Playing Favorites

The St. Clair High School Band has a tradition of playing one of Karl King's most famous marches, "Barnum and Bailey's Favorite" each year as their competition tune for parades. With that in mind, their band directors suggested that this commission use the thematic material from the march and repurpose those melodies into an overture. The result is this unusual piece entitled Playing Favorites.

While the opening and closing sections of the piece are nearly identical to the original march in order to give the audience some context, the themes are quickly reimagined and used in some unexpected ways. The most obvious example is the lyrical section of the piece where the thematic material is deconstructed in order to create a vastly different vision of the melodic fragments set in a minor key. The end of the piece is a near replication of the original march, although it is placed in a different key, and a cadential extension allows for a more theatrical ending.