Composer: Alessandro Casorti (1830-1867)

 

I couldn't find much about Casorti other than his dates from IMSLP, but a brief biography of his family on this history of the Northern French town of Hamelincourt, says his family is originally from Venice. Some of the Casortis settled in Hamelincourt and Alessandro likely visited his family there. He's not one of the dozen-ish Casortis buried in Hamelin's cemetery.

Alessandro was a virtuoso violin player and trained in Brussels.

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Date:  ?

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Original Instrumentation: Violin, Guitar

 

Why this one:

 

When I was looking to add some guitar to the Lazarus Music Project I stumbled on this short piece. Since I had never recorded with a nylon string classical guitar before, I wanted to find something that looked like it wouldn't break my spirit. I thought it would be a good easy first piece with a classical guitar. but as it turns out it was a touch more difficult than I thought it would be and it wasn't the first guitar piece I recorded.
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Description:  

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Key: D
Time: 2/4  BPM=80

There's actually three versions of this piece with different instrumentation: one for solo guitar, one for guitar and violin (or flute), and one for 2 guitars. The version I chose has the violin playing the melody over continuous sixteenth note chord arpeggios in the guitar.

It's titled "Allemande" which is a German dance at a moderate tempo.

The piece is structured as AABBCCAB, with each section being 8 measures. The C section is in B minor, the relative minor of the home key of D. The harmony is really basic, with the A and B Sections just bouncing between the I IV and V chords that are (still) a staple of Western harmony

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Performance:

 

I wasn't sure what tempo to play this at. Allemandes are at moderate tempos so I just picked the fastest moderate tempo I thought I could consistently do the guitar sixteenth notes at.

The guitar was tricky to record, but all told not all that difficult. I had to use four fingers on my right hand (thumb, index, middle, ring), a standard classical guitar technique. I had to practice a lot though, as I didn't have any recording experience with this kind of arpeggiation. And since the arpeggios were going basically the entire time I needed to build up the coordination and stamina to ensure I could get a smooth and consistent sound with all four fingers. It's easy to buzz a string on a guitar and I also had to be aware of the open drone strings I was hitting with my thumb, to make sure they didn't ring out past beat boundaries, particularly when I changed chords.

All told it went pretty well, but it was stressful.

The violin was pretty easy, though because it wasn't all that hard and I had a lot of pieces I was working on, I kind of gave this one a short shrift when practicing. I wasn't as rehearsed as I normally am. This was at the very end of a long day, too, so I think I might have been a little tired. I made a lot of mistakes for the difficulty of the part, mostly because my focus was flagging.

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Album Art:

 

Didn't have much to go on for Casorti, so I used this photo of me being a T. Rex.  (I know, i did the hands wrong.  T. Rex hands faced inward, not down.)