Various Arrangements

[nigeld]

I have made several arrangements for saxophones of early madrigals and other music.

Quartet:
Byrd: Agnus Dei from the 4-Part Mass (SATB or AATB)
Gabrielli: La Spiritata (SATB)
Tallis: If Ye Love Me (SATT or AATB)
Tomkins: Pavan a 4 (SATB)

Quintet:
Gibbons: The Silver Swan (SATTB)
Holborne: Galliard - The Sighes (SAATB)
Monteverdi: Ecco Mormorar L'Onde (SSATB or AAATB)
Monteverdi: Si Ch'io Vorei Morire (SSATB or AAATB)
Tomkins Pavan a 5 (SAATB)

(Edit: The Marie Gold is @tenorviol 's arrangement - not mine. I had included it in this list by mistake with the other Holborne Galliard. Now removed. I hope I haven't claimed that any other arrangements of his are mine. Grovelling apologies if so.)

Larger Groups:
Tomkins: Woe Is Me (SSATBB)
Beethoven: Octet, First Movement (SSAATTBB)
Gabrielli: Canzon a 12 (3 groups of SATB)

While Pete is re-thinking the resources section of the Café site, I thought I would post a pointer here
Dropbox - Nigel's Arrangements

If anyone ever fancies trying the Beethoven Octet, I would love to join in, and I could do an arrangement of the other movements.
I have played it on bassoon and its great, but not easy.
It would need a good first soprano player.

 

[jbtsax]

Very impressive. May I ask what program you used to write these? Did you have to input each note into the score or was there some type of shortcut used to transfer the parts from a vocal score?

 

[nigeld]

Very impressive. May I ask what program you used to write these? Did you have to input each note into the score or was there some type of shortcut used to transfer the parts from a vocal score?

They were mostly done with Sibelius, but a couple were done with MuseScore. On the whole I prefer Sibelius. That's partly because I have learned how to use it, but also because I have still not found out how to change instruments easily in MuseScore (e.g. how to change a single part from Soprano Sax to Alto). (Edit: I have just discovered how to do this - stave properties.)

The most painless way to get the notes is to import a MIDI file into Sibelius. This is what I did with the Beethoven Octet. There can be occasional errors, but very few.

My copy of Sibelius also has the capability to scan a PDF of a score and turn it into a Sibelius file. This is what I mostly have done for the vocal works. There are lots of mistakes to correct, but it's much faster than entering all the notes by hand.

Using the "Play" function of Sibelius and MuseScore is a quick and easy way to spot mistakes. The sound is very poor, but a wrong note will usually be obvious.

 

[Jeanette]

@tenorviol @chadders some interesting pieces. If you are ever up this way Nigel you can guest play with us

Jx

 

[nigeld]

@tenorviol @chadders some interesting pieces. If you are ever up this way Nigel you can guest play with us

Jx

If Ye Love Me, and The Silver Swan are good warm-up pieces.

I have sung the Monteverdi madrigals and they are gorgeous.

The Tomkins "Woe is me" has some wonderful dissonances, and it would be fun to try it one day. All strange notes can be blamed on the composer.
Needs 2 sops and 2 baris though.

 

[jbtsax]

Thank you. I use Finale and have also found the importing of midi files very useful. Unfortunately Finale discontinued the ability to scan a score. In my version of Finale the string sounds are excellent. Did you hear the accompaniment to Gabriel's oboe I made a while back?

 

[nigeld]

Unfortunately Finale discontinued the ability to scan a score.

It is only available with certain versions of Sibelius. Mine is an all-bells-and-whistles version that I was able to get cheap several years ago when I worked for the University.

In my version of Finale the string sounds are excellent. Did you hear the accompaniment to Gabriel's oboe I made a while back?

Yes, that track was good. I have only got rubbish sounds out of my version of Sibelius on the Mac. The saxophones are appalling! But I have never tried to make it better. It it quite possible that I just need to use better sound files.

 

[Tenor Viol]

@Jeanette - we have tried the arrangement of Gibbons' Silver Swan a while ago... but it was before we had a bari. I've sung most of the vocal peices and played a lot of the consort music on viol

 

[nigeld]

Consort music and renaissance vocal music is, on the whole, very easy to set for saxophone quartet, as the parts were written to be performed on voices or recorders, so the ranges mostly work for saxophones. No concerns about copyright either. I imagine that some viol music could possibly be harder to transcribe because viols presumably have larger ranges. (And does viol music have double stopping like modern string music?)

 

[Tenor Viol]

Consort music and renaissance vocal music is, on the whole, very easy to set for saxophone quartet, as the parts were written to be performed on voices or recorders, so the ranges mostly work for saxophones. No concerns about copyright either. I imagine that some viol music could possibly be harder to transcribe because viols presumably have larger ranges. (And does viol music have double stopping like modern string music?)

Some Viol music has chords... but not usually in consort music

 

[rhysonsax]

It is only available with certain versions of Sibelius. Mine is an all-bells-and-whistles version that I was able to get cheap several years ago when I worked for the University.

I was using Photoscore Lite with Sibelius earlier this week. It sort of worked and did save me time, but it was quite limited and frustrating, given the high quality of the score it was fed. Is that the Optical Recognition programme you use ?

Rhys

 

[nigeld]

I was using Photoscore Lite with Sibelius earlier this week. It sort of worked and did save me time, but it was quite limited and frustrating, given the high quality of the score it was fed. Is that the Optical Recognition programme you use ?

Rhys

Yes. I use Photoscore Lite. I have had reasonable success with it.
It always makes lots of mistakes, and it can’t cope with muliple-bar rests and text annotations, but I find the process of correcting the mistakes is less tedious than entering the notes by hand, and a lot less time-consuming.
I ignore the correction facility in Photoscore, and do all the work in Sibelius.

 

[rhysonsax]

Yes. I use Photoscore Lite. I have had reasonable success with it.
It always makes lots of mistakes, and it can’t cope with muliple-bar rests and text annotations, but I find the process of correcting the mistakes is less tedious than entering the notes by hand, and a lot less time-consuming.
I ignore the correction facility in Photoscore, and do all the work in Sibelius.

Interesting - I did the correcting in Photoscore Lite and here are some of the problems it had in reading a good, clear score for a big band:

• Lite can only cope with 12 staves maximum
• When I tried to save the *.OPT file part way through my corrections it all crashed (because of the stave limit I think) and I had to go back and start again.
• The score was a transposing score and it couldn't understand that different instruments are in different keys
• It couldn't cope with a pick-up bar
• It didn't see any of the articulation or phrase markings
• It was very good on pitch but occasionally mistook a quaver for a crotchet but not vice versa
• It didn't recognise the key change that happened part way through

I think it probably saved me more than 50% of the time it would have taken from scratch but I wouldn't pay the price of the full version even if it has got a lot better.

Rhys

 

[nigeld]

I’ve never tried a scanning a score with more than 12 staves.
I tried using the Photoscore correction facility once, but I found it very confusing.
Lite tells you not to import the file into Sibelius until you have fixed the problems, but you can ignore that.
It only gives you the notes, all text and extra marks get thrown away.

 

[Dave E]

Slightly off-topic but what do people recommend for scanning and transcribing? I hand-transcribed Baker St recently half a tone down to better fit the normal key. (Could have googled to find a solution but thought it might be useful to do it the old-fashioned way). In future I might use a lazier method i.e software.

 

[nigeld]

I have transcribed a new piece: The first movement of Beethoven's Wind Trio Op87, arranged for SAT or ATB saxophones.

Dropbox - Beethoven op87-1 SAT.pdf

Dropbox - Beethoven op87-1 ATB.pdf

 

[nigeld]

Slightly off-topic but what do people recommend for scanning and transcribing? I hand-transcribed Baker St recently half a tone down to better fit the normal key. (Could have googled to find a solution but thought it might be useful to do it the old-fashioned way). In future I might use a lazier method i.e software.

I use Sibelius, but any music editing software should allow you to transpose.