PERCUSSION SHEET MUSIC

    Welcome to Dantalian's Percussion Page where you you will find information about our sheet music publications of Donald Martino's percussion music.  There was a time when Mr. Martino would not have thought of using instruments you bang on with a stick and play with your foot in the chamber ensemble context.  All that changed when he wrote his now classic NOTTURNO and discovered a new breed of performer who plays a drum with as much sensitivity and fluidity as the violinist plays his violin.

The octet SERENATA CONCERTANTE is Mr. Martino's latest composition to feature the percussion family.  It has been performed only once so far.  The performers and the audience loved it, the critics: Eh!  But since this entry was written there have been another four performances, all to  critical acclaim.

As its title suggests AUGENMUSIK is for the eyes only!  This little cartoon spoof of the mixed media madness of the late 1960s, like a bad child, is meant to be seen and not heard.  Pick up a copy and find yet another use for your instruments and why this madcap solo work has, in 30 years, sold out many printings but has never found a premiere.

FROM THE OTHER SIDE for Flute, Cello, Piano and Percussion, commissioned for the Australian Bicentennal Celebration, was premiered at the Sydney opera house in the fall of 1998.   It is a gift from one side of the world to the other.  It is also a spoof of our cultural follies.  "five movements that venture from the sublime to the ridiculous.  Tangos, pop tunes, boogie woogie, theater songs, quotes from Bartok, Stravinsky, and the Second Viennese School. {Just picture Schoenberg as a pit band drummer!, ed.}  Who said that academics don't have a sense of humor?" - Fanfare.   Thanks for the great review Fanfare but Martino was never really an academic!

NOTTURNO of course, is the piece that won Mr. Martino his Pulitzer Prize in 1974.  In it he transformed the entire sextet into a percussion band!: "swarms with color, delicious noises, and eerily magical gestures.  A barrage of night-thoughts to flutter, buzz, and jangle against the window screens of our consciousness.  The second movement begins and ends with those fragile clicks and pops and half-heard sighs heard only in the silent  watches of the night" -The Boston Globe

 

All Compositions by Donald Martino  Previously Published by
The E.C Schirmer Music Co/Ione Press
Are Now Published by Dantalian, Inc.

* = Not printed in quantity; allow one month for delivery. § = Prepublication item, inquire as to availability; C = Commercial Recording (Number of C's indicates number of recordings).  P = Perusal Tape. M = Manuscript. ß = Repertory Selection "Director's Guide to Festival and Contest Music" (The Instumentalist). DSE = Dantalian; McG&M = McGinnis & Marx.

FREE ILLUSTRATED BROCHURES ON REQUEST: VOICE, CHORUS, WIND, STRING, PIANO, LARGE ENSEMBLE, BACH CHORALES, STRING-O-GRAPH

Our BROWSE-AT-HOME BROCHURES offer you more than just a few themes.  They are averitable "Reader's Digest" of each work.  Please contact us via phone, mail, fax or email, or use the online order form to receive any of our useful brochures.  Click here for a sample of six of the sixteen excerpts that illustrate one composition in our wind brochure.

Flute    Clarinet    Violin    Viola    Cello    Ensemble Piano    Other

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