Transcriptions¶
Alice Mary Smith¶
Symphony No1, 1st Mvmt¶
Symphony in C, the First Movement
I am trying to be faithful to the over-arching message of the film 'Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu', by bringing works by women, which during their time may have received considerable acclaim, but which a patriarchal history subsequently suppressed, out of the shadows of obscurity into the light of being performed.
Alice Mary Smith is one such composer.
Alice was a big admirer of Felix Mendelssohn, as am I. Her admiration is quite apparent in this first movement of her C minor Symphony. This first movement is magical!
I transcribed this work into Musescore from a PDF of a handwritten manuscript of Alice Mary Smith's Symphony in C, the First Movement. The pdf of the original manuscript can be found here. Also, for those who dare, you can open the transcription here .
My original transcription was done in Musescore 3.6.2. The sound being MIDI, it left a lot to be desired.
I subsequently brought the file into Musescore 4.4.4. The MuseSounds interpretation was a significant improvement over what MSBasic provided.
It is important to understand that Musescore is primarily a music notation software, not a digital audio workstation. Since I do want to provide the listener with a reasonably enjoyable experience, I felt it would be best to "write to the software" in terms of dynamics, articulations and so forth. I should think Alice would forgive my little departures from what was on the original manuscript. Thus, there are discrepancies with that original document.
By the way, presented here is my second publishing of this work, using the Spitfire Symphony Strings, Woodwinds and Brass libraries. I have also updated my original version of this piece as newer, better flavours of MuseSounds became available.
Admittedly, still far from ideal. 🤨 😳
Lalla Rookh¶
Uploaded to Musescore-Sketch II on 30th-Oct-2020
From the Musescore site:
I would like to express my gratitude to the Royal Academy of Music Library in London, UK for their kind assistance and support in this effort: without their help, this transcription would not have been possible.
I found Alice Mary Smith's works during a deep-dive at archive.org. As I worked my way through this piece, it became quite apparent that this was a truly significant work by Ms Smith, who, besides her liturgical works - for which she is likely better known - was the first Englishwoman to write symphonies and larger works for orchestra.
The manuscript on archive.org was, it became apparent, a sort of rough draft. Towards page 36, there were bits that had been rubbed out and the whole score became increasingly threadbare. An inquiry to the librarian of the Royal Academy of Music Library resulted in Amy Foster kindly sending me the 'parts' scores, with which 'Lalla Rookh' was finally fleshed out. Unfortunately, by the time I had obtained the parts scores, a lot of the original manuscript had already been entered into Musescore, so the revisions took an enormous amount of time, much longer than the original transcription. This transcription endeavour was done independent of collaboration. I spent the past 7 months or so transcribing and revising: it is my fervent wish that it is as accurate as possible. However, sometimes the notion that "perfect is the enemy of good" applies. I'm sure that the kind listener will appreciate the fact that Musescore - while an incredible product - still struggles with certain articulations. Hopefully these will be corrected in future versions. I'm currently porting this amazing work into Reaper with a hopefully better auditory experience.
Lalla Rookh had been - until quite recently - only very rarely performed and never recorded. You are listening to a unique piece of music that only the very fewest have heard in this century. It must be noted that whilst a few transcriptions exist, only Prof. Ian Graham-Jones - the preeminent authority on the life, times and music of Alice Mary Smith - has transcribed the authoritative edition.
As to the image, this is a digital remastering (using the image model Flux1-dev Kontext within ComfyUI) of an image on Wikipedia - I think Wikipedia indicated she might have been 19 at the time. Is this what Alice Mary Smith actually looked like? your guess is as good as mine. I sort-of like to think this is a fairly good representation, at any rate.
Carl Reinecke¶
Serenade for Strings in G¶
Uploaded to Musescore-Sketch I on 6th-Sep-2020
Antonin Dvorak¶
Sextet II Dumka¶
"Sometimes, the magic works, sometimes it doesn't."
WIPs - Works is a Big Word¶
For those who might be slightly interested, here's how things like this progress. Taking Alice Mary Smith and her Symphony in C, first movement as my inspiration:
(who, in turn, was inspired by Felix Mendelssohn, another of my absolute favourite composers, ever) this might be a 'Tone Poem' when finished. Or something. Chronicled by date rendered in Reaper:
WIP-2022-07-27