A collection of articles and music transcribed for solo classical guitar gathered from ten years of the popular series in the journal Soundboard. Each of the music scores is accompanied by an article describing the process of transcription for the guitar, the history of the music and composer, and performance suggestions. All pieces are fully fingered and suitable for intermediate to advanced players.
This unique package compiles various methods and techniques to help you master transcribing. The author, himself a successful transcriber, calls on today's top transcribers for answers to the most common questions and explores all the details necessary for accuracy. The author also includes exercises from beginner to advanced levels that cover everything from rhythm counting to tab notating. The accompanying cassette has full and half speed recordings of the exercises - perfect for practicing. 48 pages. 30-minute audio accompaniment.
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Transcriptions have long been a companion to solo organ literature. Because of the instrument's rich and diverse sound palette available to the organist's discretion, organ transcriptions can generally offer an expressive and captivating recreation of the work at hand. The history of transcriptions paints an intriguing picture: transcribers often reworked contemporary pieces of their time. For example, J. S. Bach transcribed works by Antonio Vivaldi, and Theodore Dubois arranged symphonic works by Felix Mendelssohn for the organ. This embellished trend of transcribing contemporary works seems to have broken around the turn of the twentieth century. Transcribers of today are generally continuing to transcribe works from preceding periods, especially nineteenth century symphonies. If transcribers have overlooked mainly twentieth century works, then minimal music is particularly underexplored. This observation brings forth a compelling question: in what direction can organists continue to expand upon the tradition of transcribing works for the organ in the twenty-first century in a productive way? One possibility is recreating minimalist pieces on the organ, as this dissertation demonstrates. The idea of transcribing minimalist works for the organ came after hearing Latvian organist Iveta Apkalna perform Philip Glass's Mad Rush (1979) on the Glatter-G tz/Rosales organ at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2019. Her technical endurance, registrations, and expression in her rendition of Glass's piano piece generated an overwhelmingly positive response from the audience. This enlightening discovery unveiled a strong affinity between audiences and minimalist works be reimagined on the organ, influencing this dissertation study. Chapter 1 will present three case studies of organ transcriptions of various works completed within the last 150 years to generate a wide array of transcription approaches. Philip Glass's renowned Glassworks (1981-2) will be examined in Chapter 2 to reveal its peripheral appeal to classical and popular music listeners through instrumentation, form, and style. Chapter 3 outlines my process of creating an organ version of Glassworks, addressing any concerning areas that surfaced in the process. Herbert Ellingford's treatise, The Art of Transcribing for the Organ, and each transcribers' methods addressed in Chapter 1 are consulted to aid my transcription process. Chapter 4 presents the Glassworks transcription and addresses performance considerations, instrument selection, and registration approaches.
A well-known feature of great works of art is their power to “live on” long after the moment of their creation – to remain vital and alive long after the culture in which they were born has passed into history. This power to transcend time is common to works as various as the plays of Shakespeare, the Victory of Samothrace, and many works from early cultures such as Egypt and Buddhist India which we often encounter today in major art museums. What is the nature of this power and how does it operate? The Renaissance decided that works of art are timeless, “immortal” – immune from historical change – and this idea has exerted a profound influence on Western thought. But do we still believe it? Does it match our experience of art today which includes so many works from the past that spent long periods in oblivion and have clearly not been immune from historical change? This book examines the seemingly miraculous power of art to transcend time – an issue widely neglected in contemporary aesthetics. Tracing the history of the question from the Renaissance onwards, and discussing thinkers as various as David Hume, Hegel, Marx, Walter Benjamin, Sartre, and Theodor Adorno, the book argues that art transcends time through a process of metamorphosis – a thesis first developed by the French art theorist, André Malraux. The implications of this idea pose major challenges for traditional thinking about the nature of art.
Though popular music in the twentieth century was often disseminated aurally through recordings, transcribers have reified these sounds into musical notation to aid in analysis and re-performance. Today, musicians use myriad types of transcriptions-online tabs, lead sheets, and note-for-note sheet music-to help them understand and learn their favorite songs. This dissertation narrates the emergence of these transcriptions among different genres during the Rock Era, a period stretching from the late 1950s through the late 1970s. Detailed transcriptions were far less common then than now: some were created to secure copyright protection, while others helped musicians gain competency in a certain performance style. By the 1980s, however, many transcriptions started being published as exquisitely crafted musical works that could stand in for their model-the recording. I argue that these documents are most often influenced by classical music aesthetics, as transcribers borrow from this tradition to legitimize popular music at a time when it remained outside the purview of the musical academy. In Chapter 1, I explore the ontology of musical transcriptions, focusing particularly on the relationship between transcriptions and musical works in the genres I study in subsequent chapters: jazz, the blues, and rock. Chapter 2 studies Gunther Schuller's transcriptions of Ornette Coleman's free jazz; one example translates Coleman's improvisation into a "coherent" musical artifact, elevating him to Western art music standards and problematically occluding other musical inheritances. Chapter 3 provides an overview of the different varieties of guitar transcriptions in this era; I profile key blues guitar pedagogues and transcribers, Happy Traum and Stefan Grossman, and then scrutinize various publications of Jimi Hendrix's guitar music. I examine The Frank Zappa Guitar Book in Chapter 4, a collection of exceptionally detailed (and overly complex) transcriptions of Zappa's guitar improvisations undertaken by young Steve Vai that serve to impart a sheen of legitimacy on Zappa's music, aligning his improvised compositions with his written ones. My conclusion explains the proliferation of note-for-note transcriptions at the end of the 1980s, a trend that stems from the popularity of neoclassical metal and the emerging treatment of canonic rock music as "generational objects."
