For this year's district-wide String Fest, I arranged Rossini's "William Tell Overture" for beginning orchestra. There are two versions for the very beginners--one is a mostly open string harmony part with a few first finger Es and Bs, and the second is more melodic part that sticks mostly to D string notes. The arrangement for second year players is very balanced--everyone gets the melody at some point! Instead of writing repeat signs for repeated material, I wrote it out so violins get the melody the first time and violas/cellos/basses get the melody the second time. This is written in G Major (so some low 2s) with no slurs (but a few tricky double down-bows in the intermediate arrangement that take some practice).
Orchestra members really enjoyed learning a "real" piece that they had heard before and seen YouTube recordings of professional orchestras playing. While some students were initially put off by its length (two pages instead of one for the intermediate version), they quickly realized there's a lot of repetition and felt a sense of accomplishment as the orchestra learned each section.
Sheet music (all PDFs):
Audio (WAV files) to preview or for students to play along with to practice:
Intermediate melody (first 8 measures only), which I used when introducing the piece:
Selected YouTube links:
Again, I like to use clip art instead of labeling parts "beginning" and "intermediate" or by grade level, so you'll see matching images within the beginning and intermediate parts and scores.
