SKU: A0.533692

Biblicals: Concerto for Solo Piano in Five Movements (1998) was commissioned from the
composer by an anonymous benefactor for pianist Kathleen Supové in tribute of her tireless
support of new music.
The work is in five movements, each inspired by a different biblical quotation which is
quoted in the score before each movement. If possible, these passages should be printed in
the program or read aloud before the performance of the work. Each movement is
programmatic only in an internal sense. While the movements do not attempt to directly
portray the action of the passage in a storybook sense, they do attempt to capture the overall
affect of the verse. The form of the work is as a concerto for solo piano drawing on a title
that has been used in the past by numerous composers. Likewise, although the work does not
involve an orchestra, I have titled it concerto because it contains elements of a concerto solo
part and because of the virtuosity required to perform the work. The work explores a widerange
of styles from quasi-lyrical to highly chromatic. Throughout, the work has a rhythmic
intensity which should be observed by the performer.
The first movement, Hovering Over the Waters, makes use of an irregular rhythmic pattern
introduced in the opening measure and used throughout the work. Irregular and nervous
rhythms using chromatic intervals pervade the entire movement.
The second movement, Baldhead, is a forceful and loud movement making use of the clash
between diatonic and pentatonic clusters. It is relentless in its pounding energy, irregular
rhythms, and volume. This movement is dedicated to American composer Daniel Pinkham
on the occasion his 75th birthday in 1998. The connection of this movement to Pinkham
comes in the superimposition of pentatonic and diatonic clusters, a technique used so well in
one of my favorite Pinkham works, Blessings for Organ (1978).
The third movement, Forgiven and Free, presents a tranquil scene involving the building of
chords, standard and otherwise, through the adding of tones one at a time. Brief chromatic
melodies appear and then disappear quickly.
The fourth movement, Under the Sun, makes use of a motive involving four chords over a left
hand bass consisting of a major-tenth chord. This motive appears throughout the movement,
constantly breaking in and interrupting the action. A variety of irregular rhythmic motives
appear throughout as a contrast to the main motive with its strict rhythm. Quotes of nursery
rhyme tunes are hidden throughout the movement as well in various forms.
The fifth movement, The Seventh Angel, is a fast and furious tarantella. As the movement
flies by a variety of musical ideas emerge and then disappear into the main motive again.
The music continues to get faster and faster and finally the movement ends with a furious
progression from the bottom to top of the piano and then a thunderous unison chord in the
lower register.

SKU: A0.1323881

Solo Piano Arrangement By Thomas Gunther
Santa Claus Is Coming To Town is another one of my favorite Christmas songs. For some reason I love playing it in a bluesy style, with some jazz voicings. The bridge is more in stride piano style.
About The Arrangement
The arrangement includes different stylistic elements found in more traditional popular piano music. It definitely has a bluesy vibe, but also shows elements of jazz and stride piano.
When it comes to the form I extended it by adding an intro that comes back in-between sections in form of an interlude. There is also an outro. 
About The Sheet Music
The sheet music is basically a transcription of my recording. It contains jazz chord symbols and plentiful of articulations as well as some dynamic markings. 
My Arranging Workflow
I have different approaches for creating solo piano arrangements of songs. The one I took here is as follows. First I come up with different ideas, try them out, and after a while settle on those I like best. Once I practiced and internalized those ideas I press record and hope for the best. Before the final version is done, I record myself many times over. This gives me the opportunity to improve upon each version until I have one that I feel comfortable with.
Recommendations For Learning The Song
I recommend that you first listen to my performance while reading along in the sheet music. This way you get a better understanding about the phrasing and the rhythmic feel.
You may want to spend a little time just vamping a few bars to get into the groove. When that feels good move on to different sections.
The bridge is different in feel because it is based on stride piano rather than blues. Stride piano features big jumps in the left hand and big intervals between the outer notes (up to a 10th). Should you have difficulty in playing those big intervals (smaller hands will make this hard) you may roll the notes and use the sustain pedal.
Is This Arrangement For You?
This solo piano arrangement is for every pianist who would like to try playing Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town in a more bluesy-jazzy style. Dependent on what your specialty is musically speaking, you made benefit from it in different ways. Here are some examples.
Classical Pianists
If you are a classical pianist who rarely listens to jazz and blues music, this arrangement might be a great way to dip your feed into more contemporary genres and styles like blues and jazz. This said, it might be quite challenging. Not from a technical point of view, but from a musical point of view. For example, swung eighth notes and accents and phrasing in blues and jazz are somewhat contrary to classical music. It's gonna be a great learning experience for sure!
Jazz Pianists
Should you be a jazz musician or blues musician, you may not necessarily want to play the arrangement as written note for note. Instead, you might just fall in love with some of my ideas and create your own arrangement based on those.
This goes especially for the solo section. You can play my solo or use it as inspiration for your own solo. Of course experiences blues and jazz musicians will prefer to make up their own solo.
I truly hope you have fun playing this arrangement! Yes.

SKU: RX.9783737803298

This song is a travelling song written under the impression of several tours through South and East Europe, the Balkans and around the Black Sea. Dedicated to Jason, the hero of the Greek mythology, it has to be played in a hymnic manner. Jason went on a most adventurous journey to the very outermost coast of the Black Sea with this motley entourage - the Argonauts - in order to seize the Golden Fleece, a gigantic golden ram skin. Just about where the Georgian city of Batumi is today. If you would like to know more about it, you may want to read the chapter “Die Reise nach Batumi� (The Journey to Batumi) in our roadbook “Quadro Nuevo: Grand Voyage. To every person who is interested in these old myths, I recommend the books of the author and journalist Michael Kohlmeier, for example his amusing interpretations of the Sagen des Klassischen Altertums (Sagas of the classical antiquity). Just East of Batumi the Caucasus begins, with its colourful mixture of ancient peoples and cultures. I have always been fascinated with musicians who originate from this region. For example the composer Aram Katschaturian or the pianist David Gazarov, with whom I often play concerts. An Eastern groove suits this song well, quite comparable to a fast rumba. I suggest you play the intro (may be extended) and the theme (measures 6 to 39) first. Then you may improvise freely over the AABA-form of the theme. The last solo part is shortened because the B-part leads into a percussion solo. This percussion solo may be omited. After the last complete solo part you can repeat the theme and then play the al fine. For Improvisation: On a separate sheet I am offering some scales to the chords of the song in various transpositions, which is helpful as basic material for improvisations. Some chords (like the very first one) fit several different scales. Decide for yourself which one you prefer. Or maybe even make up your own. Even though these notes may sound right with the chords, one thing always holds true in creative music: There should be no dogmatic wrong or right. Sometimes what seems like a wrong note, could give the progression of the melody its special colour, tension and spice. Sometimes an improvisation with exclusive right notes is correct in music theory, but sounds terribly boring. Besides, every improviser is encouraged to happily help themselves to the chromatics. All of this is only a suggestion. Music becomes exciting and colourful when the basic material is interpreted in an imaginative and creative way!

SKU: A0.987083

This piece is a free adaptation and a complete reworking of a study by Felix Le Couppey (1811-1887), from his L'Agilité, Opus 20, 25 Progressive Studies for Mechanism and Light Touch. In its original form, this study was a charming little piece of musical fluff. But getting it up to speed reduced me to tears! It also gave me an epiphany of immense power that transformed my technique. Suddenly I could play faster than I had ever thought possible, and I could do so with a thrilling ease! This epiphany emerged from the spluttering frustration I felt over my inability to play these sixteenth notes at Le Couppey's metronome marking of 144. It dawned on me that I couldn’t play fast enough because I was tripping over my own fingers when I used the overly articulated technique of moving the fingers by the lift, throw, relax method. This superfluous motion creates an impenetrable barrier, a speed wall, as does playing legato scales by passing the thumb under the palm, when shifting hand position up and down the keyboard. So I found another way-which I’ve since learned was known to every pianist who ever achieved prodigious speed. Here’s how to bring this piece up to speed with ease: Be sure to practice this piece with each hand alone. For each group of sixteenth notes, gently place the four fingers down simultaneously, to get the feel. Think of your arm, from elbow to fingertips, as something like a kitchen utensil, such as a spatula. Moving your right arm as a unit, place your finger tips down into the key bed, depressing all four notes at once, as a block chord. Make sure that all the fingers remain stiff (not rigid with tension, but just stiff enough to resist collapsing upwards.) Slowly lift and then play each group by placing all the fingers down with a rotation of your forearm, calm and relaxed, with the fingers rolling through the notes at the speed of a brief snare drum roll: Rrrrip! To rip through this group of notes like this takes no more effort than to place those four fingers down, calmly, all at once! Then, with a quick shift up or down the keyboard to get into position for the next group, that’s the whole trick for playing such passages with astonishing speed and ease! It takes time and effort to get the knack here, but the result can be transformative and thrilling! As for my adaptation of this study, I believe it offers intermediate advanced players the chance to enjoy a great leap in technique like the one I experienced, and also offers a piece of music that one might not blush to play outside the practice room-perhaps bringing it at least into the living room for a soirée, if not into the concert hall. To make this adaptation, I wrote a grumbly bass line with lungs, and nice fat chords to flesh out most of the skinny little triads that accompany the original study’s fast passages. I added a brooding, chromatic introduction that features as a melody the accompanimental figure of a broken triad that Le Couppey wrote a few times on the second page, in various inversions. I employed this broken chord figure several more times in both hands, and also added a little coda, sprinkled with sparkle. Playing time is about 1 minute and 30 seconds.

SKU: A0.1024623

Misfortune is my final theory project of my community college experience, and honestly, I had fun in community college but I can't wait for the future opportunities that will come to me.

Anyways, about the piece, This piece is my second project out of three and unfortunately you guys won't be able to see the third project unless if I figure out how to write it in Finale. This project is all a Twelve-Tone composition written in Piano while my third project is an Indeterminacy. I never really been a fan of Twelve-Tone music because I always thinks it sounds really ugly so that is why I had the idea to call it Misfortune, symbolizing depression or bad luck.

Misfortune can be a good solo piece and in my opinion, it is an easy piece to practice. The total length of the piece is 2:48 and this is open for anyone to purchase and perform.

Anyways, that is really all I have to say about the piece. If you all enjoyed this, please make sure to let me know. All feedback of any kind is greatly appreciated. Thank you all so much and have a great night.

Written in Finale V25

Email Me: reedbensoncompositions@gmail.com

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SKU: A0.938227

Many of my songs are named after the piece has been written . This is one example. I titled it ' unforeseen' because I never imagined that I would write music.

SKU: A0.933520

There are many more unfinished than completed compositions of Beethoven that have been preserved. ln these fragments one sees ideas for individual works. A large number of sketchbooks and sketches from the composer were preserved and are housed in libraries and private collections all over the globe. Some sketches are no more than brief experiments or short elaborated ideas, but there are also fragments preserved that nearly give us a complete picture of a composition. In the so-called Kafka sketchbook, which was published in 1970 in London, approximately 500 fragments of manuscripts were bundled that stem from 1786 - 1799. The Fantasia Sonata in D (deest 45) for piano forte in three parts, was hidden in the archives since 1792. This sonata of the young Beethoven, with striking similarities to the Moonlight sonata and the Pastorale has never been performed on stage. Young pianotalent Martin Oei played it for the first time in the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, October 21st, 2012. The large, over 1100 bars comprising torso now known as Fantasia Sonata in D from 1792, cannot be called a sketch anymore, although Beethoven has not completed the work and used many ideas in other, later works. The reconstruction of the sketches was done by the Dutch Beethoven musicologist and composer Cees Nieuwenhuizen. The piece was probably written in Bonn, three years before he started to write his first official piano sonata of a series of 32 sonatas. In November 1792 Beethoven went from Bonn to Vienna to study with the famous composer Joseph Haydn (1732–1809). Beethoven rapidly proceeded to make his mark as a brilliant keyboard performer and as a gifted young composer with a number of works to his credit. In 1795 his first mature published works appeared, and his career was officially launched. Striking harmonies The re-using of previously drafted material is quite common in Beethoven's works. Apparently the material wasn't yet ripe enough at the time of its origination, or perhaps Beethoven changed his mind with regards to the new composition. This could very well be so regarding the torso from Kafka’s sketchbook that we now call the Piano Fantasia sonata in D. This piece contains 1100 bars of music, not taking into account the alternative bars. The piece is composed by Beethoven in 1792 - 1793 and was set up as a tripartite sonata in D with remarkable abnormalities in terms of form and content. There are striking harmonies that cannot be found in other works composed in that same period. It’s possible that the composer didn’t have the courage to publish it or that indeed the time was not yet ripe for it. Finally the composer let the draft go and never came back to it. Or did he? Thematic similarities We find phrases in several later works that share similarities with ideas and themes from Fantasia sonata in D. The first part of Fantasia sonata has the same theme as the trio of the third movement of Symphony no. 7 (in A Major Opus 92). Even the key and also the rhythm in 3/4 time are the same. This cannot be a coincidence. Similar mood and thematic parallels can be found in the Pastorale, the Sonata for piano no. 15 (Opus 28): it is striking that this piece is also composed in D and in 3/4 time. We find similar dramatic expression in the Sonata for piano no. I 7 in d minor Opus 31 no. 2. The second movement of the Fantasia sonata nearly has the same theme as the second movement of the Sonata for piano no. 23 in minor (the Appassionato Opus 57). Martin Oei, Daiel Wayenberg, Cees Nieuwenhuizen at The World Premiere in The Concertgebouw Beethoven begins the third movement of the Fantasia sonata with the main theme of the first movement, but now in e minor. lts appearance in minor is an entirely new idea. Nevertheless Beethoven doesn't elaborate the idea any further because it disappears after 29 bars. Now a new agitated theme starts in d minor, which was announced in the first movement, but now reappears in its complete.