Moonlight Serenade for reed organ!!

Something little out of the ordinary..! I have had the melody of Moonlight Serenade by Glenn Miller buzzing in my head for a long time. It's a melody that my father played from an LP record when I was little. It was only this autumn that I took it seriously and looked up Glenn Miller on a music streaming service. I was very fascinated by how the extremely legato melody hardly needs harmonic support from the orchestra, and thought that this must be transferable to the reed organ. And voila – I started a new project. It's taken me many hours to come up with the right playing style, while at the same time both preserving the sound of Glenn Miller and making all the necessary compromises to make it playable. It is actually quite difficult to play nicely. The result is very unique compared to what is already out there on the internet, so I consider this a bit of a gem in that respect. You can find the sheet music at www.organamateur.com as usual, look for the section for “Reed organ music”. Good luck!

4 American Christmas hits !!

Popular Christmas songs like "Have yourself a merry little Christmas", "I'll be home for Christmas", "Winter Wonderland" and "White Christmas" are very nice songs to play in between other traditional Christmas carols at the odd reed organ lunch recital during Christmas time. I have finally written them down, two of them are from last year with some minor modifications, the other two are new. I think they are quite unique compared to what is out there on the internet, and on top of that they are adapted for reed organ with a E/F bass section divide. As usual, you'll find the sheet music on organamateur.com. Just scroll down to the Christmas section. Enjoy!

Glade jul / Silent Night / Stille Nacht

Check out the new reed organ arrangment for the last verse of Silent Night. You'll find it under the section "Everything Christmas (and Advent)!" at the Organ Amateur Page (organamateur.com). It's is adjusted to fit the Norwegian metre and rythm, but you can easily adjust to your local variant, it's not that different. The harmonics are quite "jazzy", but it's laid out in a traditional hymn format / style of playing. As I have mentioned earlier, reed organs usually have divided keyboards for the bass reeds (16' and lower). My reed organ starts it's bass register at E (which means that F and above must be octaved down to get a rich sound with the 16'). This arrangement takes this into account. Well, that is really the art of sight reading for reed organ, being able to compensate for the divided bass register on the fly. For that very reason is it often a relief to rewrite the music to fit the properties of the reed organ, making sure I can play it correctly every time. Oh, Christmas time and all, I guess a "Merry Christmas" is in order, and also a "Happy New Year" which will come in a few days time.

New arrangement of an old advent song "Gammel mariavise"

Wow, I have finally published my SATB a Capella arrangement of "Gammel mariavise" (eng: Old Song of Mary). I realised too late that I made a mistake for measures 15 through 18 as the stems are pointing down, although the voice is meant to be tenor. I can't be bothered to fix it now, maybe later. Check out the sheet music on my web site The Organ Amateur Page under the section "Everything Christmas (and Advent)!".

Everthing Christmas

I made a little twist to the list at The Organ Amateur Page. I added a new section called "Everthing Christmas (and Advent)!". Most of the music there is found in other sections, I have just gathered them without changing the original location. Merry Christmas!