Fand IncWessex Press

After a long period of preparation, Fand Music Press is very excited to launch its landmark event of the year: AN ENTIRE NEW WEB SITE! This isn’t just a superficial makeover; it’s a completely new database-driven site, planned afresh and written from scratch.

We hope you will enjoy exploring the features of the new site, which is far more detailed than ever before. The new database underlying the site contains just about everything you might want to know about the products in the Fand catalogue, and the site can now automatically cross-reference and catalogue pieces by instrument, by composer and so on. Use the tabs at the top of the page to explore what’s available. The buttons in the left column bring you back to this News page or provide additional information about Fand.

You will also notice that we now have online ordering for all items, accomplished through PayPal. This should make ordering items immeasurably easier than it was previously, as well as being a quicker and more secure process. (However, you can still send us a cheque through the post if you would really prefer to use the old ordering method!)

There’s still more to come, too. Although this new site is fully working and complete in itself, it will be expanded over the coming weeks and months to include further new features, such as:

• Sound samples are currently missing, but will return in improved and extended form.
• The Wine Catalogue is also absent for the moment, but will return with updated and expanded entries.
• A search facility will be added to supplement the already very comprehensive indexing.
• There will be even greater cross-referencing of items on the site, with links between printed music in the catalogue and recordings of it on CDs that are available from us, plus CD listings on composer information pages.
• More sample pages: currently, the only pieces in the catalogue that include sample pages are items that I (Richard Hallas, Webmaster) have typeset for Fand in the past under my music-editing/setting name of KeyNote. (Examples include Bax’s In the Night and Peter Thompson’s Prelude for Orchestra: Stress.) I created these samples initially because I could generate them easily from the original computer files. Over time, I intend to include sample pages for all items in the catalogue, but this will require a lot of scanning and graphical tidying!
• And, no doubt, a few more surprises…

New releases by Bax and Thompson

As if the new Web site weren’t enough, Fand has also produced two exciting new musical issues:

Sir Arnold Bax’s A Rabelaisian Catechism was written in 1920, and was one of a set of seven arrangements of French folksongs that Bax wrote at that time, but the only one never to be published until now. Set for baritone and piano, it takes the form of a chanson de série in which a question is put twelve times and the answer given cumulatively, in the manner of The Twelve Days of Christmas. Peter Thompson’s The Oblation is a delicate new setting of a poem by A. C. Swinburne for medium voice and piano.