Everybody Loves Saturday Night Arrangement

Here's a sort of mix-and-match arrangement of "Everybody Loves Saturday Night," from Nigeria.  There are two versions in this arrangement, one for beginners and one for second-year orchestra students.  Each version has its own melody and harmony.  The beginner version has an all open-string harmony with a simplified melody with just D string notes, and the advanced version is mostly D string notes with a few G string notes (including a C# on the G string).  Students did really well learning the syncopated bits after hearing the lyrics sung.  We also would stomp our feet on the eighth rest in practice.

My students studied this piece in the fall of 2020, when we couldn't have full orchestra or in-person concerts.  My colleague and I ended up recording ourselves individually playing the different parts using the Acapella App and then added pictures of our students to create an "Orchestra At-Home Winter Concert" play-along video, which we also used for our virtual version of String Fest that year.  That being said, this is a super flexible arrangement--you could play through the piece twice and assign or give choice to who plays which parts when. 

Here's a link to some history of the song from Art Podell and results of research about its origins from Deanna deCampos (which shares that the song is actually from Ghana from at least 1932 rather than from Nigeria in the 1950s), as well as a website with translations to more languages than I included (and even more languages here).

Sheet music (Alpha notation included at the end of each document):

• Beginning parts (PDF) (melody/open-string harmony)
• Beginning parts (Word document)
• Advanced parts (PDF) (melody/harmony)
• Advanced parts (Word document)

Sheet music with links to audio files (WAV files) to preview or for students to play along with to practice:

• Beginning parts with audio files (PDF) 
• Beginning parts with audio files (Word document)
• Advanced parts with audio files (PDF)
• Advanced parts with audio files (Word document)

Enjoy!

D Major Sheet: Audio Files for Accompaniment

After putting together the audio files for the Orchestra Expressions supplement, I thought this audio-file accompaniment would also benefit my second-year students, so I went ahead and typed up some Finale files to correspond with their first handout of the year (the D Major sheet).  For the rounds, I created a solo version with piano accompaniment and then a round version with all string sounds.  Some pieces were exported at different tempos (named either Andante, Moderato, or Allegro) to help students at different points in their learning.

• Table of Contents to D Major Sheet: Audio Files (with links)

Enjoy!

William Tell Overture Arrangement

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):

• Beginning orchestra score and parts
• Intermediate orchestra score and parts

Audio (WAV files) to preview or for students to play along with to practice:

• Intermediate arrangement audio file

Intermediate melody (first 8 measures only), which I used when introducing the piece:

• PDF sheet music of melody
• Word document of melody

Selected YouTube links:

• Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra
• Animated graphical score

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.

Blue Danube Arrangement

Here's another arrangement I've written for this year's String Fest.  I've included two sections plus a DC al Fine to end up with an ABA form for "Blue Danube Waltz."  The intermediate parts give the melody to violas and cellos in the A section and to violins in the B section, while the basses get a more traditional bass part.  Harmony parts are either "boom" or "chick-chick," intentionally simple so we can spend more time working on the melody parts in small groups.  Violas and cellos have to play C# on the G string, while violins go up to F# on the E string.  All intermediate parts (except basses) include slurs.  I've also written parts for a beginning orchestra.  The A section is a simplified melody with notes on the D and A strings, and the B section is mostly open strings.  While the intermediate arrangement can stand alone, the beginning orchestra arrangement needs the addition of the intermediate arrangement to fill it out (and to provide a melody for the B section).

I introduced this piece to my sixth graders by listening to a recording of this famous Strauss waltz.  Many students had heard it before and were excited to be learning this piece in orchestra.  Students also learned how to dance a waltz--"forward-side-together, back-side-together" starting on left foot for the leader or "back-side-together, forward-side-together" starting on right foot for the follower.  A few kids partnered up and tried the dance together, while everyone else was content to just try the steps themselves.

Sheet music (all PDFs):

• Beginning orchestra score and parts
• Intermediate orchestra score and parts

Audio (WAV files) to preview or for students to play along with to practice:

• Beginning arrangement
• Intermediate arrangement

Intermediate melody (first 4 lines only), which I used when introducing the piece:

• PDF sheet music

Again, I like to use clip art instead of labeling parts "beginning" and "intermediate," so you'll see matching images within the beginning and intermediate parts and scores.

Les Toreadors Arrangement

My district has an annual String Fest, where all the orchestra students in the district get together for a day of rehearsing and listening with a big concert that evening in the field house.  Each grade level orchestra is featured for a piece or two, and then everyone plays a combined piece as the grand finale.  This grand finale piece has to be playable for first-year string players but still interesting to high school musicians.  My solution this year has been to arrange sections of "Les Toreadors" from Carmen by Georges Bizet in a multi-level format.  I did transpose it to D Major from its original A Major to make it friendlier for the beginners, and I shortened the movement to a simple ABA form.

Overview of parts:

• The beginning students get a simplified unison version with limited range--mostly D string notes plus a section with  hopping 2nd finger notes (B on the G string and C# on the A string) and open G.  
• The elementary (second-year) parts have the same simplified rhythms but an expanded range--mostly notes from the D Major scale plus the bass part gets some 2nd finger notes and a fun chromatic passage.  I also included "challenge" intermediate parts which include more finger work, more eighth notes, and a slightly wider range to sound more like the original melody.  The "B" section is the same between the regular and challenge parts.  The different voices would be regular parts (vln/vla/cello basically in unison), challenge parts (vln/vla/cello basically in unison), bass part.
• And then the advanced parts come from Bizet's original, just transposed to D Major.

Here are the openings for the different violin parts for comparison...

Beginning orchestra:

 Intermediate orchestra (regular part)

Intermediate orchestra (challenge part)

Advanced orchestra (Violin I)

Advanced orchestra (Violin II)

Sheet music (all PDFs):

• Beginning orchestra score and parts
• Intermediate orchestra score and parts (with challenge parts too)
• Advanced orchestra score and parts

Audio (WAV files) to preview or for students to play along with to practice:

• Beginning arrangement
• Intermediate arrangement
• Advanced arrangement

Intermediate melody (first 4 lines only) and challenge part (first 4 lines only), which I used when introducing the piece:

• PDF sheet music

With all the different versions, you can mix and match to differentiate for individual students.  I like to use clip art instead of labeling parts "beginning" and "intermediate" etc., so you'll see matching images within the beginning and intermediate parts and scores.

Feel free to try out with your orchestras!