Alexander Publishing Announces Online Professional Orchestration™ Writing For Strings Class

Taught by educator/composer Stephen Hill, Alexander Publishing's online Professional Orchestration™ begins its third year of instruction on February 9, 2009 with Writing For Strings. Over a six week period, students write a two-minute solo composition due every ten calendar days. The composition is based on a piece of literature selected specifically for that instrument. Each composition is performed and critiqued from a player's perspective by Mr. Hill.

With this approach, students leave class with the beginnings of a demo reel and four publishable works. Students also learn the basics of score reading and score reduction, two important skills needed for long term career success.

To explain how the class works, four short videos were produced that can be viewed at TrueSpec.com where students can also register for the class.

Required text is Alexander Publishing's Professional Orchestration Volume 1: Solo Instruments and Instrumentation Notes which has been endorsed by winners of the Academy®, Grammy® and Emmy® Awards. Students will also need the specially prepared audio package created by eClassical.com which contains 10 hours of DRM-free MP3s that can be played on any computer or MP3 player, the Professional Mentor™ Workbook, and Strings Position Workbook. Also included in the audio package, as a bonus from the Vienna Symphonic Library, are 13 MIDI mock-ups and matching MP3s for each solo instrument created by composer Jay Bacal to aid students in learning the skill of doing MIDI mock-ups

For international students, a separate PDF package with book and audio is also available.

"The teaching approach is based on the simple common sense idea of learning how to write for live players and how to make samples sound live," explained Peter Alexander, author of the multivolume Professional Orchestration series and class designer Starting Feburary 9, 2009