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Share Your Music Share your .not or .mid files of your arrangements or compositions. |
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#1
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Copland Appalachian Spring for Two Pianos
Hello Music Sharing Friends,
It has been a long time since I've shared anything with you in this forum. In the past, I've showed you some of my compositions; but I realize that my composition styles probably appeal to only one percent of music listeners. I've decided to put my own composing on hold. Instead, I'm planning on devoting my music recreation time to arranging my favorite orchestral music to two pianos, 4-hands and 8-hands. I have two nice Yamaha grand pianos, 6'11 (C6) and 7'4 (C7). Well, they're kind of old now, 30 and 16 years respectively, but I plan on getting the felts softened, to tone down the brightness. My social life here is taking root with these two pianos. Friends come here to play 4- and 8-hands with me. They are all excellent sight readers. I have 8-hand arrangements for all of Beethoven's symphonies, and several Hydan symphonies, Mozart, etc. It is a blast reading these scores with 3 other pianists on the two pianos! Well, there aren't a lot of 8-hand piano arrangements out there. Nor are there 4-hand arrangements for pieces I really love, such as Copland's Appalachian Spring. It is the first of probably many pieces I'll start arranging for 4- and 8-hands. It was a joy using Composer to do the arrangement. I used a MIDI file off the Internet to get started. I collapsed all of the string parts into a single staff, using Merge Staff. Then I did Split Hands to divide the combined string parts in to first piano RH and LH staves. I did the same for the woodwind section plus the piano in Copland's score, which role is mostly to play the lowest A note on the piano-- what a wonderful note in Copland's score. I was pleased at how well the Split Hands command worked. It came up with some ideas that I would not have necessarily thought of, bouncing notes between the RH and LH. It is a lot of fun to play the the piano parts, as some attention of my part, as arranger, is devoted not to just faithfully copying notes from the 14-instrument Copland score to the piano. I also pay attention to how it's fun to bounce musical figures between the RH and LH. It (only) took me about 12 hours for a first shot at transcribing almost half of Appalachian Spring. Most of the work after the few minutes of Merge Staves and Split Hands was:
I've attached an excerpt from this 4-hand arrangement of Appalachian Spring. It isn't easy playing. A disclaimer comes with this, that if you are a pianist and you hurt your fingers playing this, I assume no liability for physical or psychological damage. I sight read this with a really good pianist two days ago. We hit a lot of wrong notes-- mostly me-- but got the feel of the piece pretty good on first reading. I'll keep you posted from time to time about this new mission of mine to transcribe orchestral works to 4- and 8-hands. Don't worry, I'm not spending too much time on this instead of working on Notation Software development. CoplandAppalachianSpringTwoPianoExcerpt.not Cheers -- Mark (the software developer of Notation Software) |
#2
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Re: Copland Appalachian Spring for Two Pianos
Hi, Mark:
Always exciting to get some music from you! I'll listen at leisure later. David |
#3
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Re: Copland Appalachian Spring for Two Pianos
Howdy,
I'm not a keyboard player, so I can't comment about how hard this arrangement would be to play for most pianists. However, I made a small tweak to the listening aspect of this file. I set the Pan for the top two staves (pianist 1) hard left, then set the two staves for pianist 2 hard right, so it's like I'm sitting between the two pianos. That gave me a little better perspective on the interplay between the two pianists. I really enjoy Copland, and this was a very satisfying listening experience Looking forward to hearing more! Sherry
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Music is to the soul like water is to green growing things. |
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