TONIGHT, MAGGIE Broughton and her quartet will play as part of her Capstone program, a project for graduating seniors at Mt. Ararat High School in Topsham. Quartet members include, from left, Ashley Parker on trombone, Broughton on tuba and Macey Downs on trumpet. Not shown is Natalie Burch, who plays the French horn.
Maggie Broughton has played the tuba since she was in eighth grade, and she likes the sound of brass. So much so, she started an all-female brass quartet, consisting of her tuba, and a trombone, trumpet and French horn.
“I like to arrange music from video games,” said Broughton.
Most video games aren’t arranged for brass quartets, of course. That means transposition, which isn’t an easy task for seasoned arrangers, at least not for brass instrumentation.
For instance, the E-flat tuba sounds a major thirteenth — an octave and a major sixth — lower than it is written, while a trumpet in F sounds a perfect fourth higher than written.
If that sounds like your worst mathematics class ever, you’re not alone. It’s not easy to keep straight, even if you understand it. And Broughton does understand it.
But she wanted to do it anyway.
Not that long ago, she finished the game “Zelda: A Link to the Past” and found herself listening to the end credit music.
“I could hear all the different parts,” she said. “And the music meant something to me, because I could always remember beating the game.”
Luckily for Broughton, transposition comes more easily in another video game of sorts: “Sibelius” is a musical arrangement program, and Broughton figured out how to use it.
“It sounded funny at first, but then I realized it sounded that way because it hadn’t been transposed yet. I had to figure out how to use the program, but after I did, it was simple, and it sounds perfect.”
Tonight, Broughton and her quartet — plus an extra trumpet to give the piece a stronger balance and a little depth — will play as part of her Capstone program, a project for graduating seniors at Mt. Ararat High School.
She had originally planned to arrange the whole band, and she did a piece for all the instrumentation. “But it was only about two minutes long,” she said. “So I wanted to do a longer piece for a smaller number of instruments.”
The result was the Zelda arrangement.
Broughton also recently played the Side by Side concert for the Midcoast Symphony Orchestra. She lamented that a lot of orchestral music has only small, intermittent parts for tuba. “Ordinarily, you play three notes, then you have a 64 bar rest,” she said, laughing. “But with the MSO, we had a chance to play the ‘Academic Festival Overture’ (by Johannes Brahms). It was a good one to be part of.”
Broughton also plays the trombone in the school jazz band and, occasionally, the euphonium, which is a tenor tuba.
She’s going to Ithaca College next year, majoring in philosophy with a minor in music. But that plan could change, she acknowledged.
“I’m not even in college yet, and I’ve changed my major three times already,” she said.
THE CONCERT will take place tonight at 7 p.m. at Mt. Ararat High School. It is open to the public.
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