Tim and I have been enjoying going back-and-forth on a number of pieces. This, our latest, is an attempt to make some sense out of Septimus Winner’s 1858 piano piece, “Banjo: An Imitation of this Popular Instrument.” We took the piano piece, written in the key of C major, and arranged it for banjo in the D/G tuning. Tim developed an arrangement in D major and I did it in G major.
This was essentially a “blind take” on coming up with an arrangement for the banjo of a piano imitating a banjo. See what you think.
Tim can comment some more on his arrangement, but here's a brief summary of my arrangement: I pretended that I tuned the banjo up to modern low-bass C tuning (the G as the third and fifth strings), which would be acceptable a la Briggs and others. Since Winner's piece is not the most banjoistic, I needed to take some liberties in order to try to make some actual banjo music out of it. I think my ultimate approach to this piece is actually most closely aligned with my attempts at trying to make sense out of a number of the pieces from the Buckley 1860 book, tunes like Buckley's March (pg 32), Hail Columbia (pg 33), and Marsellaise Hymn (pg 34). As a result, I ended up treating the Winner piece more like a march. Tim, on the other hand, completely rocks out!!!
We’ll have to see what we come up with for next week….