After all the excitement last week of the concert playing the Planets Suite I have had a week of other musical things distracting me from the business of writing and arranging music. I have to say that this is not all bad because I’ve been invited to play trumpet in Mahler’s 1st symphony in October, and I have 3 gigs coming up in the next 8 days, 2 with my rock band and one solo with my loop station. It isn’t all about the high brow and serious, even musicians have to let what little hair they have left down every once in a while. When I have had a moment to myself recently I’ve been reading Rimsky-Korsakov’s Principles of Orchestration and I still find new things to learn. As a player I am often confronted with passages that lack a certain flow and beauty and I wonder why they are set out as they are. One of Rimsky-Korsakov’s recurring themes in his book is what he calls “the correct progression of parts”. Music should not only sound beautiful, it should also be beautiful to play and appear so on the page! I suppose what he wants us to try to achieve in our writing and orchestration is elegance.