Somewhere Duet

[JaneLewis]

Hi Ralph

Many thanks for this music, set as a recorder duet (and I see lots of previous ones that I will look at!).

I am an ex string player but am just beginning to learn tenor recorder which I think/hope is your alto line. My daughter teaches recorder (as well as other wind instruments) so your arrangements will give us plenty of lovely music to play, once I'm up to it. And, of course now I am a Notation software user I can practise along to the computer.

Thanks again, Jane

[rrayner]

Hi Jane,

Thank for your kind words, and welcome aboard!

Originally Posted by JaneLewis

I am ...just beginning to learn tenor recorder which I think/hope is your alto line.

I have never tried a tenor recorder, but (perhaps your daughter can confirm this) I believe it is a concert (non-transposing) instrument like the soprano. The alto recorder is an F instrument, similar to the French Horn and the English Horn in that it transposes up a fifth from concert. But, a very powerful feature of the Notation products is that you can easily switch the alto part to concert and/or transpose it for the tenor, if the tenor is not a concert instrument.

I've seen a tenor in the stores, and the sales clerk mentioned that he plays one. He said he has a problem with reaching all of the holes (and keys?). My piano teacher at Berklee played a bass recorder when we got together for a Handel "Water Music" Jam Session.

I wish you good fortune with your endeavors. You will find a very wide selection of pop/folk/classical/jazz duets with considerable variation in level of difficulty in this "Learning and Teaching" forum.

Additionally, if you transpose the alto part to concert, you and your daughter could play a soprano recorder/violin duet. Neat!

Ralph Rayner

[JaneLewis]

Hi again Ralph,

I think I may be wrong about the type of recorder I have - I think it may be a treble and not a tenor, I must ask my daughter!

Thank you for the very useful suggestion that I can transpose the appropriate line for the pitch of whichever recorder I have.

Jane

[JaneLewis]

Hi Ralph,

My daughter tells me that the recorder she gave me is a Treble and that Treble = Alto, so your duet arrangements are just perfect!

Please excuse my senior moment yesterday

Jane

[rrayner]

Hi Jane,

You might want to take a look at the new posting I made for "Transposing the Duets", so that you can play the lead on your Alto Recorder and still hear the proper harmony as Notation plays along with you.

Ralph

[JaneLewis]

Hi Ralph

Thanks for the post about Transposing.

When I came to try to play the Alto line of your duets I couldn’t understand them because they show notes on the score which are below what the Alto recorder can play.

I then realised that they didn’t sound as written because they show harmonies that shouldn’t work, yet they sound OK when played by Notation on the computer.

I enlisted my daughter’s help and we found a place in one of them that showed middle C written in both staves … yet the notes were not the same when played in Notation! I couldn’t understand why, but my daughter tells me that the 5 semitones up that the Alto line had been transposed means that it can be played on the Alto recorder using Soprano recorder fingering.

We don’t learn that way over here … we learn different fingering for the two recorders. I have to transpose the Alto line so that C ‘sounds as C’ and not as F! Then, in order to look right on the staff it needed to go up an octave!

We got it sorted and I learned about transposing in the process!

Thanks for the duets and the enforced learning that came with them!

Jane

[rrayner]

Hi Jane,

Well, I am truly staggered -- and embarrassed. My formal training was on Tenor Saxophone (Flute and Clarinet) with an orientation toward the Piano keyboard. I am a self-taught Recorder player. My wife Cynthia had bought a Soprano Recorder over 30 years ago and never learned to play it. As she is now married to a musician, she asked me to teach her to read music and play her Soprano. So, we learned the baroque fingerings for it, and after a while, she bought me an Alto Recorder. I never even looked at the fingering chart that came with the Alto. After reading your post, I frantically dug out the fingering chart that came with my Alto, and I found, exactly as you are describing, the lowest written note for baroque fingering on an Alto is the F in the bottom space of the staff. In my ignorance, I treated the Alto just like any of the other modern concert instruments, i.e., Saxophones, Clarinets, Trumpets, English and French Horns, and transposed it, and as you say, used the Soprano fingerings for it.

So, for the embarrassment part -- I've posted about 100 songs and exercises in this forum that technically and classically have Alto Recorder parts that are not written correctly. My assumption is that probably most, if not all, of this forum's reader are not actually playing an Alto Recorder and are simply transposing the Alto part for whatever instrument(s) they are playing.

Thank you very much for enlightening me in this regard. I have to say I personally prefer using the Soprano fingerings on the Alto, and not having to deal with all of those ledger lines above the staff. I will continue to post songs and exercises in the same manner, as I want to be consistent with all that I have posted before. It seems the way you treat the Alto Recorder over there should have been the way I treated it over here.

Well, this should explain all the confusion you and your daughter had to deal with. My apologies to you and to all followers of this forum who actually play Alto Recorders.

Ralph Rayner