Publishing a Trio for Alto Saxophone, Flute, and Piano

      Today, I finished the last editorial touches on a trio for Alto Saxophone, flute, and piano. I was excited to package it up, along with some recordings my friends Mike Sakash and Julia Hendrickson and John Cotter helped with. I'll be mailing it to Cincinnati tomorrow to be part of the National contest for "Distinguished Composer of the Year,"  a program of the Music Teachers' National Association. I am also posting it here, in case there are other trios like ours out there who want to play it.
      Now some of you may ask whether I have copy-righted the music. Well, I do have my name clearly emblazoned on the scores. But I do want to share the experience of my music. That is I want people to hear it. To be living music, it needs players and an audience.
      So if you would like to play this music, please do. All I ask is that you credit me with its composition in your performance and let me know if you plan to perform it. I'd like to know that my music is being played and (I hope) enjoyed in different places. Beyond those two things, I'd like you to you think a bit about how it might be possible to compensate me. I have considered putting a donate button on this site, but I haven't done that yet, nor am I convinced it's the right thing to do. I compose because I must. I earn my living as a music teacher (which occupation I dearly love). But more economic freedom would certainly buy me more time for composing. So if you like the music, think about this issue a bit and let me know what you think. What would be a convenient way for you to express your valuation of it? What would be fair? What would help more art flourish in the world?

     Please follow this link to the folder with the sheet music in it

   Files for Trio for Alto Saxophone, Flute, and Piano

This posting is for my orchestra friends. You can now download audio files for the piece "Vignettes From the Life of John Brown" that you are helping me premiere on October 28th. There are two types of files: midi and .wav. Both types play the tunes. The midi files do not use correct instruments. The .wav files are more accurate (but still a bit computery). The midi files are much smaller than the .wav files, so pick whichever makes sense on your machine.

Let me know if this process works for you!

Here's the link the the folder where the files are.
Click here for audio files of Vignettes from the Life of John Brown

Happy practicing.

A New Trio for Flute Saxophone and Piano

       Thanks to the generosity of New Hampshire's chapter of Music Teacher's National Association, a piece of mine will be premiered on Saturday, October 6^th at 3:30 PM at Keene State College. I was selected as the commisioned composer of the year by NHMTA. I've written a trio for flute, saxophone and piano. Mike Sakash and Julia Hendrickson will be performing with me. We hope to record the piece and perform it in the Conway area sometime in the next year, so if you can't make it to Keene, you still may have a chance to hear it performed.

      The piece is largely tonal, but it employs some stealthy elements of bitonality. The result is much more consonant than Kodaly's duo for violin and viola, but much more spicy than Robert Schumann's chamber works (to whom the piece owes a lot of inspiration.). Germaine Tailleferre and Bohuslav Martinu, two composer's whose work I've studied over the last couple of years, also influenced this work.

There are four movements, a romantic adagio, a jolly romp through the statements and developments of three themes, a fugue based on computational trees, and a motile allegro with a lyrical melody. I think the work is quite listenable despite my indulgence of academic compositional techniques.