Twinkle Arrangement

Here is a very simple two-part arrangement of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" that I used with my beginning orchestra last year.  Each instrument has a turn playing melody and harmony for a verse.  I've written the Part I and Part II for all four instruments, so you can mix and match instrumentation as you like.  I had cellos and basses play Part I (where they get melody on Verse 1) and violins and violas on Part II (where they get melody on Verse 2).  I double-sided the parts so everyone got a Part I and Part II for their instrument, but I starred the side they'd be learning.  The form is Introduction, Verse 1, Interlude, Verse 2, and Coda.  I used just a bit of Alpha notation where I thought it might be helpful.

I wasn't sure what my students would think of learning and performing this piece, if they thought they were too old to be playing "Twinkle," but they ended up really enjoying it.  I think that they liked that it was a familiar melody to them that they also knew the audience would recognize and that they liked how it sounded with both melody and harmony together.  The harmony part is very simple--pretty much either a third away from the melody using D string notes or just open strings so students were quite successful at being able to learn this quickly and confidently.  There were also opportunities to have to count measures of rests.

Because everyone gets to play both the melody and harmony (and the harmony is basically the same for all instruments), it was easy to rehearse in full orchestra.  I could have everyone practice the melody together (starting on whichever verse) or everyone practice the harmony together (starting on the other verse) or as written (everyone starting on the same measure number).

I did play along on the piano to fill out the harmony a bit and to provide more rhythmic support.  The piano arrangement below is pretty close to what I played--feel free to improvise something else too!

I'm planning to put this into my rotation of a first "full orchestra" piece--along with my arrangement of "Ode to Joy" and Michael Allen's arrangement of "New World Symphony Theme."

• Twinkle parts
• Twinkle parts with links to audio files (WAV files) to preview or for students to play along with to practice
• Score 
• Piano part (with basic score)

Enjoy!

C/E String Notes

 

Orchestra Expressions gets to the C and E string notes pretty late in Book 1, and I like to introduce them to first-year players in the spring, as we are preparing for our spring concert.  I created a double-sided sheet where students learn about half steps and whole steps to figure out the names of the notes on their newest string on the front and then the back side is music that uses these new notes.

I'll have a student read a paragraph out loud, and then we'll go back dissect it together, pointing to the notes on the keyboard poster to figure out the notes on the E or C string one by one and get them written down.  It is fun to see students make predictions about what the letter names or sharps will be, and then I encourage them to see if their guesses are correct as we work through the sheet together.  Many will independently fill in the corresponding bubbles on their fingering chart that's taped in their folder as we go through this sheet too.  Otherwise we do that together the following week as a quick review.

Ideally each student in the small group is on the same instrument, but this tends to be the time of year when I have to do combined small groups or creative scheduling due to testing or field trips so I'll have multiple instruments in a group.  When this happens, I have to be careful to keep the pace moving so we can get through all the notes/fingerings but not to go so fast that I am losing/confusing students--this can be a tricky lesson for some!  It can also be tricky to play these pieces together since they are in different keys depending on the instrument/string--I'll use my judgement in the moment if it makes more sense to have the E string instruments play while C string instruments air-bow or say finger numbers or clap/count or just listen and then switch or to just have everyone play the parallel 5ths together.  In full orchestra, we'll do "show and tell" with one of the pieces to avoid the parallel 5ths :)

In the both the Word document and PDF below, I've included three different versions of the sheet music--one with regular notation, one with a few Alpha notes at the beginning of each piece, and one with all Alpha notes.

C/E string notes worksheet/repertoire

• Word document
• PDF
• Audio files

Contents:

1. C/E Pentascale and Arpeggio
2. Mattachins (Sword Dance)
3. Barcarolle
4. Funga Alafia

Image of labeled keyboard (png)

Feel free to use and update as you like!