Small Steps on the Path

It’s been a very busy two weeks for me, between organising my end-of-spring student recital (the hardest one to find a good date for in ten years!) and one of my cats deciding she was going to have an allergy attack over the weekend. (She’s fine, but on way more medication than before.)

Consequently, I don’t have much of an update on my musical representation project today–especially given my computer froze recently before I could save a bunch of notes for my next History Hunt piece. However, I can at least share a few small additions I’ve made to my Classical and Romantic Era timeline.

I’ve blogged about this timeline in the past, and how its ratio of men to women (11:1) and white people to POC (12:0) tells an incomplete story of the musical landscape of the time. So here are a few small steps on the path toward making my studio more inclusive and more historically accurate.

An overview of the changes I made.

Zitkála-Šá, Sioux violinist and composer.

Teresa Carreño, Venezuelan composer, conductor, pianist, and opera singer.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovksy, who is frequently–and incorrectly–presented as straight by history.

To learn more about Zitkála-Šá and Teresa Carreño, you can read my History Hunt posts about them.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Representation Remixes: Playful Puppy, by Linda Niamath

I realised earlier this week that it had been a little while since I last did a Representation Remix, and so I picked up my old RCM New Piano Series Preparatory Book and skimmed through it. “Playful Puppy” by Canadian composer Linda Niamath jumped out at me as a piece I remembered enjoying playing as a young piano student, and so that settled that!

This arrangement is a little different than my previous ones. Instead of simply divvying up the piano parts between the flute and accompaniment, I very slightly filled out the accompaniment part so it wouldn’t sound too sparse. What I added wasn’t much, since I wanted to follow the original composition as much as possible, but I think it enhances the arrangement all the same.

I also located the fix for the issue wherein tempo markings weren’t showing up on PDF files when I exported them from Finale, so over the next while, I’ll be reuploading the PDFs I’ve shared here.

This arrangement would work nicely as a study to introduce the upper register to students, as it reaches upper register D, but it isn’t terribly complex otherwise. Grade 1 RCM students would find it most useful.

flute-Niamath-Playful Puppy

flute-Niamath-Playful Puppy-flute

The first link is to both the flute part and the accompaniment; the second is the flute part only.

Enjoy your weekend, all!