Although I am a rock ‘n roll player, I do like the occasional piece of classical music. Among my favourite pieces is the orchestral suite, The Planets, by Gustav Holst.
Of the 7 pieces that comprise The Planets, Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity, is, for me at least, the piece that is the most moving. It literally makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It is an incredibly gripping piece of music.
This morning I happened across an amazing arrangement of Jupiter. It is being performed by the Mi-Bemol Saxophone Ensemble, of Japan. This 20-piece saxophone band—which ranges in voice from soprano through bass—does an absolutely stunning job of performing this Holst classic.
And who said sopranos can’t play in tune? 😉
The Mi-Bemol Saxophone Ensemble has a couple of other videos on YouTube. All of their performance pieces show how well saxophones can play in tune, and how full a saxophone ensemble can sound when given a good arrangement. They do an excellent job of sounding like strings.
I don’t know anything about the players who make up the Mi-Bemol Saxophone Ensemble. Unfortunately my Japanese skills are sadly lacking, and Google translate has let me down badly. If anyone here can offer up any insight into this amazing group, I would really appreciate it.
I think the Mi-Bemol Saxophone Ensemble is a great example of what our instruments are capable of in the legitimate arena, when placed in the hands of those with really great playing skills.
I’m currently listening to “Jupiter” as I’m writing to this Mal-2. It sounds really good. I think it would be a lot of fun to play. Again, just like with your arrangement of Pictures At An Exhibition, I am missing playing in a saxophone ensemble.
I wish I had access to some saxophone players who played at a high level. Sadly, that’s not the case. Those that I know that are good enough to play this, are from town, and are too busy, and aren’t interested in playing this style of music anyway. Additionally, some of the horns are a bit harder to find, so your choice of players will be limited. Even in a city the size of Vancouver, you’d have to pick the player, based on their ownership of the horn.
Well I’ve gotten all seven done. Originally I intended to provide alternate parts for the less common instruments (namely C-Sop and C-Mel) but I’m going to have to scrap that. I wrote tremolos (wide interval trills) into several places, and I tailored them specifically to be easy on the instrument they’re written for. Using a horn of a different key would make them awkward to unplayable.
Also, because of the choir in “Neptune”, I had to add an additional person on keyboard, as well as appropriating the usual timpanist/celesta for keyboard duty. (They’re playing the celesta parts on keyboard anyhow if they’re smart, though they are written to be playable with two mallets on a MalletKat or something similar).
Written parts will come as I feel like it. I’m kinda burned out right now. This was a much bigger project than Pictures was, though I finished it in a similar amount of time because I know my tools better. Also, I reserve the right to edit and update the recordings at any time, as I listen to them and find things I dislike (or perhaps that are wrong, it happened a couple times in Pictures).
I’ve started working on my own rendition of this suite, and the plan is to take them in order. Thus, the first (and so far only) one completed is Mars, the Bringer of War. My choice of instrumentation is different from that of Mi Bemol in two ways — I include sopranino, C soprano, and C tenor (C-Mel) in addition to the usual five. However, I’m only writing for one of each for a total of 8 saxophones, all unique. I have also included two percussionists. I could have made Mars work with just one, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to need both of them at once somewhere down the line.
Here is the link to the page for the suite, though there is only the one track at the moment. I will add tracks to this page as I complete them, and will post a human-readable score when done.
http://hydrogen.servegame.com/planets/
Also as a bit of a diversion from the heavy stuff, I did a quartet version of H. C. Lumbye’s “Champagne Galop”. It is filed with the rest of the quartets, although up until now all my “chamber music” has been swing or Christmas tunes.
I have now posted “Venus, the Bringer of Peace”. Your favorite, Jupiter, is the fourth movement so I may get there in the next week or two.
On this piece, I had a need for extreme high range but not a lot on the bottom so I have the bass sax part doubling on soprillo. Those not equipped with this rare beast can play the part on piccolo — it’s so high that it won’t sound that much different. I just wanted to stay with saxophones for my own rendering.
I also re-recorded Mars. I opted to align the various saxophones in a manner that somewhat resembles a symphony orchestra in miniature. I also decided that I’m going to need a stupid number of tympani for Jupiter so I might as well put them to good use on Mars as well. I would anticipate a practical person would use a synth drum pad to play the part rather than trying to play six drums. If someone even HAS six tympani, they’re probably going to break them into two sets of three (with two players) as was originally written. I’ve gone in with the mindset that both percussionists will be equipped with MIDI mallet percussion, Perc1 has the drum pad for tympani, and Perc 2 has an actual stand-up drum kit (snare drum, bass drum, crash cymbal, and a hanging triangle). Both players will need to have tambourines, unless they want to incorporate the throwing of a common tambourine across the stage as part of the show. 🙂
I also wanted to mention the alternate domain name for my site, since I don’t own the Hydrogen domain and could potentially lose control of it. http://redstone23.no-ip.biz will get you to the same place, with one less layer of redirection.
I finally completed Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity. Just arranging it took me four days, while actually rendering it took maybe six hours. I’m getting better at the rendering end as far as workflow goes, especially since I’ve only been using Cubase 5 for a few weeks. I was previously using a 6 year old version of Cubase 4 LE which was missing many convenient time-saving features (although the end result was the same).
Since I’ve been arranging for over half my life, I doubt I’m going to get THAT much faster there. This was just a particularly difficult piece to minimize to my chosen format of 8 saxes and 2 percussion. I had to have the bass double on soprillo again for just a few bars.
Since I can only include one link at a time (last I checked), I’ll slip in the URL to the Bandcamp site where I’m also posting these:
http://mal-2.bandcamp.com/album/the-planets
Cute name there — Mi Bemol not being Japanese in origin, but French, and it means “E flat”.