Starting a school ukulele orchestra is a motivating way for children to study music while learning to play a fun and affordable musical instrument. It is a perfect way to deliver the Wider Opportunities scheme. UkuleleOrchestra is a great new approach that enables non-specialist primary music teachers to start a ukulele orchestra at school even if they don’t play a musical instrument already. …

Stephen Sondheim's music and lyrics stand as milestones in the world of American Musical Theater. He won Tony Awards for Best Score for a Musical for Passion Into the Woods Sweeney Todd A Little Night Music Follies and Company. All of these shows won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as did Pacific Overtures and Sunday in the Park with George the latter also receiving the Pulitzer Priz…

Carol of Burgundy. Here is a lively and intricate setting of the classic French carol that builds to a powerful close. In imitation of the flute and drum mentioned in the carol, the singers play back and forth with their ?tu-re-lu-re-lu's? and ?pat-a-pat-a-pan's? on interludes throughout the piece. After a straightforward first verse, the second presents the melody mysteriously, in pianissimo octa…

Par ALLISON KEVIN. While one of a kind is a hard rating to achieve at Mel Bay Publications, Kevin Allison has done it with The Ceilidh Dance Book. A ceilidh is a traditional Scottish gathering where people share songs, stories, music, and dancing that is very much alive today. In Scotland, there are hundreds of ceilidh bands, each of which has their own trademark tune sets, making it possible for …

A curious child climbs up to the attic and discovers a jumble of boxes, trunks, old clothes, and dusty junk. There, a black leather case catches her eye. She pries it open and finds inside an old Violin - her grandmother's from high school. Sitting on the floor, she tunes the strings and tightens the bow. As she draws the bow across the strings, the Violin becomes alive with music. To her delight,…

In Flanders Fields is a series of poignant and evocative choral works with a theme of reconciliation and remembrance set to iconic texts by John McCrae and Rupert Brooke.Alan Smith was born in London in 1962 and spent his childhood in Croydon. He sang with various local choirs and attended the nearby Royal School of Church Music where he began organ lessons with Michael Fleming at the age of ten…

for soprano and piano. Par CASKEN JOHN. Chansons de Verlaine were completed in 2006. The third song, Colloque sentimental, was written in 2003 for Alison Smart and Katharine Durran’s New French Song project. It was as a result of having written one short song to words by Verlaine that I subsequently decided to set two further poems to make a group of three. All three were also set by Debussy: L’…

Par MARTINU BOHUSLAV. Unusual instrumentations were by no means the exception in the chamber music works of Bohuslav Martinu, most notably the works he wrote in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s being characterised by his experimentation with sound and form. It is from this period that four short serenades also originate (1932), each with a different instrumentation. The serenades were issued by the Pr…