New York Brass Quintet

The New York Brass Quintet, founded in 1954 by Robert Nagel and Harvey Phillips, was the first brass quintet to regularly perform on the concert stage. The ensemble is credited with popularizing the modern brass quintet in its most common form: 2 trumpets, 1 horn, 1 trombone, and 1 tuba. While the NYBQ most frequently performed transcriptions, they also commissioned prominent works for the brass quintet by Alec Wilder (1959), Malcolm Arnold (1961), Gunther Schuller (1961), Alvin Etler (1963), Vincent Persichetti (1968), and Jan Bach (1971). The quintet disbanded in 1985.