Sound Innovations: Ensemble Development for Young Concert Band is a complete curriculum for beginning band students to help them grow as ensemble musicians. The series complements any band method and supplements any performance music. It contains 167 exercises, including more than 100 chorales by some of today's most renowned young band composers. Various exercises at the grade 1/2, 1, and 1 1/2 levels are grouped by key, including: * Long Tones* Passing the Tonic* Pitch Matching* Scale Builders* Interval Builders* Expanding Intervals* Chord Builders* Moving Chord Tones* Diatonic Harmony* Rhythmic Subdivision* 5-Note Scales* Scale Canons (5-, 6-, or 8-Note Scales)* Scale Chorales (5-, 6-, and 8-Note Scales) * ChoralesThe compositions were written by Roland Barrett, Chris Bernotas, Jodie Blackshaw, Matt Conaway, Ralph Ford, Tyler S. Grant, Rob Grice, John O'Reilly, Robert Sheldon, Todd Stalter, Randall Standridge, Michael Story, and Scott Watson. Whether your students are progressing through exercises to better their technical facility, or improving their musicianship with beautiful chorales, we are confident your performers will be excited, motivated, and inspired by using Sound Innovations: Ensemble Development for Young Concert Band. / Percussions

Three Dances for Solo Timpani was written in 1998 and dedicated to percussionist Neil Grover. The dances can be performed as individual solo works or together as a suite. Melodic intervals and timbre contrasts provide color for each dance. Subtle ambiguity in rhythm, pulse, and pacing create a challenge for the performer and listener. The composer was influenced by several different styles and periods of music in the writing of Three Dances.

In the biography Keiko Abe: A Virtuosic Life, author Rebecca Kite tells the untold story of Keiko Abe's groundbreaking influence on the evolution of the marimba and its music. Kite also offers a history of the xylophone, the marimba, and the music, composers, and performers that each instrument was associated with over the centuries. Examples of rare and historic recordings are included on a CD. Keiko Abe transformed the marimba into today's five-octave solo instrument and full-fledged member of classical ensembles. Over the course of Keiko Abe's long musical career, beginning as a child prodigy at age ten, her rare gifts have garnered her recognition as a musical genius, consummate artist, innovator in her field, and composer of classical pieces of art music for her instrument. As Abe's audiences worldwide know, she is also a spellbinding performer. Biographer Rebecca Kite is a marimbist and composer whose solo recordings include 'Across Time' and 'Prism.' She is a frequent contributor to Percussive Notes, the journal of the Percussive Arts Society. / Percussions