Category: DUETS Composer: Arthur Smith Arranger: Richard Saucedo
Take your two best percussionists, stage them up front and let them dazzle your audience with this clever feature for two xylophone players (or 1 xylophone and 1 marimba). Using the classic “Dueling Banjos,” Richard Saucedo has written a great novelty with easy band parts as accompaniment.
A Comic Duet for Two Cats was originally a popular concert encore for two singers. The words are not complicated: “meow” is the only one used and it is left to the soloists to express what is going on. Credited to the operatic master Gioachino Rossini 1(792-1868), the Duet is in fact thought to be a short selection of suitable operatic tunes by an English composer Robert Pearsall. There can hardly be anyone who has not heard and/or suffered two cats serenading each other at night.
The two brass soloists are scored to use WaWa mutes to create the appropriate feline effects, and since this arrangement was originally done in 1985 for a Brass Band it has amused audiences a great deal. lt is left to the soloists to create the atmosphere with the mutes, even whether or not to be on stage, or even to process around the hall among the audience before includes a quotation from Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner. That the two composers loathed each other is my own joke.
Howard Snell 2016
instrumentation:
Soloists: - Cornet or Trumpet in B flat, Tenor Trombone
Category: DUETS Composer: Arthur Sullivan Arranger: Philip Sparke
Grade 2.0
A duet for Flute & Alto Saxophone ( or Bb. Clarinet). From The Pirates of Penzance
The Pirates of Penzance is perhaps Gilbert and Sullivan’s most popular operetta. It premiered simultaneously in America and England in December 1879 (to secure copyright in both countries) before starting a run of 36 performances at the Opera Comique in London the following year, having already been playing successfully for over three months in New York.
It is the stow of Frederic, who was apprenticed to a band of tender-hearted, orphaned pirates by his nurse who, being hard of hearing, had mistaken her master’s instructions to apprentice the boy to a pilot Frederic, upon completing his 21st year, rejoices that he has fulfilled his indentures and is now free to return to respectable society. But it turns out that he was born on February 29 in leap year, and he remains apprenticed to the pirates until his 21st birthday. By the end of the opera, the pirates, a Major General who knows nothing of military strategy, his large family of beautiful but unwed daughters, and the timid constabulary all contribute to a cacophony that can be silenced only by Queer Victoria’s name.
Towards the end of Act II Frederic sings a hauntingly simple love duet with Mabel — Ah, leave me not to pine alone and desolate — which is arranged here as a duet for flute and alto saxophone (or clarinet).
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