Tag: composing

Well, it isn’t compulsory, that’s a fact and when we journey out from the realm of European ‘classical’ (and other) styles we encounter more and more regions where musicians barely give the idea a second thought. The book deals in some depth with form and the way in which other elements, particularly rhythm, are affected […]

Composers will occasionally pause to think about about what they do and why they do it and then get on with their daily business. Some will rarely think about it at all. But it can be interesting to assess current attitudes against the background of what has gone before. For example, many years ago music […]

I’ve had a number of interesting conversations on here where ideas stray into the realms of philosophy. As a composer/arranger/trombonist ­– and I was also classically trained as an artist – I’ve never spent too much time dwelling on ideas that are better handled by musicologists who specialize in them. I usually have little time […]

My book was never intended to become a philosophical work. Nevertheless, I believed it to be important to establish a common ground regarding objectivity because I was aware that ideas about music and art are often hopelessly subjective. Here’s a quote from the part of the book dealing with ‘Composition’, where the detailed studies of […]

Musicians spend a huge chunk of their lives sitting at rehearsals and paying attention to instructions from the MD. In my experience, MD’s have generally been fairly competent. What I’d like to do here is to provide them with a little feedback; a view from the trenches. My early experiences were with various big bands […]

The English-style brass band is unique in its origins and instrumentation. Men who performed heavy duty work in hostile environments found it easier to pick up brass instruments than orchestral instruments such as violins and woodwinds and their employers often encouraged them to do so, providing rehearsal facilities and sponsorship. High-achieving bands were associated with […]

One of the great things about WordPress is the opportunity to talk with people worldwide, swopping ideas and learning from each other. One of my recent blogs discussed whether or not music is truly an international language, as some people believe it to be. Another dealt with the mixture of intuition and formalism in a […]

One of the most common mistakes arrangers make in their early days is to treat the brass (trumpets and trombones in the big band context) consistently as one section. In reality it often isn’t and the reason for this is simple. Ideally, the brass section would be one family of instruments with increasing bore sizes […]