Work
A Long Time Ago
for concert band
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About
This arrangement is based on a previous arrangement of the piece, which I had made for various combination. It was made for my ex-colleague Mary Siew and her band at Shanghai American School, prior to a planned visit there in early 2007.
New Zealand is too young a country to have a true ‘folk’ tradition and much traditional folk music is really variants of earlier British songs, often with local names and places substituted for the originals. In this piece it deals with the seas and the lives of sailors.
My source for some of the folk song arrangements I’ve made is Neil Colquhoun’s collection Songs of a Young Country: New Zealand Folksongs published over thirty years ago.