ABOUT LANDIG MUSIC PRODUCTIONS

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Welcome to LANDIGMUSIC.COM, the web home of composer / arranger Jeremy Landig.

I started composing music in 2nd grade.  It’s possible that my “Pac-Man Polka” for piano solo was a big hit among my elementary school friends.  It’s also entirely possible that they were soon sick of me playing it during lunch hour.  I wonder if the school ever got around to installing a divider between the lunchroom and the music room.

Around 8th grade, a group of fellow summer campers and I took a short course in music arranging.   I had never written music for anything besides piano, and I was devastated to learn that my arrangement of the theme from “Cheers” sounded horrible because I had misunderstood how instrument transpositions worked. 

Things got better.

In high school, thanks to my public library and a couple of lucky stops at the record store (remember those?) I discovered a world of classical music and vocal jazz recordings.  I wanted to be able to write music in those styles, so I composed a few instrumental and vocal pieces, mainly for myself. 

Then, my show choir director generously allowed me to arrange two pop songs for our group to perform at the final concert senior year.  They turned out decently enough, and he asked me to write the competition show for the next year before I went off to college.  Some of it was good, a lot of it was clumsy and formulaic, and all of it was written by hand on staff paper.   They won their last competition of the year, and I got to keep writing.   The next spring, someone showed me I could notate music on a computer in the “Mac Lab,” and I cheerfully started filling up diskettes with completed arrangements.  

Things got more better.

Meanwhile, my college choral experiences started to inspire me to write choral music – a dozen or so choral pieces.   I auditioned into the school’s vocal jazz ensemble and a new world of sound opened up to me.  I had dabbled in jazz piano, but I hadn’t had jazz piano lessons; looking at the jazz charts we were singing started to make jazz piano make more sense. 

About two years into college, I started getting calls from show choir directors that had met my high school director at competitions and wanted to know who wrote his shows, and I learned that I could custom-arrange music to pay for my books instead of taking a work-study job.   I continued to write for show and jazz choirs into my first few years of teaching high school.  I started thinking about what it took to balance creativity in an arrangement with fidelity to the original song.

As a young teacher, I realized that often, the right music for a particular ensemble’s performance and educational goals was not always already pre-written and available from a publisher.  I built up a small clientele, learned a lot about copyright, and cheered when the age of the Internet began to make less familiar music (not to mention lots of incorrect song lyrics) easier to find.   I could find someone else who was writing was I needed.   Someone else could find me to write what they needed.  

Things were good.

I’m not a high school teacher any more, but I remember that during those 10 years I spent a lot of time writing arrangements for my own groups.  I sort of wished that someone could read my mind and know what they needed to supplement the music I could order.   It felt good when another director could also use what I had written for my own choirs.

Along the way I’ve been lucky to connect with people who have done this for longer than I have, and who have done it really well.   I learned a ton from them.  I also learned to trust my weird sense of musical humor and some of the unusual directions it’s taken me as I write.  I’ve had great feedback from friends who I consider to be outstanding teachers and ensemble directors.  It’s a pleasure to work with them.

Here’s to more good.

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