Accent on Performance Holiday Collection: Alto Clarinet Book

These arrangements trust alto clarinetists with genuine musical responsibility rather than filler parts. The holiday material gives your band a full concert's worth of repertoire that students recognize and audiences enjoy, all calibrated to the Accent on Achievement curriculum so your students can actually play them without additional technical preparation.

Familiar holiday material reimagined with care and humor. These arrangements celebrate the songs we know while adding harmonic color and rhythmic interest that keeps the ensemble engaged and lets each voice contribute something meaningful.

Band directors building winter concert programs around accessible but musically substantive material. Alto clarinetists in developing ensembles who benefit from arrangements that give them the melody, not the counter-line.

• Balance the alto clarinet line against the full ensemble by listening carefully during rehearsal; these parts are melodic leads, not accompaniment, so they need to project without forcing.
• Mark articulation patterns consistently across your clarinet section so the holiday arrangements maintain stylistic coherence when multiple clarinet parts interact.
• Tune the interval between alto and soprano clarinets with special care in the lower register, where intonation issues become most apparent in slower, lyrical holiday material.

Program several of these back-to-back as a holiday medley to build concert momentum, or space them throughout a winter program to provide tonal contrast and showcase different sections. The 22 arrangements give you enough variety to program a full December concert or a substantive holiday unit within your concert season.

• Playing counter-melody lines and secondary parts within an ensemble texture
• Balancing melodic responsibility with harmonic support
• Sustaining tone quality in the middle and lower clarinet registers
• Responding to stylistic cues in familiar material (legato vs. articulated phrasing)