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!