Music for young (mostly) string players: introductory
Like many school instrumental music teachers, I have perpetrated a fair number of arrangements of music for soloists and ensembles of various sizes and levels of proficiency, and I’ve been asked to put some of it online. The advent of musical notation software has been a godsend to music teachers: rather than relying on (sometimes venal and tasteless) music publishers to supply music for our middle-school students, we can now each be our own Kapellmeister, adapting the best music we can find to our local circumstances.
Except for a few .pdf books, the music on this website is all in Finale 2002 format – which should be readable by any later version of Finale, and also by Finale Notepad (a free program available from finalemusic.com). Finale Notepad can as well save a score to MusicXML, which can then be imported into MuseScore (also a free program) or Sibelius.
The site contains scores only – no parts. It’s assumed the user knows or can learn how to make parts from the score, and the whole point of this format is to permit a teacher to add (or change) bowings or fingerings, transpose if necessary, add or subtract instruments, improve the arrangements, make great big notes for very young students, and in general modify the music as required.
Quite a lot of this music is for solo study and/or solo recitals, and for student chamber music performance. Most of the music for younger students is playable either with one or multiple players on a part. Generally I arranged music for grade-school children (grades 3-6) in three real parts, that is with violas, if present, mostly doubling second violin, and basses (if any) doubling the cellos. The designation “trio sonata” in the instrumentation means two melody instruments, cello (or bassoon), and keyboard, with the left hand taking the cello part. The continuo realizations in Baroque music are mostly mine, but I may not have always noted or remembered if I transcribed someone else’s, so I apologize if I’ve done so without attribution. (Renaissance ensemble music may appear over-represented here, but I often used it for chamber-music groups: the repertory combines modest technical demands with musical and intellectual interest of the highest order. It’s remarkable to hear seventh-graders asking for another canzona, and some of the dances are not beyond 10-year-olds.)
The music is accessible via this downloadable, sortable, and editable Excel spreadsheet. (Those who are, like my doofus brother, unnerved by spreadsheets may instead access an equivalent webpage here.) Sorting by the various column categories (in the case of the webpages, clicking on the blue column headers) should permit a teacher to locate music of a particular genre, instrumentation, or proficiency level. These latter I’ve graded, very roughly, as 1-5:
1 for beginners – in my case it was usually third-graders. Naturally fifth-grade beginners, for example, will quickly become much more adept.
2 for second-year players (in my case usually fourth-graders).
3 for youngsters who have been playing more than two years – where I taught, that meant fifth-and sixth-graders.
4 for upper middle-school students (typically seventh- and eighth-graders).
5 for older or more advanced players – for example, a proficient upper-middle-school group, a ninth-grade orchestra, the high-school ensemble in a small-school or small-program situation, church or community groups, etc.
All of these arrangements are free to use as you see fit, for any non-commercial purpose. Every once in awhile you hand a middle-school kid a piece of music that really sets them on fire, and their parents call you up and ask why they are suddenly practicing so obsessively. If any of this music has that effect on any of your students, this collection will have achieved its purpose.
Roger Solie
Northfield, MN 55057
summer 2019