Ferrante Manuscript for the Fife

Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife! To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name.
- Sir Walter Scott

Ferrante Manuscript

I am often contacted by fifers who require the musical score for a particular song. They may have read about it somewhere, heard it on a recording, in a movie, or performed by another musical unit. I do my best to locate the information, sometimes even scoring the song myself from memory. Most of the time, I can find it in the Ferrante Manuscript.

Art "Doc" Ferrante has been a friend of mine for over 50 years. For many of those years, we would get together at a muster or other fife and drum gathering and challenge each other with tunes we

thought would stump the other. Just about every time, Doc won the competition. I have never known anyone with such a prodigious memory for music! I had no idea that he had built a mammoth collection of music for most of his lifetime, going back to the 1930s. Art even played for President Roosevelt! After many years of effort, he has now compiled and edited his entire collection into three volumes that are now available to anyone who wants to research music without a lot of needless travel to countless libraries. It is perfect not just for the fifer; fiddlers, flautists, pennywhistlers, musical folklorists and historians will spend many years browsing through Art's legacy, maybe a lifetime.
The finished product is composed of a collection of tunes, 1,303 in total, over 848 pages, in three volumes. There are also anecdotes, legends, and other tales. There are tips on fife care, double and triple tonguing, etc. If you can't find it here, you probably can't find it anywhere! If I were to list the names of all of the tunes, the page would take forever to load.
A publishing task of this magnitude is very expensive, especially when one considers that it is for a limited market. The books are spiral bound so they lay flat. Each volume sells for $49.95 plus shipping. If all three are purchased together, the cost is $134.95, plus shipping expenses.