The Music of W. Francis McBeth

Greetings!

Considering that I've been reading and rereading W. Francis McBeth's book, "Effective Performance of Band Music", I figured I couldn't move on from talking about it without bringing some of his music to this blog. I mean, the man came up with the Pyramid of Sound schema, after all!

In looking around for music to feature on this blog, I discovered that he wrote "Daniel in the Lion's Den", a tuba solo with band accompaniment written for Daniel Perantoni and featured on Perantoni's solo album, "Daniel in the Lion's Den". This is a cool thing to me, because as I've mentioned before, Daniel Perantoni's was the first truly incredible tuba sound I ever heard, and it was a constant inspiration to me as a tubist, especially in high school. It was one of, if not my favorite track on the album. What a cool way to have been impacted by McBeth!

Hindemith, Copland and Stravinsky Conducting Their Work

Greetings!

YouTube has become an incredible resource for us musicians, as well as fans of music. Every time I go digging around for stuff, I find new things to get pumped about. Today's blog is a few selections of famous composers conducting their own works, all of which have transcriptions for band. The last one not only has audio, but actually includes video as well! Enjoy!

Music by Frank Erickson

Greetings!

For some odd reason I recently had the craving to listen to the music of Frank Erickson.

Frank Erickson was an important composer and arranger for wind band after World War II. He also did some pedagogical work, including arranging music for the "First Division Band Method" and writing his own band course. I won't go into great detail about his bio, but if you're interested you can find some information on windrep.org. All that I'll really say is that he wrote some gorgeous music. Several of his prominent works are slow and lyrical. He has an exceptional ability to write beautiful, moving lines, and this has caused band directors for decades to use that music to help teach musicianship to their players.