On 24 Aug 2007 at 19:26, Raymond Horton wrote: > I'll go out on a limb and say that _generally_ Fulton, Sousa, and > modern university and pro bands play/played pieces like marches with > whomever they have/had present at the time. The instrumentation > varied for Sousa, certainly, over the years, and I imagine he did > much re-scoring of even his more serious works and transcriptions to > suit his changing band, rather than send players off-stage or see > them sit idle. > > This is the blessing and curse of the bands, as we have been > discussing.
I'm very, very well aware of it, having spent 15 years as assistant music director of the Illinois Premier Boys State Band. As you can well imagine, when you have all boys, you lack certain instruments. We were lucky to have 3 clarinets, or even one flute, but we had thousands of trumpets and trombones and drummers. Sometimes we had 1 clarinet, 6 alto saxes, 3 tenor saxes, 2 horns, 25 trumpets, 8 trombones, 2 baritones, 1 euphonium, 1 tube, 12 drummers. Try to make *that* sound good. I learned a lot about orchestrating for such ensembles (I was the de facto staff arranger -- learned to turn them out from scratch in about 4 hours of work, including copying parts, then rewriting and recopying parts after the first rehearsal to fix what I got wrong; it was a *great* learning experience). But that was a different kind of situation than pro-level groups (which for me includes the top-level university bands). I wish more of those organizations would take a historical approach to older music -- it would certainly provide much more variety of texture and sound on concerts. And I think it would be good for talented school bands to do the same thing. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
