A Cappella Choir to SAAT saxophones
I run a SAAT saxophone quartet, and am consequently always on the look out for new music and new sources of music. One day last summer I happened upon a ladies a cappella choir singing in a local beauty spot and several of their arrangements just blew me away. One in particular, Lennon & McCartney's 'In My Life' was just stunning and I asked the choir's MD which arrangement it was. She told me and I bought the arrangement over the Internet and set about seeing if it would transpose and rearrange for my quartet. It did, and very nicely too, and our audiences love it.
I thought I was onto a great new source of sax quartet music, but sadly it doesn't work like that. This beautiful tune is one of the fewI've looked at which lend themselves to transposition and rearrangement for sax quartet, but there are many others which, nomatter how much you try, just need to be voiced by humans and not by saxophones.
Here's my transposed and rearrangeed 'In My Life'
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| In My Life saat.mscz, | 7.02 KB |
Comments
Sorry wrong format above...........this should be OK
In reply to OOOpps by Peter B
Very nice. Something that hit me was how the tenor jumps in octaves. This might be something that you've already given a thorough thought and decided to do as you think is the best, while my thought is more of an instant reaction without deeper consideration. Anyway...
In bar 10 the tenor jumps up to the Bb, while it could play it an octave lower - the lowest note on a tenor. Now, the lowest tone on a sax might not always sound very good, you know that. But perhaps you could leave the decision to the tenorist; suggest that the Bb be played in the lower octave, if possible.
Then in bars 17-19 the tenor has to jump up. My thought was to make the jump a bit earlier. The C in bar 18 I would move an octave up, as well as the following 2nd alto tones, namely E, C and C. This way the octave switch would happen on the "pickup bar" part, not on the 1st beat of bar 19. Downside would might be that all parts move upwards at the same point - no counter movement. But that is not always a bad thing.
In reply to Some thoughts by jotti
You are absolutely right that these are the sorts of details I had to get down to when transcribing from a cappella voices to saxophones. I'm the tenor player and I have no problem with low Bb, I can voice that at mp no problem, (though I have to admit I struggle with it on a pianissimo entry). Actually in my original arrangement I did play 9 and 10 an octave down, but it just sounded a bit more in keeping up there, a bit 'sweeter' if you like, but I'll try it down an octave again next time we play it to see if I've changed my mind. Thanks for your suggestions for 17 to 19, I'll try that next rehearsal and see how it sounds.
My aim with this piece, as with the other a capplella choir transcriptions I've done, was to try to capture as much of the a cappella choir sound as I could, all those lovely 'barbershop' chords. It works in places, but in others it's just not right for saxes and I abandon them for more conventional triads.
Thanks for your very helpful and useful comments.