Arrangement of Tchaikovsky, Souvenir d'un lieu cher, Melodie

I made this arrangement of Op. 42 no. 3 for church and thought I'd share in case anyone wants to add to their repertoire of "pretty things that aren't too hard" Difficulty about equivalent to the easier Seasons by Tchaikovsky.
http://imslp.org/wiki/Souvenir_d'un...kovsky,_Pyotr)#For_Piano_solo_.28Reichgott.29

 

Heather,
Good job! I printed it and played through it a couple of times. I like the way the turns are notated - it leaves little doubt about how to play them. (Good for a non-academic like me.)

Question about the tied notes in measures 45 and 46: are these completely accurate? Seems to me that the bottom notes would be tied, too, to give the effect of a single-note melody. (The idiom is so prevalent in piano music that I automatically did it this way.)

Too bad we don't have a dedicated spot for things like this. Perhaps a cross-posting in "resources" would help.

 

Hi Stu,
There are two melodies going on there. The violin melody is the 16th notes on the first beat, then a half note. The piano melody is the top voice of the eighth-note chords. If I were more skilled with notation, I'd have written it clearly in two voices, half note with stem going one way, and eighth notes with stems going the other way. I know some ways to do multiple voices in Lilypond, but everything I came up with resulted in colliding stems. So I wrote tied eighths instead of a half note. You're right, it is a bit confusing...
Heather

 

Thanks, Heather. I'll try playing it that way.
I've paid no attention to notation software and have no clear idea of what's involved.

By coincidence, I went to church with my wife this AM and sat right behind the piano. I liked the offertory piece and asked him what it was and it turned out he had just written it and was willing to talk about the software. So I got exposed to it twice in one week.
He actually gave me the hard copy he had, since he can print out another, and corrected a couple of mistakes in pencil. What an age we live in!

 

That looks nicely written out, with plenty attention to detail like phrasing marks etc.

Just wondering: what is your view on writing out pedal markings? I've written out several scores - in fact I've just finished one! - and can never decide whether to go through punctiliously indicating them all, or whether to take default, or implicit, positions (for music of this era/genre) such as that the performer understands to pedal by the harmony.

 

I think it only makes sense to write in counter-intuitive pedal markings, unless the arrangement is for students first learning pedal.

 

Cool!! I love being able to have access to new music so quickly

 

Let me add my thanks too, Heather. Just what I need for church.

The B-natural in bar 50 is presumably a mistake.

The tied 8ths in the left hand in bars 60 and 62, for what are really off-beat 4ths, look a bit odd, and I wondered why they aren't notated similarly to bars 50-52, for example. But then I saw you were just being true to the original where they are also -strangely- written like that.

Is there a reason why you end the piece on bare octaves, where the original has a chord?

 

Thanks Rainer for helping me proofread.
The B natural you mention is a mistake and I will correct it.
The tied notes are indeed odd and it seems to make sense to alter them to quarter notes.
The ending was a choice of mine -- the last RH note comes from that long pp arpeggio and I felt it sounded better continuing to emulate the violin line, ending on a quiet single note with just a pizz.-like bass note underneath (which I pedal briefly). I can also see why someone might prefer a chord there.

 

A corrected version has been uploaded to imslp.