Autumn 2024: Corporate LiveWire Global Award

Having previously been awarded Sheet Music Publisher of the Year for two years running by the SME News Southern Enterprise Awards, Fand Music Press’ is thrilled to have now repeated this achievement with the internationally recognised Corporate LiveWire Global Award, which it has just been awarded for the second year in a row:

Music Publishing Company of the Year 2024/25

Once again, Fand is delighted to receive this recognition for its services to contemporary classical music publishing in such a competitive market.

The award text again notes in particular “the quality of the publisher’s platform” and how it is “easy to explore the sheet music, recordings, and books that Fand Music Press offers in its impressive catalogue” of more than 40 composers, authors and recording artists.

August 2024: New Mitchell releases

John Mitchell’s Barcarolle Blanche is an attractive light piece for pianists of Grade 6 standard, and is accompanied on this site by a recording of the composer’s own performance of it. The work was written to mark a friend’s 75th birthday, and consequently is 75 bars long!

It was written as a kind of complement or follow-up to a previous Barcarolle Noire, written for another friend’s 80th birthday, and is much brighter in mood than the earlier work.

Summer’s Hue is a song cycle setting four poems by Edward Shanks. Shanks was best known as a war poet in World War I, but the songs in this collection are not based on his war poetry. On the contrary, the settings have mostly cheerful and naturalistic subjects. The first song recalls a youthful romantic moment in the East Sussex village of Fletching; the second is an observation of a natural scene. The third song, which is the most wistful of the set, considers the persistence of the beauty of nature after our own passing. The final song, in the style of a polka, sees the poet luring a girl away from the crowds and the light for a discreetly private dance…

July 2024: Moonlit Greenwood

Peter Thompson’s latest composition takes the form of another Suite for piano, the thirteenth in the series to date. Written in May, Suite no 13: ‘Greenwood Tales’ tells of moods and images glimpsed, fancifully and briefly, from a Maytime of bright blossom and burgeoning greenery. The music suits pianists of Grade 6–8 standard.

Also written by Peter Thompson, though not so recently, is a little part-song for women’s choir (SSA voices) called The Moon. The music of this piece was recently rediscovered: composed back in 1984, it was typeset ten years later and readied for publication back in 1994. However, copyright issues relating to the poem meant that it could not be issued at the time. Rediscovered by accident just recently, the former copyright problems no longer existed, so the piece is finally being issued on the fortieth anniversary of its composition! As for the piece itself, it came about after Peter Thompson was introduced to the director of a ladies’ choir in St Albans, The Laurel Singers. She informally asked for a new piece for the choir to perform, and Peter obliged.

The Doggy Tales of Arnold

Wearing his writing rather than his composing hat back in the 1990s, Carey Blyton came up with a series of ten children’s stories, collectively entitled The Doggy Tales of Arnold, about a small dog with a massively outsize bark. Despite the fact that one of the stories was turned into a TV programme narrated by the much loved Willie Rushton (this was one of his last pieces of TV work before his unexpected death), the stories never found a publisher during Carey’s lifetime. This changed in 2018 when Austin Macauley Publishers decided to publish, in a single volume, the two of the stories that had already been fully illustrated by Maurice Stevens, Carey’s collaborator. There is an interesting account of the background to these stories on the official Carey Blyton website.

As of mid-2024, however, Austin Macauley Publishers relinquished the rights to Arnold back to Carey Blyton’s estate, and as a consequence the existing book can now be sold by Fand Music Press. It is available in both paperback and hardback formats. September update: The ebook (supplied as a PDF file) is also now available once again.

June 2024: Moods and a Sonnet

John Mitchell’s piano arrangements in Mood Music Medley, a volume of orchestral music by Carey Blyton, seek to give a wider audience the chance to hear (and to play) music of charming melodic invention and skilful mood presentation which was mainly originally written to fulfil publishers’ stocks of library music.

Thus can pianists relish, for example, the ‘Parisian left bank’ in Valse Musette and 18th century pastiche in the Minuet for Octet, and catch glimpses of the old music hall in Music Hall Memories.

There are many differing mood evocations in this Mood Music Medley and they are likely to prove as popular as the original orchestral versions were, as recorded by session players in the 1960s on Carey Blyton – Film & Television Music (1/4).

Note that this collection includes a slightly more demanding (Grade 6+) arrangement of Girl Friday, which John Mitchell recently arranged separately for easy piano (Grade 4–5).

Peter Thompson’s Symphony no 5, ‘The Sonnet’ is so named as it reflects the sonnet form. Thus, movement 1 is the volta, movement 2 is a development and exploration of the ‘theme’, and in movement 3 the issue seeks resolution in a short rhyming couplet.

This is a brief but pithy symphony which was sketched and orchestrated between February 2023 and March 2024 and is scored for traditional symphony orchestra.