Tuesday, July 26, 2011

QotD

Charles Ives to a heckler at a concert:
Stand up and take your dissonance like a man!

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Bach's Prelude No.1

This is, of course, one of the most famous Bach pieces - the opening prelude to his Well-Tempered Clavier book I, BWV 846. It's been called an encapsulation of the entire WTC and is a favorite of music theorists; there are multiple contrafacts on it, most famous being Gounod's Ave Maria. It is a favorite of classical piano and guitar players for being a sequence of arpeggios and thus relatively easy to play. Of course, that's exactly what makes it *hard* to play on a trumpet. This would be my "some day" piece, along with Tempo di Minueto from Partita No.5 - that thing is hardcore...
I had to transpose it to E and also move the bass notes up in bars 32-33 to fit it to a trumpet range. Obviously, the bass notes cannot be sustained under the arpeggios, so it's all in sixteenths. Here it is on Scribd.