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K.I.S.S.

Compromises

Wheat or chaff?

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K.I.S.S.

It's snowing to beat hell here (thanks for the euphemism, dad) and I'm on a week away from my day gig, chipping away at some BIG arrangin...

Another possible approach

I might have tried to transcribe something as awesome as the first movement of Mahler's 5th Symphony decades ago - I might have even thou...

Top of the Muffin to you!

Musings on Copyright

Get your head out of the score

Conductors who can't lift their head out of the score are a pet peeve. It usually means they don't trust their own understanding of the m...

Bass Doubling

I wrote something yesterday that was confusing even to me when I read it again today. Mea culpa. The offending sentence was: Wright notes...

Willow, Willow

Many years ago, I was walking past Bill Stanley’s trombone studio at CU Boulder and heard a most remarkable thing. I stuck my head in the...

Huzzah! to the Queen's Chapel

Renaissance keyboard music is really fun to arrange. The simplicity of the music (well, at least some of it) lends itself to crafty solut...

Arranging with intent

Many years ago, my friend and colleague Bill Stanley (professor of trombone, University of Colorado at Boulder) pointed me towards an art...

Writer's block

I wrote recently about starting with the bass line when beginning work on an arrangement. That is generally a true statement. However, th...

Thorny textures

For those that aren't familiar, Grainger frequently reworked his own compositions for instrumentations other than the original. Handel in...

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