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I have been unhappy with my production as of late, so I decided to work on a piece for much longer than I normally do, and these is the unfinished results of my time. "A drop of color - For Wind Band (Rough Draft, Unfinshed)". Critique and review are very welcome. Please keep in mind that this is a very rough draft, and none of the visual weirdness or engraving issues will be present in the final score. https://youtu.be/4KUo4SZu5UA

Finished this much faster than I thought I would, so I guess i'll post it here. PROGRAM NOTES Mov I, A Surreal Landscape. This introduction movement is slow, alluring, and representative of the night before christmas. Snow outside, warm clothes and an unsettling nervousness about the day to come. Mov II, Horizons. This movement begins the downward spiral. Not all life is as it seems. You expect gifts under your tree, but all that is there is a rock, and a looming horned shadow making its way across the horizon. Mov III, Arrival. The middle movement of the piece begins the flight of Certa. Certa, known in most cultures as Krampus, is on his way to deliver children to their untimely ends, for not cleaning their rooms and eating more hot pockets than the serving size suggests. Mov IV, Naught To Give. The final movement is the closest you will come to Certa. He walks up to your door and surveys the landscape. He turns around and starts to walk away. I guess you have until next year.

https://soundcloud.com/user859741024/aesthetic-night Recording on SoundCloud an alto saxophone solo with wind band

A while ago I decided that writing for wind band was something I wanted to seriously pursue. After a couple false starts this year, I finally got going on a second wind band work (after 'Aviary', which was performed twice last year), and gradually worked on it over the last two months. It's now become my longest single-movement work so far, and I'm quite proud of a few of the ideas in it. I'll soon be sending it around to a few conductor friends of mine to see if anyone will be willing to play it, but I'm pretty sure that someone will somewhere. The score still needs a bit of polishing here and there but I'll leave that for if/when I have to make some presentable parts.

CYCLES for grade 4+ wind band Full of repetitive patterns and interesting musical approaches. Also a mean clarinet solo in the middle; as well as film-like and smooth modern jazz styles that rotate back and forth. Tell me what you think about this piece. It serves as a special dedication to a composer by the name of David Shaffer.

Hello! It has been a long while since I posted here, and whatever little I did post went along with the refresh (???) of this forum. Anyway, here is an unnamed (because I'm bad with names) concert march which I have been working on and off over the past few months. It is written in the Japanese concert march style if you are familiar with it. The marches are typically written for the All-Japan Band Competition as set pieces. They tend to have a slightly different structure and (sometimes almost completely different) feel from the traditional English and American marches. There's no particular inspiration or motivation for this piece - just a short work which I had fun working on in my free time. Admittedly, this isn't exactly a piece which less experienced bands should attempt. If this piece ever gets played at all. Notation may be weird in some places (notes for bari sax are halved in value rather than stacatto-ed, questionable dynamics, no slurs in euphonium part, etc) but that is to achieve better playback quality since the midi (Sibelius Sounds) do mess up at times, so please don't mind them! Do comment on the piece, and I hope you enjoy it. :-)

"When putting chaos into music, there's always a perfect chord in it." Please do give feedback if you can on what you think about this piece ***WARNING: Playback is very loud, so ADJUST volume if needed***

Hi everyone. I'm a composer who mainly writes piano and concert band music. Here is something that I have been working on. Please give me some critique if you have it, especially about the string parts because I don't know much about writing for them. Thanks in advance for listening! Hope you like it!

The conductor of the my university's wind orchestra, who I've known (and played under) for many years, has been hinting for quite a while that he would be very interested in having me write something for the ensemble. I finally wrote something over the last summer holidays, and they premiered it in a concert a few weeks ago. It's my first piece ever written for wind band, and certainly my largest-scale work ever performed so far, but having played in wind bands and brass bands for the last 15 years I felt confident that I knew what traps to avoid. I didn't, of course - I met up with the conductor a couple weeks before the first rehearsal and he had a longish list of stuff I had to fix, including things you just don't do like writing the seconds above the firsts for any instrument, which as a percussionist was not something that had ever occured to me. The recording is actually taken from the rehearsal before the concert, as the concert performance itself came very close to falling apart - my piece wasn't the only one affected, people just weren't concentrating that night. It's not a perfect recording of course, but it was a relatively difficult piece, as well as being slightly differently written to most of what we were used to. For a no-auditions ensemble made up of a mix of music and non-music students, I felt we did alright. (I say 'we' because I was playing in it as well due to lack of percussionists.) The piece was not necessarily meant as any literal or metaphoric representation of birds themselves, but more as a way for me to explore flashes of the potential colours of the ensemble, as one might experience flashes of colour in an aviary. Colour is something that can be influenced both by instrument choice and by harmony choice, and I really enjoy just slightly changing one of those and seeing what the effects are. I also really wanted to rebel slightly against a trend I sometimes see in wind band writing, that of including an instrument (particularly percussion) just for the sake of it. Any time I included a percussion instrument, it was not just for rhythm or to bolster up the overall sound, but for its particular colour or effect. https://soundcloud.com/fotytoo/aviary-live In other news, I have been accepted into the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, in Glasgow, to start a masters of music in composition this September, which I am super excited about! I have started a GoFundMe to try and help very slightly with the enormous cost of being an international student - https://tinyurl.com/mkejaqg. If anyone is in a particularly generous mood, I would appreciate any small donation :)

Hey! This is a project I did as part of my Quick Write Challenge. I was inspired on a tour of some caves in Kentucky, thinking how nifty it would be to have a performance in such a resonant space. The cave idea transformed into something almost as metaphorical as literal, and hence this was born. Let me know what's strong and what needs to be stronger! Thanks y'all, Gustav Johnson