New Music Release Thread

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

Glad it eased your morning chores. I'm drawing mixed reactions on the Dorico forum. Some like it, but one very vocal defender of the Bruckner 6th faith wishes I'd left the movement alone, mainly because of the sound engine I used to reproduce the instruments. He doesn't seem to have as big of a problem with my arrangement, and in fact seems to sort of like it, at least.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

New web page up:

https://dleejackson.lbjackson.com/2024/02/keil-and-carragan-and-dorico-oh-my/

Includes embeds of players for the first three movements of Bruckner's sixth, arranged for concert band / wind ensemble.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

At long last, I've finally finished the fourth movement of Bruckner's 6th Symphony, arranged for concert band / wind ensemble. It's not officially posted anywhere since I have yet to do a full proofreading pass (good lord, it's 415 measures long), but I have got a WeTransfer link to a FLAC file of it up for you to download:

https://we.tl/t-7ygAMR3EIF

Please feel free to download it. If you do, I would appreciate knowing what you thought of it. Thank you.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

I've just returned, more or less, from the King Con Cruise 2024 edition, a convention held by Jon St. John and hosted on Royal Caribbean's Liberty of the Seas cruise ship. My part of the convention was a presentation about the history of Video Game Music, from 8 Bits to 120-Piece Orchestral Scores. I had to do a 60-minute PowerPoint presentation, followed by a 30-minute Q&A and Raffle. Not to brag, but I think it went down pretty well. I got nothing but praise after it was done, with the exception of a couple of people who wanted me to include a game I'd missed. C'est la guerre. Still, I'm happy with the outcome.

I don't have any pics or recordings yet, but I will post any that get posted by others in the FB thread.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

I entered a competition earlier this year called the loadbang 2024 International Composition Competition. My entry was titled "Interweave," for 4 woodwinds and 3 brass. Well, it turns out that over 600 other people entered the competition, making my odds of winning very slim. The upshot of this is that I didn't win anything. However, now that the contest is over, I can let you listen to it. Here's the YouTube link:

Please note that the first 4 seconds of the video are silent.

Feel free to leave comments. Thanks!

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

I think...I think...I think I've completely finished proofreading all four movements of my band arrangement of Bruckner's 6th Symphony. Furthermore, I think I've finished putting all of the bells and whistles on it (e.g., adding a title sheet and a contents/arranger's notes page, making sure that everything is symmetric from one movement to the next, etc.). In other words, I think I'm finally, finally finished with this four-movement, 133-page behemoth of a work. Now, I need to print out and have bound three copies of the score (two to send out, one for safe keeping), but I will probably only be able to afford to do two at the moment. Both of the printed & bound copies will have to be sent out.

Until I can get to that part, I'm working on getting all four movements up on YouTube. I will advise when they're up.

[mlooney 3,733]

I'm some what surprised that you are using dead tree version for back up.  

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

3 minutes ago, mlooney said:

I'm some what surprised that you are using dead tree version for back up.  

I need a "safe keeping" score so I can have one to send out to a band director at a moment's notice. It's not for my safe keeping, therefore, it's for theirs.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

The YouTube task is done. Here are the links:

1st movement - https://youtu.be/bGvums5A6jg
2nd movement - https://youtu.be/1UA9Knu5S_s
3rd movement - https://youtu.be/U8MRGV5H5Vo
4th movement - https://youtu.be/0nA_0WMHkTY

 

Playlist with all four movements - https://youtu.be/bGvums5A6jg?si=tjmu1Y-iWBa3sEDx 
 

Enjoy with your favorite beverage.

 

 

 

 

[mlooney 3,733]

13 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

I need a "safe keeping" score so I can have one to send out to a band director at a moment's notice. It's not for my safe keeping, therefore, it's for theirs.

Ah, that makes sense.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

Just got a hit from someone who claims to be a member of the New Jersey Wind Ensemble (a rather prestigious organization) on my Bruckner 6th arrangement for band. On further research, the guy appears to be their principal oboist. I sent him a copy of the score, along with a copy of the Bach Prelude 7 score for good measure. If this pans out, then I shall be a happy camper. If not, then sigh once more, same as it ever was.

[mlooney 3,733]

Good luck!

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

I have spent in excess of 12 hours today working on my concert band / wind ensemble arrangement of Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 2 in C Minor. I did take a brief involuntary nap for about 2 hours in the late afternoon, but that's all. Don't ask me what's kept me going - perhaps it's guilt from having gone almost five days without working on it. Whatever the case, I've made tremendous progress to make up for the neglect.

I even managed to get my son to listen to it, and he practically never listens to my works in progress. His critique: "I want to hear more, and that's a good thing." Huzzah - sweet vindication.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

I finally hit a brick wall at around 6am and had to stop work on the Bruckner. My son and I did the math and figured that I'd done around 16 hours of arranging work from yesterday into today (I've been on a night shift schedule lately). Time to dump core and pull the Big Red Switch for the day.

[mlooney 3,733]

Creative brick walls suck, but it sounds like you got your allocated time in anyway.  I'm having trouble getting started on Project Z, after a strong start during a hypomanic phase.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

Oh, don't get me wrong - this wasn't a creative brick wall, not by any means. This was a more-or-less physical brick wall. I hit it and my body and mind couldn't go any further.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

I'm awake again. Waiting for Mrs. Prof to scan more pages from the study score so I can continue arranging. You see, the study score I bought is too small for me to work with, so she scans pages from it to PDF format, which I can zoom in on. Since her first batch, she normally does this while I'm working on previously scanned pages. It just so happens that I outpaced her while she was asleep this time.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

While I was waiting for Mrs. Prof to scan the score pages, I listened to a recording of the 1st Movement of Bruckner's Symphony No. 2. The movement clocks in at around 21 minutes in length. I've arranged around 8 of those minutes so far, so of particular interest to me were the remaining 13 minutes of the movement. Bruckner takes you on a journey and a half to get to the end, but Good Lord, is the payoff worth it!!! That last minute is so worth the trip it took to get there. It's incredibly powerful.

So, I now have pages 23 through 40 scanned and in my posession (don't ask me for a page total count, Mrs. Prof has the score and I'm not getting it back from her), which means I'm ready to work on the intervening minutes. Lots and lots of exposition. Oh, well. I've got the last minute to keep me going. And then there's Movements 2, 3, and 4... 

BTW, if you want to play along as I document this journey, here's a link to the recording I'm using as a reference. I bought a copy from Amazon. I suggest you do the same if you like it enough.

 

 

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

From the "Can't Win For Losing" Department:

A couple of months ago, I submitted several of my original works of chamber music to a publisher. They were some of my best work, and I'd pinned my hopes on them. I received an email about them yesterday. It was most definitely not the kind of email I wanted to receive about them. I quote:
 

Quote

 

Thank you for your patience...we have completed the review of music for the 2025 catalog and while the four pieces you sent us (Bohemian Galop, Interweave, Woodwind Quintet #1, Fanfare and Procession) are all excellent we are not able to commit to publishing them. We have decided to focus the next catalog on music that is accessible to beginner - intermediate musicians, and the music you sent is obviously more advanced than what we are aiming for.

I do appreciate you sending these compositions our way, and I sincerely hope that you will keep us in mind as future projects come up.

 

I was writing three of those pieces (all but Woodwind Quintet #1) for competitions, so naturally they were going to be on the tough side of things. Woodwind Quintet #1 was a tough work as well, from the moment I first plugged in the notes back in the early 1990s. Still, they think the pieces are "excellent," but they're not going to publish them because they're just a tad bit too tough. Oh my dear lord, it's Harrison Bergeron time in music publishing. Sigh, and sigh again.

I'm out of options as to whom I should send these chamber works for publication. I'm really left with just one viable option: J.W. Pepper's "MyScore" self-publishing service. It's a semi-free service (there's a one-time $99 set-up fee to get the ball rolling, after which there are no more fees) where you publish your own works online in any form and format. I think I'm going to go that route, but even that comes with a catch for me: we're trying to save money, so I've got to wait until after our credit card billing cycle closes just past the middle of the month (according to Mrs. Prof) before I can afford to pay the set-up fee. The bad part about that business is that I'll probably be recovering from major left knee surgery around that time (see the medical thread for details for that), and I won't feel like doing much of anything. Add in yet another sigh.

I think I'm going to go try to talk Mrs. Prof out of this deadline business. Into the lioness' den I go. Cross your appendages for me.

EDIT: It wasn't easy, but I got her talked out of mid-August. Now, I'm just waiting until after my appointment with the knee doctor on Monday, August 5th. I might also be taking over the family budget duties. Anyone know anything about that "Rocket Money" thing they advertise on TV? ')

Edited August 2, 2024 by ProfessorTomoe

[Don Edwards 572]

5 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Anyone know anything about that "Rocket Money" thing they advertise on TV?

I know that those TV ads aren't cheap, and the money to pay for them comes from the customers who answer them.

[mlooney 3,733]

19 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

From the "Can't Win For Losing" Department:

A couple of months ago, I submitted several of my original works of chamber music to a publisher. They were some of my best work, and I'd pinned my hopes on them. I received an email about them yesterday. It was most definitely not the kind of email I wanted to receive about them. I quote:
 

Quote

 

Thank you for your patience...we have completed the review of music for the 2025 catalog and while the four pieces you sent us (Bohemian Galop, Interweave, Woodwind Quintet #1, Fanfare and Procession) are all excellent we are not able to commit to publishing them. We have decided to focus the next catalog on music that is accessible to beginner - intermediate musicians, and the music you sent is obviously more advanced than what we are aiming for.

I do appreciate you sending these compositions our way, and I sincerely hope that you will keep us in mind as future projects come up.

Well, fuck/

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

3 hours ago, mlooney said:

Well, fuck/

That's pretty close to what I said after I first read the email.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

I'm in the process of setting up an account with J.W. Pepper's MyScore self-publishing service. Right now, the account is live, but thanks to some technical difficulties on MyScore's end, my composer page is just a stub. You can bookmark it if you'd like and check back to see when it finally updates. I'll put the link into this post.

In the meantime, I'm keeping busy at getting all of my concert band / wind ensemble and my chamber music pieces ready for publication. It won't be long now until you can buy real printed music of my recent classical works! Stay tuned!

https://www.jwpepper.com/myscore/leejackson

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

MyScore is rapidly making me MyPissed. They've come online, bit by tiny bit, but they have yet to implement all their fixes as a whole for my account. As a result, I've got two of my pieces uploaded now, but they're waiting for descriptions and other contextual data before the system will put them fully online for sale. Aauugghh.

Still, I have a very pretty profile page you can now see at the address I posted in the above message. Please let me know if it's too kitschy. Thanks.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,351]

FINALLY! I've been able to upload some of my works to MyScore! Six of them, in fact - five chamber music works and one concert band work. They're not online as of 2024-08-13 / 0532 CDT, so give them a day or two for processing before they go live. They are:

Woodwind Quintet No 1
Fanfare and Processions for Brass Sextet
Bohemian Galop (for French Horn Sextet)
Interweave (for Mixed Brass / Woodwind Septet)
Theme and Tangents (for Woodwind Quintet)

Prelude No. 7 in Eb Major from "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1" (for concert band / wind ensemble)

I'm munching on Parmigiano Reggiano from Costco to help allay the anxiety without hard drugs. If this doesn't help, it's on to the Ativan I go. Doesn't help that I've got a nasty hangnail on my right pinky that's making typing this a real bitch. Urgh.