Sep. Winner's "Banjo: An Imitation of This Popular Instrument" (1858)

[Greg Adams]

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….

[Tim Twiss]

"A banjo imitating a piano imitating a banjo". That was the project this week. I built my arrangement from the inside out, taking that figure with the repeated "C" note and making that the thumb string. note (D). From there, it was a matter of making everything fit that key. I played the main figure fingerstyle in an attempt to keep pace with the tempo I imagined a pianist doing it, and it was a way to roll those triplets. In hearing Greg, I had not even thought of the march tempo, but it makes sense and he made it sound great! We ended up in really different places with this one.

[Greg Adams]

One of the things that I'm finding most fascinating about stroke style, based on the instruction books, is how flexible and adaptable the technique really is, especially when you work to apply the technique beyond the instruction books (or as I like to call them, the quintet--Briggs, Rice, Buckley, and the 2 Converse book).

When I approached this tune and performed it in the key of G, like Tim, when I got to the mid-section, I pondered the repeated C note. I decided to treat the C, instead of being the fifth string, as though it were the G in tunes such as Briggs' Old Dan Tucker and Yankee Doodle with Variations--the 2nd string 1st position and the open bass string.

I wonder...is this the first time this piece has been played on the banjo since its composition for the piano in 1858?

Tim Twiss said:

"A banjo imitating a piano imitating a banjo". That was the project this week. I built my arrangement from the inside out, taking that figure with the repeated "C" note and making that the thumb string. note (D). From there, it was a matter of making everything fit that key. I played the main figure fingerstyle in an attempt to keep pace with the tempo I imagined a pianist doing it, and it was a way to roll those triplets. In hearing Greg, I had not even thought of the march tempo, but it makes sense and he made it sound great! We ended up in really different places with this one.