Original Concert Band Compositions by Moon:

                Ever since college, I have been an active participant in the drum corps and marching band genre.  I marched in the Madison Scouts until I aged out in 1974, and even as a member of the Scouts, I was very active arranging for and judging many organizations in both areas.  Sometime during the 1980’s I decided to take a “stab” at composing.  Along with a variety of other works I composed four “overtures” for concert band.  The first two were “pretty good”, the third was “OK” and the fourth “kind of sucked”.  I stopped composing overtures after the fourth one.

                Since we are talking “in the 80’s”, I mean “old school” composing.  I am not sure if Finale was around back then, but if it was, I had never heard of it.  Composing and compiling the score and then writing out each individual part by hand (while teaching full time and continuing and active arranging schedule with bands and drum corps), took about one and a half to two years per project.  You never heard what any of it sounded like, unless you could persuade some “higher level” group to read it down for you.  Even at that, you had one shot where you could record it on a cassette tape, re-write and edit what you wanted to, and then edit and re-copy the score and all the parts.  Today, I can’t believe I actually did all of that, but that was just how things were done back then.  I eventually (much later) put the first two overtures into Finale and extracted out the parts.

                The first one, Edison Overture, was never actually performed anywhere, and “Desert Storm” (the second) may have been once, I really do not remember.  I did find two old cassettes of their recordings I had made, dug up my old “hand held” cassette tape player, “mooshed” my headphones around its speaker, and acoustically recorded the two overtures into Pro-Tools.  Not the most technically impressive way of doing things, but it was all I could think of.  I was fortunate to be able (back then) to get two organizations to play three of the overtures for me, so I could record them.  “Edison” was run down by the Akron University “Zips” concert band, while I was teaching in Ohio.  Ironically, I believe the director was Les Hickens, who later also ended up in South Carolina (along with me) when he landed the Furman University “gig”, where he remained for many, many years until he retired.  I did not get “Desert Storm” played until several years after that, but was very fortunate to have it played by the Greenville Community Band in South Carolina.  I apologize, but I cannot remember who the director was at that time.  At any rate, I cannot thank these two gentlemen enough for those two opportunities I was given, especially after all of the time I had invested in composing and preparing them.

                Before I lost these old cassette tape recordings for good, I just thought I would post them up on my web site, well, because I can.  The PDF’s of the scores are also included, since there were some “glitches” (as would be expected) reading them down only once or twice.  As I mentioned before, I do not think either has “officially” been performed, so, if anyone “out there” might be interested? Just let me know.

Sincerely,

Rich Moon