The college class that exerts the most influence on my day-to-day life is Music 51: Theory and Composition. Influence at least construed as whistling repertoire. Leading tones and parallel fifths aren’t really relevant to my job as a Latinist, except maybe when looking at a manuscript like the example above from The Cloisters.
Anyhow, last night I was digging through some old course materials, and I found a piano transcription/adaptation of Stravinsky’s Grand Choral from his suite L’histoire du soldat. It’s a really remarkable piece especially if you’ve ever looked at baroque chorales. The original suite, written for septet, is based on an old Russian parable, and performances often include narration. It sounds like a modernist version of Peter and the Wolf written by Bach.
I’ve uploaded a copy of the music here, and you can find the full-size .jpg linked below. If anyone is really good at typesetting sheet music with MuseScore, it would be great to have a smaller non-image version for transposing and making PDFs.
You can listen to the original version (including narration) here. And many thanks to the stranger who first made this transcription of such a great piece of music!
