My Transcriptions for Violin and Guitar

Some of the most important inspirations for me are other musicians. The people I play music with fairly regularly tend to get me interested in composing music for them. When I was doing a lot of concerts with a flute-player I wrote a couple of pieces for flute and guitar. Recently I have written several pieces with violin because of a friend and collaborator who is a violinist.

As the guitar repertoire is limited compared to, say, the piano or harpsichord, I also find myself occasionally transcribing music originally written for other instruments for flute and guitar or violin and guitar. I also have transcribed some songs for voice and guitar. Last weekend my violinist got together and played through a bunch of music including several of my transcriptions. It occurred to me that they do fill in some gaps in the repertoire so I thought I might share some of them with you as I have no plans to publish them at this time.

These are pretty straightforward transcriptions and they don't include fingering for the guitar as I didn't take the time to put that into the score. I just penciled in some fingerings as needed so you will have to do the same. I do think these pieces are worth the trouble, though. Let's start with a prelude by Shostakovich featuring his favorite interval, the diminished fourth. This is from his set of Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues, op 87 for piano written in 1951. In July 1950 Shostakovich was in Leipzig for the two-hundredth anniversary celebrations of the death of J. S. Bach where he served on the jury for the First International Bach Competition. Hearing so much Bach and in particular preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier inspired him to write his own complete set in all the keys. By February 1951 the cycle was complete.

Here is the transcription which I see I did ten years ago. Oops, I see that it indicates that the instruments are viola and guitar, not violin and guitar! That is because I originally did the transcription for viola and later changed to violin as you can see from the treble clef. I forgot to change the name of the instrument.

The original has a metronome mark of 100 instead of 80. Not sure why I changed it, but it might just be because it sounded better a bit slower on violin and guitar. In any case, we have played this quite a few times in small venues and it seems to work quite well. Next time I will put up the F# minor prelude which is a lot of fun.

UPDATE: I also see that I forgot to indicate that the guitar should be tuned in low D.