I mentioned in a recent round-up that I've been working on an arrangement of Bach's famous aria "Sheep May Safely Graze", hopefully to play with the Brighton Guitar Quartet. The aria is from his 1733 secular "Hunting" cantata (BWV 208). It's been quite a process adapting it for 4 guitars!
I based my first draft on a piano transcription, transposing it from the original key of Bb up to C, and then ran it past the guitarist and arranger Steve Gordon, with whom I've been working over the last year. Steve suggested that I go back to the original scoring for two flutes, soprano and continuo and assign those to each guitar part. He also suggested transposing it - again! - to A, so that the continuo part in particular could make use of the open strings.
Now this proved tricky, not least as the original vocal part (assigned to guitar 3 in my arrangement) was written in soprano clef. So at this point I was down to transposing the whole thing by a minor third (from my first draft) and dealing with what Sibelius helpfully calls an "archaic" clef. Arghh. Oh, and I had to work out the continuo part from a non-figured bass line, inferring the harmony from the rest of the original texture and from the piano transcription. All just a bit above my pay grade, but it seemed to work, broadly.
Back to Steve for more feedback, and his final piece of (as ever sage) advice was to make the continuo part more guitaristic, making the chord voicings more idiomatic to the instrument, to which I dutifully attended. Anyway, here's a midi rendition of the final version. Still no attention to dynamics yet. Bach, being a clearly lazy bastard, hardly attended to such frippery. We'll be taking a look at this when rehearsing with the BGQ...
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