| …full of short yet charmingly accessible works. | ||
| —Margaret Fingerhut, Pianist |
Click the quotation text to discover what it refers to!
| …full of short yet charmingly accessible works. | ||
| —Margaret Fingerhut, Pianist |
Click the quotation text to discover what it refers to!
Fand Music Press is a publisher of high quality sheet music, CDs and books, all focussing on accessible 20th Century and contemporary composers and concentrating mainly on first editions. Please use the tabs at the top of the page to explore the catalogue. Further details, such as information about ordering, can be found on the Contact/Info page.
As the year begins to turn toward Autumn, Fand Music Press presents a late Summer collection of new publications and other news.
Fand is delighted to offer this splendid new volume, a most enterprising collection of some of Sir Arnold Bax’s greatest songs, arranged by the Italian pianist Ennio Caironi. The songs of Bax are hardly the best known portion of his œuvre at present, but this volume will be welcomed by pianists (and their audiences) wishing to explore them as solo piano arrangements and so to be beguiled by their extraordinary melodic invention and harmonic subtleties.
This lavish anthology includes arrangements for solo piano of ten of Bax’s songs, presented in chronological order of composition, and is best suited for pianists of at least Grade 7 standard. Each song arrangement is preceded by the full text of the original poem, for context, and the collection includes a detailed introduction by the arranger.
This new Bax Songs Without the Words issue extends Fand’s existing Songs Without the Words series, originally begun by John Mitchell with his arrangements of songs by Warlock (volume 1 and volume 2) and songs by Moeran.
Since mid-2024, Ennio Caironi has been making an extensive collection of superb keyboard recordings for the Fand website (see the September 2025 Friends of Fand news entry for more details); this volume represents his highly auspicious debut publication for Fand.
Because of his twenty marches composed for military band, Kenneth J. Alford has sometimes been referred to as ‘The British March King’. His real name was Frederick Joseph Ricketts, and he adopted a pseudonym to distinguish his renown as a composer from his career as a military musician. Born in London in 1881, and after training at Kneller Hall, he eventually became bandmaster of the Royal Marines, a post he held almost up until the time of his death in 1945.
On the Quarterdeck is probably the best known of Alford’s marches after Colonel Bogey (with its fame boosted by being used in the 1957 film, The Bridge on the River Kwai). It was composed in 1917 and commemorated the naval Battle of Jutland that took place in the previous year. Although this fine march has already been arranged for piano solo, the present transcription for piano duet from the band score has allowed the countermelodies to be included, most of which were omitted from the former arrangement.
On the Quarterdeck is, in some sense, a companion piece or sequel to the earlier Out of the Blue by Hubert Bath: both are piano duet arrangements, with the Bath piece having RAF connections and the new Alford arrangement commemorating a naval battle.
Aside from his Alford arrangement, John Mitchell has composed two new original works that have now been published by Fand.
Dedicated to Ennio Caironi, Hogarth’s Delight is for harpsichord or piano. An original version of this piece was composed in 2005 for flute and harpsichord. Entitled Gin Lane, it was a musical portrait of a street scene in Hogarthian London. The work originated in an idea for a song before becoming an instrumental piece, when it had as a provisional title Hooked on Hook, referring to James Hook (1746–1827), the style of whose song The Lass of Richmond Hill was a source of inspiration for some of the melodic material.
The Heart of Man is a cycle of five songs to words by A. E. Housman (1859–1936), a classical scholar who is now best known for his volume of verse A Shropshire Lad, first published in 1896. With their evocation of the English countryside, thwarted love and a yearning for things lost, his poems are probably still as popular today as when they first appeared. Their content and regular metres made them especially appealing to composers such as Arthur Somervell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, John Ireland and E. J. Moeran to set to music.
The five songs in The Heart of Man focus on the various aspects of pessimism and negativity that permeate so much of Housman’s verse. The first song questions whether material prosperity in later years is counterbalanced by a loss of youthful innocence, whilst in the second the narrator describes a return to a rural scene from his earlier life, only to find his former friends there have already perished. The jangling church bells in the third song sound as a metaphor for an unfulfilled life, followed by a song that asks whether there is any point in carrying on in such a hopeless situation. The final song queries whether happiness can perhaps be illusory, concluding that “…The heart of man … was never happy long.”
Finally, we have two new publications of works by Peter Thompson.
Chinese Lantern Music: Twelve Balletic Scenes for Orchestra was written for Anne Claxton and the Petersfield Area Youth Orchestra. It was first performed by that orchestra (under the baton of David Thomas) in the Petersfield Musical Festival, March 1992. This work is perfectly suitable for performance by school, youth or amateur orchestra.
String Quartet no 8, written in the spring of 2025, is a finely designed work in which the three movements form a cohesive, often joyous, whole.
The Martin Read Foundation has been involved in the production of a new Martin Read – A Celebration CD, launching on 27th April 2025 and featuring exclusively the music of Martin Read, an important Fand composer who tragically died suddenly in 2012. The new CD, full details of which can be found on this site, features nine works, half a dozen of which have hitherto not been published, but which Fand is now bringing before the public to coincide with the launch of the new CD. Indeed, every work on the new recording is now published by Fand. The newly published works are:
The CD also contains recordings of Autumn, Drawing Details in an Old Church and The Angel of History, which were already published by Fand.
(The Four Interludes appear as part of the full cantata on the CD, not as a separate work.)
On the subject of CDs, Fand has also been involved in the production of an exciting new CD entitled At the Open Door. Recorded by Lorna Windsor, soprano and William Hancox, piano, the CD contains some rare material very close to the spirit of Fand, including recordings of the following actual Fand publications:
In addition to those Fand-published pieces, the CD also contains recordings of the following works:
Many tracks from the CD may be previewed on this site, and the disc itself is available for purchase at a very reasonable price!
Also published by Fand this Easter is Gary Higginson’s Theme and Eight Variations for solo piano, aimed at pianists of approximately Grade 7 standard.
Although recently revised and newly published, this work has actually been in existence for a long time and is one of the composer’s earliest compositions, having been written initially when Gary Higginson was a student of Edmund Rubbra in the early 1970s. It was his first major composition exercise, although its importance and significance only revealed itself later. The work actually has a mild Christmas flavour, in that the original theme on which it is based was written on Christmas Eve 1970, and was originally considered a carol. The piece was revised somewhat back in 1990, and has undergone a few more small revisions in time for its publication in 2025.
Finally, Fand’s collection of new publications this Easter is rounded off by Peter Thompson’s Aspects of Miracle for orchestra. Completed in February 2025, it is a short single-movement work whose title – the composer hopes – conveys the message of the music.
A century ago this month, Peter Warlock became the tenant of a cottage in Eynsford, Kent, and was joined there by his friend, fellow composer E. J. Moeran. This period of shared habitation marked the beginning of the ‘Warlock Legend’: a time of riotous living with an open house policy to all kinds of outré visitors. It was a productive time for Warlock; less so for Moeran, who found the situation at the cottage too distracting to permit significant creativity. The shared tenancy lasted for only a relatively brief period of under three years, but it was a notable time during which Warlock composed his best-known work, Capriol.
John Mitchell’s latest publication, Eynsford Days, brings together two of his compositions in styles that pay tribute to both Warlock and Moeran individually. Both pieces were written some time ago: the Warlock tribute was composed as long ago as 1976 for saxophone quartet, but has since been rearranged for several different instrumentations, and the piano solo version published here is brand new. The Moeran tribute piece was originally written in 2006, and both individual compositions have been paired in this new publication to commemorate the centenary of the start of the interesting Eynsford-based joint period in Warlock’s and Moeran’s association.
Since mid-2024, Ennio Caironi has been creating a remarkable number of superb recordings for Fand, including much of the piano music of Bax and the complete keyboard music of Peter Thompson.
As Ennio has now created his first publication for Fand, an outstanding collection of Bax Songs Without the Words, he now has his own composer page on this site, and we have taken the opportunity to collect together on it all his recordings in one place. This page will be kept up to date with any future recordings that Ennio may produce; visit it for hours of superlative listening!
Excitingly, and coinciding with the launch of this new page, Ennio has supplied Fand with several world première recordings of piano music by Sir Granville Bantock. These recordings may be found exclusively on Ennio’s new page.
The world première performance of Peter Thompson’s Prelude for Orchestra: “Stress” was given on Sunday, 6th July 2025 in Huddersfield Town Hall by the Huddersfield Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Katherine Stonham. The event was a ‘Last Night of the Proms’-style event entitled Let’s Get This Party Started!, and the Prelude was given top billing, opening the concert as a landmark first performance. The following recording captures the event and is followed by a few words of introduction from the conductor:
The performance came about thanks to the good offices of Richard Hallas, who typeset the score many years ago, and Huddersfield Philharmonic Orchestra’s David Robinson.
Ennio Caironi has continued to provide Fand with further superb new recordings, this time of piano music by Bax and Warlock:
Previous announcements may be found in the Fand News Archive.
