About this research

Summary: The province of Valencia, Spain, has a long history of excellence in the composition and performance of wind music. This history provides a vast resource for the compilation of a list of Spanish repertoire for use in the United States and the rest of the world. Wind ensemble conductors in the United States often draw repertoire from foreign countries but, until now, very little has been generally known about Spanish wind music. This project involved a search of the music libraries of several institutions in the Valencia area and the examination of compositions for winds. A catalog has been produced, summarizing composer information, stylistic analysis, availability for performance, level of difficulty, duration and instrumentation. The catalog has been turned into a database. Via this Internet home page, you will be able to get detailed information on each of these wind compositions. Recorded examples are also included for many of the compositions.

These research activities involved compiling data from the conductor's scores of compositions for wind instruments by Spanish composers. The process was first, interviewing conductors, composers and other musicians for information regarding which compositions were at hand. The second step was to visit the libraries around Valencia to find these compositions, often discovering other interesting compositions at the those libraries. The third step was analyzing the compositions as to instrumentation, level of difficulty, compositional aspects and composer information; putting the information into a database. In most cases exact instrumentation is documented as listed in the full conductor's score. In some cases a reduced score was the only score available. The instrumentation from the reduced score was extrapolated during the analysis process. In the cases where the analysis was with a reduced score, the wording "full concert band" or "symphonic band" precedes the instrumentation list. The level of difficulty is listed from grade 1 to 6, the same levels as the New York State Music Educators Association grading system: Grade 1 and 2 is for easy materials for elementary bands for students in their first years of performing. Grade 3 and 4 is for high school bands and beginning college bands. Grade 5 and 6 is for college and professional bands. Additional research was usually needed to find adequate composer biographical information. Personal contact was attempted for each of the fifty-seven composers. Attempts to collect high quality recordings for each composition were made. Each composition was analyzed for basic compositional information such as harmonic vocabulary, general analysis of form, melody, rhythm, orchestration, and other general information that another conductor, composer or other musician might find helpful. No attempt was made to judge compositions qualitatively. These are not magazine reviews acknowledging which of these compositions should be on your next band program.... but this writer hopes that with the included information, that more conductors will consider these mostly undiscovered compositions from Spain for inclusion in their repertoire. This writer feels that many of these compositions deserve to be included in the standard repertoire for band. Most of these compositions are not published. Determination of availability of these compositions for further review or for performance can be made through: Piles Editorial de Música P. O. Box 8012 Archena, 33 46080 Valencia Spain Telephone : (34 6) 370 40 27 Fax: (34 6) 370 49 64 E-mail: [email protected] Website http://www.arrakis.es/~piles