Brass Ensemble Compositions and Arrangements
My professional music career began as a 14-year-old tuba player in a Dixieland band at Cedar Point, an amusement park in my hometown of Sandusky, Ohio. Later, I was fortunate to attend Mount Union College where a fantastic music educator, Carl H. Kandel, had developed a unique brass ensemble environment. The Mount Union Brass Choir played nearly every weekend at a church service or a symposium somewhere in Ohio or eastward. In four years at Mount Union, I had the opportunity to play, arrange, and conduct brass music at Carnegie Hall in NYC, Riverside Church in NYC, the Washington National Cathedral in DC, Yale University, Central Moravian Church in Bethlehem (PA), and a myriad of other venues.
Choral music translates well to brass ensemble. Production, phrasing, and musical approach are similar in both mediums. Although my career was spent primarily as a choral music educator, I began brass ensembles wherever I taught. The music on this website is a result of that lifelong connection to brass ensemble music. I often tailored transcriptions to match the ensemble for which I was arranging, so, if you are interested in something that doesn’t quite match the ensemble that you have; I can create something more suitable. Recent examples include works for the Parma (OH) Symphony.
I use the Robert King method of describing my brass music: trumpet.horn.trombone.euphonium.tuba. In that format an arrangment with 3 trumpets, 2 horns, 3 trombones, and tuba would be listed as: 323.01.