Writing pitches isn’t the same as writing words. The approach is drastically different, especially when writing historical fiction. You’ll read pages upon pages of facts. You’ll log them down for future use. Then you start to write. You look at the facts. You consider the scene or situation  you’re writing about, and you back in [...]

For the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Professional Orchestration: A Practical Handbook by composer Joseph Wagner, we’ve been doing a major overhaul of the book including having composer friends of mine orchestrating eleven bars from a piece by Chabrier called Bourree Fantasque.
Besides myself, two other composers have gotten their examples in: Billy Martin [...]