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Old 01-26-2014, 12:43 AM
rrayner rrayner is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2009
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Default Autumn Nocturne Septet

“Autumn Nocturne” was written by Josef Myrow in 1941. In my earlier playing days, my band was named “The Nocturnes” -- I like to say that a nocturne is a musical form, and we were nocturnal creatures, as we almost exclusively played at night. Thereby, our band name, and “Autumn Nocturne” was a natural band theme song for us.

I am trying to build up my Clavinova repertoire where I will have a meaningful number of charts to play along with, so I have started entering in some of my old playing-days scores.

This arrangement was written around 1963 when I first formed my septet and we started playing at the local Washington, D. C. military clubs. When “Last Call” time came around, we would play this chart before playing “Good Night, Ladies”. At letter B, I would step to the mike and give the “The time has come to say good night, Ladies and Gentlemen…” speech, while the trumpet player softly played the melody. I would join him in unison after my little spiel.

I have notated it as “Easy Swing” as most of the sections have a swing feel. There are a number of places where I intentionally use straight eighth notes. I marked these notes with the dash over the note head to indicate “no swing”.

I have notated the drum part with standard drum notation with the notes set to a Velocity of 1. The “real” drum part is hidden on the Conductor’s Score, but can be viewed by opening the Working Score. This is a scoring trick that Sherry and David taught me.

I hope you find this score informative. My only regret is that I can’t find a way to smooth out the legato phrases, like at letter A, where the three horns play a spread voicing background. This problem is not as noticeable in the ensemble (soli) at letter D. I have tried reducing the Velocity, and that helps, but the transition between notes still sounds very “chuggy” to me. I have lengthened the duration of the notes in these legato phrases to the full time value, and this also helps, but it still doesn’t smooth it out enough.

By the way, this lengthening of notes to their full value is something I have started to do for phrasing. I know this is not the way that Mark designed Notation, but I contend as a horn player, the sound of any individual note does not end when the player changes to another note, be it by pad or valve, therefore, I do not want the gap between notes, unless it is for phrasing and breathing.

Ralph Rayner
Attached Files
File Type: not Autumn Nocturne.not (164.6 KB, 16 views)

Last edited by rrayner; 02-01-2014 at 05:51 PM. Reason: Reposted file for Working Score
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