Sunday, March 15, 2015

More music I will never use: a Georgian Polyeleos put into English

I found a nice Georgian Polyeleos and thought to myself, you know, this could be in English. So I did it. Some phrasing still needs work - particularly the last bit - and I haven't taken the time to pretty up the score itself yet (I'm sure there's a better way to mark refrains in Lilypond), but the notes should be accurate. The dissonances are supposed to be there, I swear. Please let me know if you have suggestions - note in the original there were a couple different variations of the melody and a couple different ways of dividing up the notes, so other solutions are possible without having to come up with "new" music (also, other translations, other word orders, etc can solve problems). I have picked the verses that match the original text, but, really, you can take whatever ones you want. In the original, it seemed that they did the rising "b c d" beginning for verses that were the beginnings of sentences and "d d d" for continuations of a sentence, so you may want to continue that if you change the text.

Here is the original video:



EDIT: if interested, I have transposed for SSA, SAT, and SA-Baritone arrangements. They are up an octave (could go higher - the alto is low), up an octave, and up a 7th. Note that the bottom staff intentionally has one of the accidentals flatted out, it's a feature of Georgian music. The problem with mixed arrangements is that the tessitura is all wrong.