About

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I'm a composer/arranger and low brass player/teacher based in Tucson, Arizona. This blog has announcements of new publications and musical events. My compositions and arrangements are available on Sheet Music Plus and Sheet Music Direct. Information about private lessons is available at NeoPragma.

Popular posts from this blog

Is F-flat Major a Key?

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The brass quintet I play in has been looking at the Viktor Ewald quintets, and we were bemused to find this: It's the opening of the third movement in quintet no. 4, and it's in Fb major - eight flats (that is, seven flats with B double-flat). Okay, why not E major, then? Well, the rest of the piece is in flat keys; all four of the quintets are in flat keys. It wouldn't have looked as funky to them as it does to us. Today, the standard instrumentation of a brass quintet is 2 Bb trumpets, F horn, trombone, and tuba (or bass trombone). The trombone and tuba parts are written in concert pitch, so we end up with eight flats in those parts. In Ewald's day, a brass quintet was a subset of a brass band. The instrumentation in his group was 2 Bb cornets, Eb alto horn, Bb baritone horn, and Bb tuba. The parts were transposed and written in treble clef, as in a brass band. So, the passage above would have looked something like this: The parts for the Bb instruments...
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Tribute to Renée Goode

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The award-winning American poet Renée Nicole Goode was killed execution-style by an operative of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) not far from her home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 7, 2026. She is survived by her spouse and three children. I composed a piece for concert band in her memory, entitled "...and what dies there." The title is the final line of her poem, "On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs." The work won the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize. The title seems apt to me, because when a government starts killing its own people, something more dies besides the individual victims. Goode was not the first American killed by the government, and she will not be the last, but her murder struck a chord with the American people because of the brutal and casual way it was done and the lies told by the government to try and justify the killing afterwards. The piece is offered at the minimum price the online sheet music sites will accep...
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The Incredibly Big Pork Chop

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You never know whence musical inspiration may come. Waiting for a flight at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport in 2017, I overheard one end of a phone conversation between a young woman and her friend. As many people do, she said too much about herself and spoke more loudly than necessary, as if unaware she was in a public space. She described a pork chop she had been served in a restaurant. Apparently, it was larger than she had expected, and she couldn't finish it. She expounded on this fascinating subject for a good(?) twenty minutes, at a forte dynamic level. It struck me as a little funny that she was a doctor, and yet had a very limited vocabulary. She mentioned the size of the pork chop many, many times, and yet could only think of a few simple ways to describe it. It was, repeatedly, "big," "very big," "so big," "really big," or "incredibly big." The whole presentation seemed overly theatrical. And so The Incredibly Big...
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