedies of the Greensboro Massacre and tyrannical Communism in Czechoslovakia, we aim to grapple, imperfectly, with this shared moment of disquiet. We humbly present this experience for chamber music listeners to remember 2020: an era unique to our generation; a year that challenged us to engage and struggle with our intellectual, cultural and philosophical ideals, a year filled with moments of desolation and strife, of shared humanity and love, of anger, frustration, and of hope.
