After considering a large number of pieces to choose for this project, ranging from church hymns to viola solos to orchestral works, I decided upon Adagio For Strings for a number of reasons. First of all, the piece that I wanted to do initially was First Essay by Samuel Barber. I was interested in this piece because I am currently playing it in Symphony with Oakland Youth Orchestras. I figured that I could easily obtain a copy of the score from my conductor, and I was already familiar with important aspects of the piece such as key changes, melodic lines, and important tonal moments throughout. However, I had not considered how difficult it would be to analyze a piece written for full orchestra - that is, one with over 10 different parts. To make my life a bit easier, I decided to switch to a different, more common song of Barber's, Adagio For Strings. Personally, I have never played this piece, but I have listened to it countless times so that I am familiar with the melody. As the piece is only for strings, at most there will be five parts (violin one, violin two, viola, cello, bass) to analyze, which is much simpler to manage. As for getting the complete score for Adagio For Strings, I had planned on finding it on IMSLP, yet it seems to be unavailable. However, I was able to find a score that looks mostly correct:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/54707261/Samuel-Barber-Adagio-For-Strings-Op-11-Full-Score#scribd
I am excited to start working with this piece!
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