Piano Transcriptions for two hands

[Ferruccio]

Alas Ferruccio, the life of an accompanist necessitates the ability to transpose at any given moment and for an organist at choir practice the ability to play a choir work on the keyboard, especially if it is an unaccompanied item also a necessity, thankfully though we only have bass and treble clefs to contend with nowadays. Those skills are still very much in demand.
Happily plain old piano players don't have that problem and most accompanists wish they didn't as well.
regards
Brian

Yeees, I know, Brian !
I didn't mean transposing was an unnecessarity, but practice in sight-reading of music in old clefs for a pianist.

Transposing often is sort of pain because of changing the character of the original key. But on the other hand, it can bring an interesting experience to hear the piece in other keys.
Of course, accompanists are used in playing the same piece in different keys.

[alfor]

...plus, anything
written on any clef other than the treble and the bass clefs turns my
poor old brain to mush!

...I too regret that I never trained sufficiently reading other clefs - that is BTW why virtually nobody is able to play Bach from a definite Urtext score (which is at present only available as "facsimile" edition, as none of the big publishing companies so far dared to issue a "practical" Bach piano volume in the original clefs!!!)

Do you think, playing from old clefs would improve the sound result ?
I can't imagine what practising this could be good for .... (except score reading for conductors).
So I stay lazy.

You are correct, it would not improve the sound result. But the fact that only a handful of us can read old clefs is a further sign of the narrowing of our musical education. In former times they educated musicians, nowadays they merely educate instrumentalists...

[Ferruccio]

...plus, anything
written on any clef other than the treble and the bass clefs turns my
poor old brain to mush!

...I too regret that I never trained sufficiently reading other clefs - that is BTW why virtually nobody is able to play Bach from a definite Urtext score (which is at present only available as "facsimile" edition, as none of the big publishing companies so far dared to issue a "practical" Bach piano volume in the original clefs!!!)

Do you think, playing from old clefs would improve the sound result ?
I can't imagine what practising this could be good for .... (except score reading for conductors).
So I stay lazy.

You are correct, it would not improve the sound result. But the fact that only a handful of us can read old clefs is a further sign of the narrowing of our musical education. In former times they educated musicians, nowadays they merely educate instrumentalists...

No, dear Alfor ! IMO this is NOT correct ! Being a musician is NOT being used in (Sight-)READING of nowadays rarely used ways of notification. Being a musician is NOT being focussed on thinking musical textures or composition only.

Being a musician (either creating as a composer or bringing it to sound as an instrumentalist) means to feel, what is said in the work. How it is said. Which kind of atmosphere has it. The one who can make the public be present and feel that, is the musician.

Score playing is a certain sort of musical craft, that can be optimized, ok. But what for ?
People who spend plenty of their time in recognizing textures spend to little time in how to play it well.

[alfor]

...Score playing is a certain sort of musical craft, that can be optimized, ok. But what for ?
People who spend plenty of their time in recognizing textures spend to little time in how to play it well.

...a discussion with no end. Surely in former times the "craft" was taken much more important than it is nowadays. The essence of the question seems to be: to what extent can we create or "install" musicality (...must be defined before...!!!) in a person and how. And a step lower: to what extent can we "install" technical abilities in a person and how (that question emerges for example when reading about the teachings of Ludwig Deppe, Kullak or Liszt).

While I do invest a certain time in sight-reading (which seems to pay off in several ways), I do no longer try to become a good score player/reader. - But why not teaching a six-year-old beginner 4 instead of only 2 clefs?

[Timtin]

...plus, anything
written on any clef other than the treble and the bass clefs turns my
poor old brain to mush!

...I too regret that I never trained sufficiently reading other clefs - that is BTW why virtually nobody is able to play Bach from a definite Urtext score (which is at present only available as "facsimile" edition, as none of the big publishing companies so far dared to issue a "practical" Bach piano volume in the original clefs!!!)

Of course, it's not only Urtext facsimile editions of Bach that are a problem.
I recently chanced upon a large collection of Jean-Marc Fuzeau scores for sale
at well below their market price. However, my excitement at seeing all these
splendid books of 17th. and 18th. century French keyboard music was quickly
dampened when I noticed that some of the left hand stave in most of them
included passages in a clef which was a 7th. above the bass clef, and therefore
unplayable without lots of practice.

[sgambatiesque]

I wonder if the process of converting the printed score to the keyboard
is fully computerised, and if so, can we soon expect to hear a lot more
other arrangements for 'piano' of the great string quartets? I hope so.
They may sound a bit mechanical, but they're better than nothing at all.
I'm so going to make a CD of these quartet arrangements.

As regards playing quartets directly on the piano, that is totally beyond
me, due to the difficulties of playing the 'inner' notes, plus, anything
written on any clef other than the treble and the bass clefs turns my
poor old brain to mush!

It's a long time since I looked but there were people providing software for scanning to MIDI or MusicXML format about ten years ago. Once you have that, you just open it up inside your favourite music editor and crush it all down to a two handed music arrangement. Something I've done myself from time to time.

[sgambatiesque]

I would like a nice 2H version of the Purcell Chacony in G minor (the one Britten arranged).

Here's three versions, in different states of playability. The Lehman version I found as low-res GIFs some years ago. The MIDI-2H version was one I printed off but haven't had the diligence to work into something more pianistically respectable.

PURCELL Z730 Chacony a 4.pdf

PURCELL Z730 Chacony in G minor [Lehman].pdf

PURCELL Z730 Chacony in G minor (1).pdf

[Timtin]

Thank you Sgambatiesque for your pdfs and explaining how to produce them,
although I'd need one-to-one tuition to really grasp it all properly.
I'd love to be able to produce my own pdfs and mp3s as proper piano music
directly from the original quartet scores, without too much effort!

[Mouchette]

I would like a nice 2H version of the Purcell Chacony in G minor (the one Britten arranged).

Here's three versions, in different states of playability. The Lehman version I found as low-res GIFs some years ago. The MIDI-2H version was one I printed off but haven't had the diligence to work into something more pianistically respectable.

PURCELL Z730 Chacony a 4.pdf

PURCELL Z730 Chacony in G minor [Lehman].pdf

PURCELL Z730 Chacony in G minor (1).pdf

Dear Sgambatiesque,
Which software do you use? Have you found better than Sharpeye or Capella Scan???
Yours,
M.

[sgambatiesque]

Which software do you use? Have you found better than Sharpeye or Capella Scan???

I haven't looked at any of the scanning options in a long time as the internet has brought forward a great resource of easy to find MIDI files of the original compositions.

I used to use Finale to do this work because it had a "piano reduction" feature which smashed all selected staves into two, and then I'd weed it down a bit, print it out and make edits at the piano, going through however edits my patience and time allowed. IIRC there was a scanner add-in.

I looked at the Sibelius program but despite having a far superior user interface to Finale, it didn't have the powerful plug-ins or reduction features. It may have them now, but certainly not in 2003/4 when I last looked at it.

For a period I used Noteworthy Composer but not sure why I stopped.

More recently I've been using Notation Composer and two of the Purcell files I attached are generated from that. One by simply by printing the SATB-formatted MIDI file, and the other by applying the piano reduction (which is pretty much instantaneous on a short piece like this). I may have fiddled with settings like minimum-duration note but that's all.

I should note that MIDI is not an ideal format for this as it's primarily oriented towards mechanical performance. Alternate formats like MusicXML are designed to capture more of the notational aspects. So for example grace-notes and other ornaments often get dismembered with their parent notes, or repeated bass figures change bar to bar because of subtle changes in timings.

For those who want to dip their toes into such transcription waters ( I suppose I should say fingers, and leave toes to the organists) - you can usually download a trial version of the software, then just open a MIDI file of your choosing...