New arrangements of old standards
Posted: Fri May 04, 2007 9:01 pm
For the past several years, my family has gotten together at Christmastime and played Christmas carols on downtown street corners, at shopping centers and nursing homes, just for fun and to spread the holiday spirit. We leave an instrument case open, and if people throw money in, we donate it to the local high school music program.Each year, I do one new arrangement of a classic Christmas song. The first one (and still the best) was "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire ...") set to the style of "Play that Funky Music!" Believe it or not, it FITS PERFECTLY and sounds fantastic. I also did "The Grinch" song for bari sax solo, "Silver Bells" with Chicago-style horn parts, and last year's was "If John Williams Had Written Frosty the Snowman."Everybody loves these arrangements, and they come off really well with our little 8-piece band. I don't have any recordings of them except their MIDI versions of the score.I realize all these songs are still under copyright - but we're just playing them on street corners in our small town. My question is, once I do enough of them, I'd like to market the arrangements to Hal Leonard or something. How do I go about doing this? Anybody have any experience in the matter?