P.S. to John Howell...my mother hails from Radford. I can remember going to Blacksburg many times as a child with my mother and grandmother.
Ever catch a New Virginians show, Karen? I directed the group and produced the shows starting in 1979.
P.S.S. Christopher, thank you for also writing in your post about how you actually create your music i.e. still with paper and pencil at the piano in the beginning and then to the computer. I'm with you on that!! I can't write directly to the computer either though I know there are those who can and do with much success. I too usually start at the piano and then move to the computer to orchestrate. Maybe this is another idea for an OT conversation. I'm always curious as to others' methods of writing and how they go about the process.
You're right, that everyone probably works differently. For close to 12 years a very talented arranger named Paul Breske and I split the arranging for The New Virginians. Paul conceived the entire arrangement as a whole, which made for fairly simple (Broadway style) choral voicings, and treated the 6 horns like a small big band.
Not me! I always worked out the vocal arrangements (and basic chord flow) first, at the piano, exploring possibilities and narrowing them down. Made for some richer and more flexible voicings. (It was a good contrast and the group benefitted from having two different approaches.) Then I mostly wrote the showband charts at my desk, except for checking some voicings at the keyboard. Probably comes from 20 years of writing (vocal) quartet charts and thinking of the band lines as sweetening, since we had to have charts that worked for everything from piano trio to the Tonight Show band.
I started working directly into the computer about 14 years ago, when our department started furnishing us with good Macs (Professional Composer--yechhh!; Mosaic--a great improvement), and do it now even for large-scale charts. The stack of ms. paper in my cabinet will probably never get used up! Works great for CD transcriptions, where you concentrate on one thing at a time.
John
-- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
