I had started working on a new arrangement, but took a break from it and thought that it would be worthwhile (quicker?) to digitize another hand-written one: Danse Macabre, which I arranged in 1989/1990 to perform at the 1990 Yamaha Electone Festival on the HX-1.
Having started yesterday, by lunchtime today I was 200-odd bars in and around halfway through! Aside from having to edit nearly every bar with non-standard quaver beaming (keeping true to Saint-Saëns groupings, which I do personally find easier to read with how the phrasing works in this piece), I’ve also been consulting both the original orchestral score (in French!) and a video of an orchestral performance to document suggested registrations as well. The video of my performance at the Electone Festival hasn’t been converted to a digital format yet, and an older performance at an Eisteddfod which has been converted is not of a quality where I can pick out all the sounds.
I finally finished around 8:30pm this evening, after having dedicated most of the day to it. 16 handwritten pages translated to 11 typeset ones, with a couple of tweaks of moving both hands to the same manual in a few places to rationalise the registration changes a bit more (as there were 35 in the original one!). 373 bars in total!
I’m going to keep my “original” score, but also create some alternate arrangements so that it’s not restricted to Electone organs. I’m looking forward to experimenting with this on the theatre organ to see if I can make it work on that as well – I think it might a fun one to tinker on with the WA Theatre Organ Association’s Compton theatre organ.