Luminosa arrangement
- karencortez7797
- Jun 3, 2020
- 2 min read
While originally I thought I would just need a collection of aleotoric cells pulled from Luminosa, as I planned out my whole unit, I realised that I wanted the class to progressively learn the entire piece. The challenge: a lot of aleotoric things, and a somewhat mis-matched instrumentation.
At first, I thought I'd just give the class the whole score and then let them go. But then I started to allocate in my mind which instrument needed to go where, and would the saxophone want to transpose, and who would want to challenge themselves with alto clef? In the end I decided to just arrange it, not in a "mixed bag" style because the piece depended so much on tone colour, but by allocating parts and/or combination of parts to a suitable student. Part swapping happened when I tried to stay truer to the articulation markings, such as keeping the strings in string parts when slides or Bartok pizz were called for.
I felt as if my time spent inputting the entire composition into Sibelius was really not worth my while, so instead opted for a bit of an old-school cut-and-paste approach, using word and a Sibelius file "canvas" from which to copy-paste little snippets of replacement notes as I needed. It was still really fiddly, but I'm sure I saved some time, and it also gave me a chance to go through the whole piece really meticulously and get familiar with it myself. In the end I decided to transpose the Sax lines and treble-clef-ify the alto clef, because I feel as if there are better times to practice transposing and reading rare clefs than right before the HSC.
For the moment, the arrangement is a little bit less tidy than I'd like because sometimes the students will need to swap parts on the next system. I've tried to mark it really well with colour tabs for each student, but it would be more ideal to have them all in one order from the start. The disadvantage of doing that, however, would be that the students when playing the score will no longer have an idea of what instrument they originally were. Since a lot of the discussion revolves around layers of sound, it seems more important that the original score be as preserved as possible so notes and observations the students make whilst playing it can inform their analyses. So it's possible it will remain this way.
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