Although relatively brief at eight-and-a-half minutes, this one-movement work for concert band is a serious work, exploring various coloristic combinations of its medium.

Leslie Bassett (b. 1923 in Hanford, CA) is a highly honored American composer. He received his education at California State University at Fresno and at the University of Michigan, where he spent the major part of his teaching career, becoming the Albert A. Stanley Emeritus Professor of Composition. His own teachers included Roberto Gerhard, Arthur Honegger, and Nadia Boulanger. He has composed in a wide variety of media, including both tonal music and serial procedures, as well as electronic music. He won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize in music for a set of variations for orchestra. He is a widely performed composer, with a large catalog in a wide variety of classical media, with an emphasis on instrumental writing, though he has a considerable number of choral works to his credit.

He has a strong background in band; among his principal instruments is the trombone, which he played as a member and arranger of a U.S. Army Band during World War II. His band compositions have won the John Philip Sousa Award. Bassett wrote this work on commission from the [United States] College Band Directors National Association for a premiere performance at its 1985 national conference.

The work is built of two major sections, slower and faster, linked by a solo for euphonium. While it strikes this listener as a tonal work with extended use of chromaticism, it also sounds as though it uses serial procedures, with a sinuous subject announced at the outset on vibraphone that is also the basis for many vertical sonorities (chords and contrasts of chords) throughout the piece. These note-series are not, strictly speaking, twelve-tone in derivation, since the composer draws them from various eight-note scales and from the two whole-tone scales.

These, it would seem, are the "colors" of the titles. The "contrasts" stem from the way the material appears organized on the page. These contours, as the composer says in a note to the work, are shaped as "musical pyramids, crescendos and diminuendos, arpeggios, silences, and free-time." One or another of these and similar contours dominates, in succession, the several individual sections of the work. Throughout the work, multiple pitch sets sometimes unwind in layers simultaneously.

The result of all of this for the listener is surprisingly mellow in sound, due to Bassett's excellent orchestration, though the harmonic language of the work is complex. It is the ongoing wash of constantly changing ensemble color that makes Colors and Contrasts engaging to the ear of a moderately experienced classical listener.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide