Trois Morceaux pour piano (for Harp)
$10.00
Difficulty Level | Advanced |
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PDF or LHS | Downloadable |
Harp Type | Pedal Harp |
The French composer Lili Boulanger (1893 – 1918) holds the distinction of being the first woman to win the prestigious Prix de Rome award for composition in 1913. Before her tragically young death to tuberculosis, Boulanger composed a small number of beautiful and unusual pieces, with clear influences from impressionist composers. Although many people are familiar with her better-known sister, the famous composition teacher Nadia Boulanger (1887 – 1979), Lili Boulanger’s name and work are becoming increasingly recognized. In addition to composing, Boulanger sang and played the piano, organ, cello, violin, and harp. Despite studying harp with Alphonse Hasselmans and Marcel Tournier, Boulanger did not write anything for solo harp. Consequently, when I first encountered her Trois Morceaux pour piano (Three Pieces for Piano), I was immediately drawn to the idea of playing these three short pieces on the harp. Given the highly chromatic nature of these pieces, figuring out a way to play them on the harp was difficult. The resulting transcription required the extensive use of enharmonic solutions, especially in the first piece. Even so, the work is filled with pedal changes, many of them quite challenging. Throughout the three pieces, I have made some minor adjustments to the original piano writing, making small changes to the registers and dynamics, sometimes simplifying the voicings for ease of reading, and rewriting the pentatonic arpeggio which ends the third piece as a pentatonic glissando. Overall, the work is quite faithful to Boulanger’s original score. The original keys are retained in all of the pieces. The second and third pieces are both written in the key of B Major, and my initial thought was to rewrite them in C-flat Major, a key that better suits the harp. However, after experimenting with this, I discovered to my surprise that a couple of crucial passages work better in the key of B Major. (An example of this follows on the next page.) Consequently, I left them in the key of B Major.