NORWICH – The Chenango County Council of the Arts, Norwich, announces the 2nd performance in its annual spring Chamber Music Series.

The Syracuse Symphony Orchestra Brass Quintet will perform at the Martin W. Kappel Theater at 3 p.m. on Sunday, March 7.

The contemporary brass quintet, as a chamber ensemble, is relatively new to the musical scene, having its beginnings in the late 1940s with the introduction of the Chicago Brass Quintet and the New York Brass Quintet. As a performing ensemble the brass quintet is quite flexible, with repertoire for the medium as varied as music itself, encompassing arrangements of everything from madrigals to hymns to polkas and marches to jazz and big band tunes. There has not, however, been an extensive amount of literature composed specifically for this ensemble. The Chicago and New York groups made a concerted effort to commission new works for the ensemble, and much of the existing literature comes from that era. The American Brass Quintet continues the effort at creating new repertoire for this unique ensemble, but the bulk of the available repertoire remains in the form of arrangements of other works.