rrayner
06-24-2014, 03:08 AM
“It's All In The Game” made it to No. 1 in 1958, sung by Tommy Edwards. Carl Sigman wrote the lyrics in 1951, but the original music was a classical piano piece called "Melody in A Major," written by Charles Dawes, who was Vice President of the United States under Calvin Coolidge.
I started out trying to make a simple reduction of this piece, keeping the lead line pretty close to the way Tommy sang it, but the background gave me some trouble due the range of some of the lines and my scoring this for two Recorders. There were places with the background lines that I wished to use either went too low for the Alto Recorder, or too high if I transposed up an octave. So, I compromised and made the background sound like some of the things done on the original, just not an exact copy.
We think the final result comes across okay. My wife Cynthia is the expert on Pop Music, so I defer a lot to her in this area, and it colors how I approach these arrangements of songs of this genre.
We hope you enjoy playing it.
Ralph Rayner
I started out trying to make a simple reduction of this piece, keeping the lead line pretty close to the way Tommy sang it, but the background gave me some trouble due the range of some of the lines and my scoring this for two Recorders. There were places with the background lines that I wished to use either went too low for the Alto Recorder, or too high if I transposed up an octave. So, I compromised and made the background sound like some of the things done on the original, just not an exact copy.
We think the final result comes across okay. My wife Cynthia is the expert on Pop Music, so I defer a lot to her in this area, and it colors how I approach these arrangements of songs of this genre.
We hope you enjoy playing it.
Ralph Rayner