Whenever I complete a new piece of music, I often consider my work as something that can always undergo revisions if needed. Such is the case with the Sarabande. I re-discovered this work and several others (shown below) awhile back while rummaging through old paperwork and graded assignments from my college years. These pieces resulted as exercises in understanding the compositional aspects of counterpoint with regard to strict melody, harmoy and voice textures (primarily, two and three voices or lines).
Looking back at this stack of papers, I decided to approach some of these pieces-- mainly, the Sarabande and Menuet-- from different perspectives: through editing and orchestration. Although I originally composed these short pieces for harpsichord, I changed the instrumentation to strings (violins, violas and cellos) because the pieces sounded better to me that way.. In terms of the MIDI playback for Finale, I also chose to use the fuller sound of the stringed instruments as opposed to the annoying sound playback quality of the single stringed instruments. I do not suggest that I wrote these pieces "for Finale": a dangerous aspect of composing music that I warned readers about in an older blog post. The re-orchestration of the Sarabande is presented below as audio video. I am currently working on completing the re-orchestration of the Menuet.
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