We are delighted to welcome Ryan Beard to our Board of Directors.

In addition, ASMAC is proud to announce that Nan Schwartz and John Altman have become the newest members to our Advisory Board.

Re-elected officers:
President – Gayle Levant
1st VP – Milton Nelson
2nd VP – Jeff Kellem
Treasurer – Liz Finch
Secretary – Bonnie Janofsky

Details:
https://twp.ai/4iw9To

#ASMAC #AmericanSocietyofMusicArrangersandComposers #nonprofit #musicsociety #musicarrangers #orchestrators #composers #copyists

Wed 1 Oct 2025, 7–10pm

ASMAC 1st Wed Hang
At The Mayflower Club, 11110 Victory Blvd, North Hollywood, CA.
Hosted by ASMAC Vice Presidents Milton Nelson & Jeff Kellem.
Pizza provided at 7pm.

Register soon, so we know how much pizza to obtain:
https://asmac.org/civi/event/register/?id=108&reset=1

Meet fellow #arrangers, #composers, #orchestrators, #copyists, #musicians who are part of the ASMAC community.
John Mitchell's Flight 584 Big Band rehearsal night. New arrangements to be read down.

This week! Wednesday, 3 Sep 2025, 7–10pm

ASMAC First Wednesday Hang social mixer
At The Mayflower Club, 11110 Victory Blvd, North Hollywood, CA.
Hosted by ASMAC Vice Presidents Milton Nelson & Jeff Kellem.
Pizza provided at 7pm.

Register soon, so we know how much pizza to obtain:
https://asmac.org/civi/event/register/?id=107&reset=1

Meet fellow #arrangers, #composers, #orchestrators, #copyists, #musicians who are part of the ASMAC community.
John Mitchell's Flight 584 Big Band rehearsal night. New charts to be read down.

ASMAC Hang Social Mixer, Tomorrow!
Wed 4 Jun 2025, 7–10pm

The Mayflower Club, 11110 Victory Blvd, North Hollywood, CA.
Hosted by ASMAC Vice Presidents Milton Nelson & Jeff Kellem.
Pizza provided at 7pm.

Register soon, so we know how much pizza to obtain:
https://asmac.org/civi/event/register/?id=93&reset=1

Meet fellow #arrangers, #composers, #orchestrators, #copyists, #musicians who are part of the ASMAC community.

John Mitchell's Flight 584 Big Band will be playing.
$10 entry goes to support the nonprofit social club.

I was reminiscing earlier about how my Sanskrit tests had bonus questions with sentences that you wouldn't expect. Example:

"The giraffe ate the king."

You'd expect it to go the other way around.

Now, let's assume a text was written in a way that was deliberately designed to shock the reader. Maybe in this text, giraffes really ate kings.

Now think about the scribes that copied this text. Would they read about the king-eating giraffes and decide that a fly had been squished in the wrong spot on the manuscript? Let's correct this. "The king ate the giraffe." There!

I can also imagine us in the West when we receive these texts, wanting to do the most charitable reading of the text, and ending up "correcting" things that don't need correction.

Note that I have no proof that this happened, no idea, nothing. I'm just engaging in a thought experiment.

What if some old sage took some psychedelic substance, had a trip and dictated his trip to a scribe? How much "sanitization" would the scribe do, and then later copyists, and then us?

#manuscripts #scribes #copyists #antiquity