Morning Mood Duet (Excerpt)

[rrayner]

This piece is written for Soprano Recorder and Alto Recorder. Some of the pieces in this series are in keys that you might not see a lot in learning pieces. This was intentional to keep the Soprano part in the lower register. Play along with Notation Composer or print the piece for playing with your friend(s). Please feel free to change the instruments and/or keys to suit your personal needs. RRR

"Morning Mood" is a selection from Edvard Grieg's "Peer Gynt Suite No. 1". At times, it simply has been called "Morning". This is a piece that I have loved for a long time. My wife Cynthia, who is now three years plus into her Soprano Recorder playing career, was playing from a small collection of excerpts of well-known songs -- "Morning" was one of them. I decided to make a reduction from the full score of Grieg's piece into a duet for the two of us. This piece is somewhat a departure from those I've done before, in that it is more interactive, with the second voice, the Alto Recorder, taking a much more prominent part, as the two instruments interact with each other.

I have taken the liberty of leaving out a number of measures from the original, where in measure 38, I take a jump to the ending measures of the piece. I had thoughts of doing the entire piece, however, we like to keep our duets at no more than two pages, and to my ear, this seemed to be a logical place to skip to the end. I trust that Grieg won't roll over, and that the classical purists won't mind. It is, after all, an attempt to spread a little classical music around to people who might not otherwise come in contact with it.

Taking a piece written for a 16-piece orchestra and cutting it down to two voices is quite challenging. I tried to maintain the harmonic integrity of the piece, and to select the most important second voice in arranging this piece. Also, I have dropped the grace notes that Grieg used in a number of places in the main theme. Grieg's direction for tempo is a dotted quarter note = 60. I have several recordings of this piece, and the conductors chose to play it at a slower tempo. I agree, and have set the tempo at 45.

We hope that you will enjoy playing this piece as much as we do.

Ralph Rayner

[rrayner]

I was playing this duet with Notation Composer as the second voice and I realized that I had not left breathing breaks in the phrases where the slurs indicated they should be. As a result, when I took a breath, Composer kept playing. This doesn't sound very good, so I decreased the duration of a number of end-of-phrase notes. Reposted the file.

Ralph Rayner

[aulos43]

Hi Ralph,

I'm feeling much more confident about scoring for recorder, now, thanks to your "challenge." Also with encouragement from this article in Wikipedia -- that I pretty much agree with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorder_%28musical_instrument%29

So, here attached, please find a more typical recorder rendition of your score. The differences are:

Alto is written at pitch (non transposing) as I've shown, though sometimes written an octave lower, still in G-clef, resulting in octave transposition when played;

Soprano, an octave lower than sounding (but sometimes using the all'ottava G-clef with superscript 8, as I've shown it -- in which case, it is at pitch).

As a result, the whole piece is transposed up an octave from your version and sounds closer to an actual soprano, alto duet.

Now the recorder has an inverted conical bore which attenuates the higher partials. I've heard it said that this accounts for the impression that they seem to sound lower.

Thanks

Walt

[rrayner]

Thank you very much for your insight, Walt. Between you and Jane, I have expanded my knowledge of the Recorder considerably. Before these discussions, I was simply a saxophonist dabbling in self-taught recorder. After Jane showed me the error of my ways, I found that same Wikipedia article and copied the range chart from it for future reference. I don't have perfect pitch, so it didn't really sink in for me that, yes, the Soprano really does sound an octave higher than the notes I'm writing -- didn't even occur to me. I have a very nice (for me) Hohner pearwood Alto, and even with your enlightenment, I still am sensing that it sounds lower and more mellow than in your score. Funny what the human senses can do when interpreted by the mind.

As I mentioned before to Jane, even though I now know better, I will continue to score my duets as before. My feeling is that most of the participants in this forum are probably playing other instruments anyway and are changing instrumentation and transposition, etc.

At any rate, I'm glad my writings have challenged you. Perhaps you will be scoring some pieces for two or more recorders to share with us?

Thanks again,

Ralph