I arranged Jean Sibelius's "Valse Triste" for the Concert Band. It was a long, long, tedious process, probably 120 hours of work. It is one of my favorite pieces by my favorite composer.

I worked on a very old Macintosh computer in a dusty back room in teh CUC music building where they keep old records and scores. I spent my entire Christmas vacation in that room listening to Cranberries on headphones. The file was far too large to save on one disk so whenever I wanted to save the project I had to insert about 5 or 6 diskettes in succession. It was slow. I would love to have an updated version of the program on my iMac and tweak the arrangement again. I photocopied the entire arrangement on ledger size paper and folded it just so for my band to play. It was never performed and we only played through it twice. The trumpet part was too high and the baritone players couldn't read bass clef. I learned a lot working on this project and I look forward to another project someday.

You are listening to the orchestral version of Valse Triste by Jean Sibelius:

Click on the image a large view of the work: