May 24, 2025
Getting Consortiums and Working with Bands with Alan Theisen
Hosted by:
Cost:
$
30
Alan Theisen shares top tips and strategies for composing, arranging, and securing consortiums for concert bands and wind ensembles, including live score analysis and practical advice on working with these groups.
Event Details
Alan Theisen provides his top 10 tips for composing and arranging for concert band and wind ensemble through live analysis of scores including standard repertoire, contemporary selections, and pieces from his own catalogue. Also topics like navigating rehearsals, getting consortiums, best techniques for maximizing time with these groups and actually finding them will be covered. Questions are encouraged and answered at any point during the presentation. Participants may offer their own projects - current or past - for examination and critique.
About the host
ALAN THEISEN (b. 4 October 1981) is a composer, saxophonist, author, and educator. Influenced in his youth by the careers of Leonard Bernstein and Quincy Jones, Theisen soon established his personal ethos of creating and sharing new music with joyous enthusiasm across multiple artistic endeavors. He continues this commitment to comprehensive musicianship by tirelessly combining the disciplines of composing, performance, scholarship, conducting, advocacy, and pedagogy.
Theisen's compositions encompass a wide array of genres and instrumentation including chamber music, art song, solo piano, concerti, jazz, pop song, musical theatre, symphonies, improvisational music, and more. Praised as coming from “an extraordinarily talented and prolific composer,” his works are frequently commissioned/performed by musicians around the world to audience acclaim. Though Theisen's official catalogue of over seventy pieces is stylistically diverse, his compositions typically feature memorable melodic ideas, emotional sincerity, complex yet sensuous harmony, and dramatic formal designs. A fundamental characteristic of his music is the hybridization of genres. For example, it is common to hear twelve-tone rows in a new jack swing tune, Medieval organum weaved into improvisational music, film noir score tropes in a band piece, and jazz fusion chord progressions underpinning a string quartet. He regards his aesthetic as “Re-Modernist” – rooted in Modernist classical music from the early and middle 20th century yet also informed by contemporary jazz, hip hop, New Wave, and Motown. (Think Miles Davis meets Lutoslawski, Stravinsky meets Stevie Wonder.) The artistic goal is not ironic quotation and juxtaposition but an earnest desire to create surprising yet coherent musical communication between composer, performer, and audience.
Theisen is a collaborative composer, easily incorporating input from the performers for whom he is writing. His music is often inspired by ritual, history, myth, virtuosity, visual art, place, phantasmagoria, and the uncanny. Some recent premieres of Theisen's music have occurred at National Sawdust (Brooklyn), New Music Gathering, and the World Saxophone Congress (Strasbourg, France), and the North American Saxophone Alliance biennial conference.
Theisen's compositions encompass a wide array of genres and instrumentation including chamber music, art song, solo piano, concerti, jazz, pop song, musical theatre, symphonies, improvisational music, and more. Praised as coming from “an extraordinarily talented and prolific composer,” his works are frequently commissioned/performed by musicians around the world to audience acclaim. Though Theisen's official catalogue of over seventy pieces is stylistically diverse, his compositions typically feature memorable melodic ideas, emotional sincerity, complex yet sensuous harmony, and dramatic formal designs. A fundamental characteristic of his music is the hybridization of genres. For example, it is common to hear twelve-tone rows in a new jack swing tune, Medieval organum weaved into improvisational music, film noir score tropes in a band piece, and jazz fusion chord progressions underpinning a string quartet. He regards his aesthetic as “Re-Modernist” – rooted in Modernist classical music from the early and middle 20th century yet also informed by contemporary jazz, hip hop, New Wave, and Motown. (Think Miles Davis meets Lutoslawski, Stravinsky meets Stevie Wonder.) The artistic goal is not ironic quotation and juxtaposition but an earnest desire to create surprising yet coherent musical communication between composer, performer, and audience.
Theisen is a collaborative composer, easily incorporating input from the performers for whom he is writing. His music is often inspired by ritual, history, myth, virtuosity, visual art, place, phantasmagoria, and the uncanny. Some recent premieres of Theisen's music have occurred at National Sawdust (Brooklyn), New Music Gathering, and the World Saxophone Congress (Strasbourg, France), and the North American Saxophone Alliance biennial conference.