I'm cracking on with the Bach chorale harmonisation work, more or less daily, so will share some recent examples, again side by side (cringingly) with Bach's own harmonisation where possible.
Here's the full choral version, sung rather beautifully by a Dutch choir - I couldn't find a version of Bach's 4-part harmonisation, but other people's own work out there in YouTube land generally has more going on in the ATB parts than mine, which is a little too, er, stately, listening back.
Here's one where I had to realise Bach's figured bass (Albert Reimenschneider collated 69 of these, only a handful of which Bach himself harmonised - and this isn't one of those).
I've also been working on an arrangement for the Brighton Guitar Quartet of Bach's famous aria "Sheep May Safely Graze" from his earliest known secular cantata "Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd" ("What pleases me is only the cheerful hunt" - BWV 208). Here's the first draft, which is based on a piano transcription and transposed form Bb to C.
Having spoken about this with my friend Steve Gordon, himself a brilliant arranger of baroque music for various guitar combinations, I'm going to be making some substantial changes. Steve suggested that I base the arrangement on the original composition, having pointed me at the extraordinary Petrucci Music Library's online database of out-of-copyright scores. The original aria is arranged for two recorders (or flutes), soprano and continuo, so Steve suggests that I assign those parts to guitars 1 & 2, 3 and 4 respectively. This should create more independence of line and give guitar 4 something more chordal (and certainly more interesting) to do. I'm also going to re-transpose the piece to A, not least to give give guitar 4 some open strings to play with. I'll report back on that, but in the meantime, here's the original.
On the non-Bach front, I've also been working on another arrangement for the BGQ, this time of "The Old Castle", from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition suite. I say "arrangement", but it's actually a transposition to Am of an existing arrangement by Angelo Ferraro that had inexplicably left the piece in the original key of G#m - not an intuitive key for guitarists! I'm probably going to make some changes to the assigment of parts, as it gets a tad tedious for guitar 4! Anyway, here it is. (The sample set is Native Instruments' Plucked Nylon which is pretty good, but doesn't seem to accomodate tamboura effect that this arrangement strictly needs).
Switching gears, I mentioned in a recent tweet (or is that an "X"?!) that it's almost 30 years since the release of the CD compilation "152 Minutes, 33 Seconds - A Brief History of Ambient", which somewhat inavertandtly kicked of a series of 24 albums that took up much of my professional (and for that matter, personal) time over the ensuing four years and is listed in Wikipedia as the "Virgin Ambient Series". Well, I dug out my original marketing notes, and it turns out that the CD was released on August 9th, 1993, so I'm busy putting together some thoughts for the anniversary, which I'll post here on the day. It turned out that I didn't have many of the original releases, so I've been buying them through the excellent Discogs, which if nothing else has revealed which of the titles is the most sought after. It's also costing me a small fortune, which is annoying, but there you go.
Finally, that word on failure... In April I finally got around to sitting my classical guitar performance diploma and I have to report that somewhat disappointingly I failed. I'm only reporting it now as I requested a re-marking. That's not something I would ordinarily do, but I was encouraged to do so by a number of my guitar-playing mentors who were all surprised by the result, not least given that the recitals I turned in as part of my Master's were both given credits. In any case, the re-marking has confirmed the failure, which to be honest I was aniticipating.
Although I was initially a bit shaken, I'm actually pretty sanguine about it. The overall tenor of the feedback is: musically communicative, but technically less than assured. That's pretty much in accord with the feedback in all the exams and competitions in which I've participated, but where musicality seems to have made up for technical issues in the past, clearly this time not so much. Given that I took the instrument up so late in life, the holes in in technique aren't entirely a surprise. So it's back on the horse, and a few months of studies and technical work awaits. Sigh.
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