South American Suite

SKU: HL.1190014

ISBN 9781705192542. UPC: 196288131816.

Osvaldo Nicolás Ferraro Gutiérrez (1934-1977), better known as Waldo de los Ríos, was an Argentine composer best remembered for his knack for making pop music out of European classical music. His South American Suite (Suite SudAmericana) is in four movements: 1. Paraguay (Nanduty; Jungle Night; Epic), 2. Argentina (Los Colorados; The Shadow of the Tiger; The Tryst), 3. Peru (Cuzco Ruins; Lima; The Giants), and 4. Uruguay (The Wagon; Gaucho Song; Carnival).

SKU: MB.30762M

ISBN 9781513465692. 8.75x11.75 inches.

Civil War Suite for Classical Guitar is a collection of ten Civil War-era songs arranged in standard notation for the advanced solo classical guitarist. The suite includes music from the Confederacy and the Union, along with soldier's songs, parlor songs, and an African American spiritual. The sequencing of the pieces is designed to create a musical narrative, with songs grouped in a manner that shows various perspectives of the war before ultimately celebrating Union victory. Throughout the suite, extensive passages feature delightful special effects that emulate period instruments such as the banjo, snare drum, and fiddle. Includes access to online audio.

SKU: GI.G-317150

ISBN 9781574630404. UPC: 073999456738.

Performers and audiences alike will love these four original works for medium-advanced high school or college-level percussion ensemble. Fun to play and exciting to listen to, each piece can be performed individually, or all four played together as a suite. Written for 9 players but playable with as few as 7 (or augment the ensemble to include several more players). Full-performance CD is included!

SKU: MA.EMR-33095

Possible instrumentations:

Trombone & CD Play Back / Play Along
Trombone & Piano (+ CD Play Back / Play Along optional)
Trombone & Piano or CD Play Back / Play Along.

SKU: HL.4002870

UPC: 884088353032. 9x12 inches.

Commissioned by Prattville (Alabama) High School, this work in three movements pays tribute to that city's founder, Daniel Pratt, who was one of the leading industrialists of the early 1800s. Including movements entitled “Fanfare for a New Era,” “Ode: The Southern Landscape,” and “Perpetual Motion: Machines,” composer Johnnie Vinson uses creative scoring and intriguing sounds to recreate this period of American history in an impressive work for band. Duration: 7:30 (Grade 4).

SKU: PR.140401340

ISBN 9781491134450. UPC: 680160684953.

Best known for his settings of spirituals and influence on Dvorák, Henry T. Burleigh was a celebrated baritone, and a prolific composer of original works. FROM THE SOUTHLAND is a suite of six atmospheric scenes of the American south, inspired by Black musical and cultural traditions. FROM THE SOUTHLAND is within reach of intermediate pianists and artistically suited for professional recitals.
In 1835, Henry T. Burleigh’s maternal grandfather purchased his own release from slavery for the sum of $50, and traveled north out of Maryland to begin a new life as a free man. He established his family in Ithaca, NY, and then moved to the bustling lakefront city of Erie, PA, where three decades later his grandson Henry would be born and raised.For Burleigh, the “Southland” that inspired this collection of piano sketches was a distant place that could not have been more different from the physical world he knew, up there in the northern snowbelt. And yet these southern landscapes and vignettes must have been intensely present in his consciousness, absorbed through the stories and songs he first learned at his grandfather’s knee.The music of the South – the spirituals and work songs he heard as a child –would travel with Burleigh throughout his long and illustrious musical life. Even as he progressed through his early classical training, his career as a baritone soloist in Erie’s churches and synagogue, his move to New York to study at the National Conservatory of Music, and his rise to national prominence as a concert soloist, these ancestral melodies stayed firmly centered in his musical identity.When he wrote From the Southland, his only composition for solo piano, Burleigh was just beginning his career as a composer. The art songs that would establish him as one of America’s best known composers in the genre were still to come. And so were his iconic arrangements of spirituals that would bring the songs of slavery onto concert stages around the world, transformed into timeless and uniquely American music.These little piano sketches bring together all the things that made Burleigh the musician he was – the lush, late-romantic style of his time; a broad vision for American music; and a profound respect for his heritage, a memory of the world his grandfather left behind, and a love of the music he brought with him.

SKU: ST.C463

ISBN 9790570814633.

This volume contains contrasting works by Federico Ruiz spanning quite a large and rich period of his compositional output that goes from his early Micro-Suite (1971), to lilting, sweet and rhythmic Venezuelan waltzes passing by the mysterious, intimate, and intense Nocturno (1994) plus pieces originally composed for film, and theatre. Real eclecticism in styles, moods and atmospheres that show Ruiz�??s talents and scope.

The Nocturno is a deep, intriguing, substantial piece presenting a satisfying length which moves from different paths of the mind and the heart written in an abstract, chromatic idiom, that does not dissociate itself from the Venezuelan waltz and the joropo. One could perhaps say that there is a deconstruction of the latter. For the interpretation, the composer has suggested to me that it is allowed to have some flexibility in the tempo. Ruiz kindly dedicated it to me, and I have had the pleasure of performing it in many concerts.

Although all highly expressive, the Three Venezuelan Waltzes present in this collection as well as the piece titled Aliseo, are works that are close to the colourful Venezuelan folk tradition. Federico Ruiz had given me two of them when we first met: �??Tu Presencia�?? (1981) and �??Eloísa�?? (1989) and then I attended a performance of the play �??Office Number One�?? by Miguel Otero Silva with a fantastic actor, Elba Escobar in the role of Carmen Rosa and, I just fell in love and was very moved by the incidental music that I later discovered, by reading the programme, had been written by Federico Ruiz. Later that evening, I called him and asked to please make a piano score of the composition, so I could have the desired piece in my hands. That is how �??Carmen Rosa�?� waltz (1987) came to exist in a piano version.

�??Eloisa�?? is another Venezuelan waltz with more jazzy harmonies where precision in the rhythm and elegant playing is also essential, as it is in most of his pieces.

�??Tu Presencia�?? was dedicated to his mother, Margarita. It is written with the structure of the Venezuelan waltz, which consists of a nostalgic subject that leads to a faster, happier middle section where the typical graceful rhythm is given by the left-hand accompaniment figure of a dotted crotchet followed by a quaver and a crotchet.

The craft and magic found in the five movements of the Micro-Suite is based on a dodecaphonic row by Ernst Krenek. They remind us of the idiom of the Second Viennese School. These real miniatures seem to tell short stories. The �??Preludio�?? is full of humour. I imagine dancing figures given by the jumps all over the keyboard and extreme dynamics; the phrases give the impression of a conversation with many questions and answers. The �??Invención�?? is a kaleidoscopic piece where the hands mirror each other. The �??Passacaglia�?? is the longest movement, at just over a minute where the prime motif is repeated three times on the bass line. For its construction Federico Ruiz uses as well the retrograde and the retrograde inversion of the twelve-tone series. It must be played expressively with dynamic contrasts between pianissimo and louder events. The �??Scherzo�?? has repetitive motifs of a minor third in both hands and the �??Final�?? displays virtuosic passages for the pianist.

Aliseo was originally written for the film �??Aire libre�?� (1995), by Luis Armando Roche. It contains elements of diverse types of Venezuelan joropo. In the film, the character of Aliseo Carvallo is played by the composer himself who performs this piece on a harpsichord to welcome scientists Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland one day at the turn of the 1800�??s, as a sample of the new music from the South American land. It presents the refinement of the late European classical era in fusion with Venezuelan folk music.