Music Professor's Publishing Company Strikes Deal With International Publishing House

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University Professor Chalon Ragsdale

University Professor Chalon Ragsdale has much to celebrate this week. It was recently announced that C. Alan Publications, a prominent international publishing house, will assume distribution of Ragsdale's Aux Arcs Music publishing catalog. This is a large step for Ragsdale's publishing company, which he started out of his home more than 10 years ago.

Aux Arcs ("Ozarks") Music started as a side project that would make Ragsdale's somewhat esoteric band arrangements more accessible to wind band conductors. Ragsdale is a world-renowned expert on the life and works of Australian composer Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882­-1961), having presented on Grainger and his life for meetings of the College Band Directors National Association, the patrons of the Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne (Australia), the 2011 Grainger Festival (Tokyo), and for the 2013 Midwest International Band and Orchestra Clinic. Concert bands at the University of Arkansas have premiered numerous Grainger arrangements by Ragsdale, and through the publication outlet of Aux Arcs Music, many of these arrangements have been played at State, National, and International conference and concerts.

The published catalog has grown to include not just the work of Percy Grainger, but also additional composers, especially those associated with Grainger, chief among them Norwegian composer, Edvard Grieg, one of Grainger's major musical influences. Other composers represented in the Aux Arc Music catalog include Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Pietro Mascagni, French Classic Period composer Daniel Francois Esprit Auber, and the works of former U.S. Air Force Band arranger Lawrence Odom.

The catalog of transcriptions from Aux Arc Music can be viewed on C. Alan Publications website.

Chalon Ragsdale is University Professor of percussion at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas. His publishing concern, Aux Arcs Music, (www.auxarcsmusic.com) has focused on bringing editions of Percy Grainger's music to the wind band medium, and he has presented on various Grainger topics in Japan (at the Japan Grainger Festival 2011), twice for patrons of the Grainger Museum in Melbourne, Australia, and in the U.S., including the 2009 CBDNA National Convention in Austin, and the 2013 Midwest International Clinic.

Ragsdale's arrangements of the music of Grainger and others have been performed in numerous significant venues, including the Midwest International Clinic, the College Band Directors National Association, the Western International Band Conference, and many state Music Educators Conferences. His arrangement for Percussion Ensemble of Percy Grainger's Irish Tune From Country Derry was recorded by the "Woof!" Percussion Ensemble in 2000; the CD was named one of International Record Review's "Best Discs of 2000", and received an Aria Awards Nomination for Best Classical CD of 2001.

In 2003, Ragsdale was awarded the Grainger Medallion by the International Percy Grainger Society "in recognition of his work on behalf of the music of Percy Grainger."