Summer joke for tuba quartet
Posted: Wed Jun 23, 2010 4:17 pm
It may be known that recorders were among the instruments I used to teach. I am not too happy with its historic repertory and much of its modern repertory.
However it is a pleasant instrument in many less loud contexts and very good for playing melodies and countermelodies in folksy environments. The curse of the instrument is that many buy a cheap soprano and at once consider themselves musicians.
My pragmatism in between clashes with the sectarians, who create niches for themselves playing in A=466, 415, or 392. I have instruments in three of these pitches myself but only one soprano in A=392 and one alto in A=415, whereas the two dozens others in 7 sizes all are in A=440.
One night early this month such thread collided with a quest for arrangements of In an English Country Garden. On the web I found one for guitars, which was immediately readable for recorders, but an expert told that arrangement was too close to Percy Grainger’s setting. Same night I had to scare off an intruder, who made it to my bedroom/office door after wrecking the frame of my bathroom window.
It belongs to the equation, that my ears were overloaded with the said tune some 45 years ago.
Revenge time: I made a somewhat complex setting of that old ear wrecker for recorders from 3 different pitch references (these are a semitone apart) so basically I wrote for recorders in C, B natural, and Bb, which is possible to perform for good players.
That setting, in its MIDI version, had its following, so I wrote a simple version and a tango also. Point is that the melody isn’t changed at all.
This afternoon I found a key making these three settings possible for a good tuba quartet. Three sample page are at the bottom of this posting. The .pdf and MIDI files are in my Yahoo based project of making arrangements available for free:
http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/Yo ... 20Quartet/
Klaus
However it is a pleasant instrument in many less loud contexts and very good for playing melodies and countermelodies in folksy environments. The curse of the instrument is that many buy a cheap soprano and at once consider themselves musicians.
My pragmatism in between clashes with the sectarians, who create niches for themselves playing in A=466, 415, or 392. I have instruments in three of these pitches myself but only one soprano in A=392 and one alto in A=415, whereas the two dozens others in 7 sizes all are in A=440.
One night early this month such thread collided with a quest for arrangements of In an English Country Garden. On the web I found one for guitars, which was immediately readable for recorders, but an expert told that arrangement was too close to Percy Grainger’s setting. Same night I had to scare off an intruder, who made it to my bedroom/office door after wrecking the frame of my bathroom window.
It belongs to the equation, that my ears were overloaded with the said tune some 45 years ago.
Revenge time: I made a somewhat complex setting of that old ear wrecker for recorders from 3 different pitch references (these are a semitone apart) so basically I wrote for recorders in C, B natural, and Bb, which is possible to perform for good players.
That setting, in its MIDI version, had its following, so I wrote a simple version and a tango also. Point is that the melody isn’t changed at all.
This afternoon I found a key making these three settings possible for a good tuba quartet. Three sample page are at the bottom of this posting. The .pdf and MIDI files are in my Yahoo based project of making arrangements available for free:
http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/Yo ... 20Quartet/
Klaus