About DavArtMusic
Dave Arthur was for many years a music educator, band director and science teacher in the high schools of the Waterloo Region of Ontario, Canada. He has an M.S. in Music Education from the University of Illinois where his teachers of instrumentation and band orchestration included Salvatore Martirano, Guy Duker, and Mark Hindsley. He recently retired as a long time bass trombone and tuba player in the Wellington Wind Symphony, but continues as choral singer in the Grand Philharmonic Choir. He has also recently taken up double bass and plays in the K-W Community Orchestra. In 2009 he was honoured as Musician of the Year by the Canadian Band Association Ontario Chapter.
DavArtMusic believes very strongly in the importance of arts education in general and of music education in particular. Music education must endeavour to introduce studentsto the richness, diversity and expressive import of all eras, styles and forms of music. To that end, band students need to experience excellent arrangements of popular music, jazz and musical shows, the finest of original compositions for band, and quality arrangements and transcriptions of the music of the great composers from Early Music to Classical to Romantic to 20th and 21st Century.
Music educators are encouraged to develop in their students an appreciation, understanding and love for the aesthetic and affective nature of music and for how it accomplishes this. Using real music and its performance as the departure point and means for teaching all the elements of music and music history was developed as an approach called Comprehensive Musicianship Through Performance.
It is also recommended that all bands, whether school, university, community or professional make use of the full range of great music available to concert band, including both original compositions and music transcribed for band from other media. An excellent article dealing with this issue is The quality of repertoire in school music programs: literature review, analysis, and discussion by Stephen Budiansky and Timothy W. Foley, originally published in the Journal of the World Association for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles.
DavArtMusic provides a growing catalogue of arrangements and transcriptions for concert band (B), solo with concert band (SB), small ensembles (E) and solos (S). Each catalogue item gives a brief description of the piece and the instrumentation. Some catalogue items provide a brief audio sample and a pdf of the first page of the score. The Wellington Wind Symphony has created a Youtube Channel that presents performances and interviews with a focus on Canadian composers and arrangers, including several from this catalogue.
In conversation with Dave Arthur
Conductor Daniel Warren interviews arranger and Wellington Wind Symphony member David Arthur about transcribing Alban Berg's Six Early Songs for band. Recorded in October 2011.