The Sound of Music Medley is an arrangement of eight pieces from the popular Rodgers & Hammerstein musical of the same name.  It's written for 4 C flutes, alto flute, bass flute and SATB vocal choir.  The vocal parts are cued in the flute parts, so the piece could be performed without vocal choir.  The pieces included are The Sound of Music, Maria, The Lonely Goatherd, My Favorite Things, Do-Re-Mi, Edelweiss, So Long, Farewell and Climb Ev'ry Mountain.  The work is about ten minutes long, although you could stop after several points in the piece for a shorter version.  As is typical of all of my works there are no optional parts.  Every single voice gets a melody at least once, even the bass flute on Edelweiss.

    Many people may want to know why I did this piece when there has been a similar arrangement for flute choir alone on the market for several years.  The answer to that requires knowing that I wrote this piece way back in 1983 - 1984 before that other arrangement was conceived.  I approached the estate of Rodgers and Hammerstein and sought permission to use it.  I know now that I should have sought the permission before doing the arrangement, but I was young and naive then.  They wanted $ 72 per piece to give me permission to perform it once only.  Those of you who manage flute choirs know that this wasn't a practical offer so I shelved it.  A couple of years later they commissioned someone else to write a Sound of Music Medley for flute choir.

    That still doesn't answer the question of why I finally brought this arrangement out.  My friends in The Nashua Flute Choir asked me if I could do something really special that they could do with a choir.  I asked if a Sound of Music Medley would meet their needs and they were excited by it.  This time I got the proper permissions to publish it and pulled out my old score and reworked it to include an SATB choir.