Parade — Score and Parts

Parade by Bruce Goff, arr. Sean Connors

Duration: 2.5 minutes

Percussion Quartet
Player 1 - Glockenspiel
Player 2 - Vibraphone
Player 3 - High Marimba*
Player 4 - Low Marimba*
*Players 3 and 4 may share one 5 octave marimba

Score and Parts sent in PDF format.

*PLEASE NOTE: Customers will receive the files via email from a member of Third Coast Percussion's staff. Files will be sent during business hours (M-F, 9am-5pm Central Time).*

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Bruce Goff is remembered as one of America’s most creative and iconoclastic architects, but his creative energy was not limited to architecture and design. Goff was a great lover of music, in particular Balinese music and the works of composer Claude Debussy. In the 1930’s, Goff briefly tried his hand at music composition, hand-cutting the paper “rolls” used in player pianos to create music that is, like so much of his output, unique, daring and endlessly creative.

At the request of long-time friend and supporter Sidney K. Robinson, who lives in Goff’s “Sam and Ruth Van Sickle Ford House” in Aurora, Illinois, Third Coast Percussion arranged a selection of Goff’s music for percussion instruments in 2014. TCP arranged these selections from Goff’ piano rolls to capture his fascinating experiment into the correlation between the visual (the piano rolls themselves, as they unfold throughout the composition) and the aural, musical result.

In 2026, Third Coast partnered with the Art Institute of Chicago to transcribe and arrange even more of Goff’s piano rolls to present a full-length concert. The program featured direct transcriptions of Goff's original works alongside the ensemble's own expansions and creative reimaginations of his musical fragments. The performance was prominently tied to the major Bruce Goff retrospective exhibition at the Art Institute, Bruce Goff: Material Worlds.

Parade is one of just a few piano roll compositions that Goff gave its own title and separated as a stand-alone composition. The other transcriptions of Goff’s piano works are available as individual compositions and as collection of works entitled Rolls and Reimaginations that also contains some of Third Coast Percussion’s original pieces inspired by Goff’s piano music.

This publication is made possible through the generosity of the Bruce A. Goff Archive, Ryerson and Burnham Art and Architecture Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago.