Music Arranger: Daniel McConnell

This Allemande (composed ca. 1705-1706) is a movement from one of George Frideric Handel’s many dance suites for harpsichord, an instrument that resembles the modern-day grand piano and was popular in Europe during the 16th-18th centuries.

I chose this piece to test a (not so simple) theory: arranging music for the N40 that was originally written for harpsichord would require minimal effort and minimal changes on my part due to similarities between the two instruments, i.e., writing music for the harpsichord involves many of the same concerns as writing music for a music box, so much so that classical harpsichord music is virtually made with music boxes in mind. Where a music box produces sound by striking teeth on a comb, causing those teeth to vibrate, a harpsichord produces sound by plucking strings, causing those strings to vibrate. On both instruments, there’s no way to control the loudness or duration of notes: the mechanisms that cause vibrations on both instruments produce notes whose volume and decay times aren’t controlled by the mechanism nor by a performer/user. Instead, the loudness and duration of notes are related to the overall mass (length, thickness, density) of individual teeth on a music box’s comb and individual strings on a harpsichord. On both instruments, higher notes decay faster than lower ones, and lower notes sound softer (and more delicate, less strident) than higher ones.

Given these and other similarities between the two instruments, the act of translating Handel’s Allemande for the N40 was relatively swift. Aside from transposing the original up a major sixth (from C Minor to A Minor) and transposing a few low notes up an octave to accommodate the N40’s range, no other changes were made to Handel’s original. Because the Allemande was composed for an instrument so similar to the music box, it sounds great on the N40 (at least to my ears) without having had to change much of anything. (From experience, the same can hardly be said of other classical music written for other instruments, which requires lots of alterations to sound sensible on the N40.)

【More about the Arranger】
Daniel McConnell

I’m a classically-trained musician with more university music degrees than I know what to do with. If you like this piece by Handel, checkout my Handel and Scarlatti playlists, and if your tastes in music are a bit more wild, check out my Classical Arrangements playlist.


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