One of the more enduring genre of art music, the term Romance has been applied to a large corpus of musical compositions for every media, as well as to prose and poetry, beginning in 15th Century Spain and Italy. Romances for solo instruments typically exploit the lyricism, simplicity, and “romance” of their vocal counterparts; when cast in a Rondo form, these compositions often contrasted such music with displays of virtuosity.

Romance for Bass Trombone and Piano was commissioned by Joel Keene. The lyrical melody of Romance evades a purely tonal harmonic structure by means of the octatonic (half-step, whole-step) scales in which this work is composed. Elements of the blues scale can also be detected, thus heightening the lyricism of the melody.