It’s not too late to add one more piece to your eight-bell Christmas repertoire! This time we have something different: A handbells-and-keyboard collaboration on Ding Dong, Merrily on High. There are both piano and organ accompaniments available, and we’re sure you’ll enjoy them!
Oct 11
AOL Issues?
Dear Friends,
We’ve noticed that some of our customers with email addresses at aol.com haven’t been getting their download links after making purchases. So far, we’ve established that the problem appears to be due to AOL’s thinking that those emails are something they should block. We’ve asked our Internet Service Provider to look into this (they actually “own” the IP address our site uses, and so must be the ones to make the request), but apparently they haven’t been able to make progress yet. They’ve told us that AOL thinks of Choraegus as a “neutral” (i.e. non-spam) site, so we think things should work properly.
If you’re having any trouble, please help us by telling AOL that you’re trying to buy music from us, and make a request on our behalf for them to whitelist choraegus.com, and if you still have difficulties, send us an email and we’ll figure out how to deliver your music. Thanks for your patience!
Oct 03
More Music!
If you haven’t heard, Above the Line Publishing has decided to call it quits. However, their catalog of music isn’t going away! I’ve moved quite a few titles to Choraegus. Most of them are for a full-sized handbell choir; there are a few ensemble pieces and solos as well – do take a look!
Sep 21
Friends
I’ve come to think of my handbell compositions/arrangements as friends after a fashion. We’ve spent a lot of time together, and we know each other quite well. (Well… at least I know them quite well!). Sometimes it’s a bit of a wrench to let them live somewhere else, as in another publisher. But at least they can get out to be seen by people!
Good news, though! Some fair amount of music I’ve written has returned to me due to another publisher’s decision to stop operations, and so I’m starting to re-release those pieces here. In addition, I’m *finally* getting around to adding some other works to the Choraegus catalog, so you might find those interesting, fun, and something you’d like to play. Take a look!
- A Minor Crash – You probably have seen the LED signs on the highway: “IN A MINOR CRASH?” After receiving due encouragement, here’s a piece about that (not with an actual crash, though, since those aren’t too healthy for handbells).
- Rondo – Stephanie Rhoades commissioned this one for her Concert Bells of Fort Worth after submitting the winning bid in the 2013 Distinctly Bronze West silent auction. It’s a rondo in Classical style.
- Ye Jazzy Gentlemen – There’s a reminiscence of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” in this jazz arrangement of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen. It’s fun to play, and fun to hear!
More fun will be on the way!
Aug 27
Wedding Music!
Bells are for weddings!
We’ve just released three classical pieces which are wonderful wedding ceremony repertoire:
- “Air” From Handel’s Water Music Suite in F Major
- Bourée from Handel’s Water Music Suite in D Major
- Mouret’s Rondeau, known to many as the music from “Masterpiece Theater”
Of course, they also are well-suited to a church service or concert – regardless of where you perform, we hope you’ll enjoy playing them!
Aug 09
Barney
No… not the purple dinosaur!
It’s been more than a month since the last post, so bringing out a new piece of music is way-y-y overdue. The new eight-bell piece is the Irish jig Barney Brannigan. It’s a lively, bouncy slip jig that’ll have you dancing even as you’re ringing it!
Jul 03
Children of the Heavenly Father
We have a new eight-bell arrangement, Children of the Heavenly Father. As far as our eight-handbell pieces go, this one is on the easier side – but it’s still fun to play and hear. We hope you’ll give it a try!
Jun 13
For those of you with Yahoo email accounts…
We’ve noticed that some of our customers who have email accounts at yahoo.com are having to wait as much as several days for their download links to arrive. It appears that our e-store is sending the links immediately after purchase, so we’re trying to contact Yahoo to ask for their help in figuring out what’s been happening (if you can help us by contacting them, we’d appreciate that too!).
Meanwhile, we’ve increased the expiration period on download links to five days so that late-arriving links will still be good when you get them.
We’re hoping that we can get this fixed quickly because we know how frustrating it is when you want to get to the music!
May 15
Take the Name of Jesus with You – the Standard Eight-Bell Version!
Sometimes we release the “Surprisingly Easy”™ version of an eight-bell score really quickly, and then it takes a bit longer to arrange or learn the “standard” (whatever that actually means) arrangement. Sometimes it happens in the other order, too – it often just depends on which one came together properly first.
Take the Name of Jesus with You, a joyous eighteenth-century hymn, is a case in point. We’ve had the easier of the two versions available for quite some time, and now we’ve added the standard one too!
We hope you’ll take a look and that you’ll decide to enjoy playing this song of faith with us!
Apr 30
Whew!
If you weren’t able to find us over the last couple of days (April 28-29, 2016), it was because our service provider had a significant hardware failure that made a huge mess at their server farm. They worked and worked, and after “only” about 48 hours have restored service to its usual smooth state. “Only”, you say? Well… we think it can a while to bring millions of gigabytes of data back online safely! They’re probably even more relieved than we are, and are home sleeping after the ordeal, or at least getting some really good coffee.
Anyway, our site is up and running, so you can shop through our music or send us messages now.
We think most of our emails have arrived safely, but there’s a small chance one you sent might have gotten lost in the hubbub. So… if you’ve sent us an email but haven’t gotten a response, please feel free to re-send it so we can answer!
Thanks again for your patience!
