Oh wow, where to being for this week! I didn’t accomplish nearly as much on the site this week as I wanted to, because things went sideways real quick. Long story short, our cat Bento had to go to the ER for some surgery to remove some toy that he ate, among a lot of other crazy things that took away a lot of time and attention. So I don’t have purchases enabled quite yet. BUT I did get some other things done:

Growing Ranks

I have completed a new work for beginning band, in both full band and flexible/adaptable band forms. Growing Ranks is a simple march in the Sousa form that uses simple rhythms and only the first 5 notes of the Bb Major scale, perfect for a group of students brand new to their instruments and learning about how everything works. The piece was originally concepted in five parts: Soprano 1 (Piccolo/Flute/Oboe), Soprano 2 (Clarinet, Trumpet), Alto (Alto Sax, Horn in F), Tenor (Tenor Sax, Trombone, Euphonium) and Bass (Bassoon, Bass Clarinet, Baritone Sax, Tuba, String Bass), plus Percussion. This provides the usual doubling that you find in early band literature, as well as an easy way to convert it into a Flexible scoring version in SSATB+Percussion. The Flex Band version also includes a piano reduction to fill any voices that might be missing. Both the Full Band and Flexible Scoring version will be offered as a single digital download in the near future.

That’s all for this week!