Moon River (Contrabassoon Trio)

Music by Henry Mancini
Arranged and performed by Michael Elderkin

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As London has been suffering through this massive heatwave turning my room into an oven and me completely delirious - an idea emerged from one of my heat hallucinations of doing a contrabassoon trio (or trying!)

Both Audrey Hepburn and Hank Mancini have been on my mind independently, so naturally their point of convergence seemed appropriate!

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As a side note for anyone interested/those who don’t know — arranging for contra ensemble is very difficult due to how the instrument resonates and it’s very low pitch. The contrabassoon is very rich in overtones, particularly in the low register, which makes it difficult to write any sort of harmony without getting difference tones — generally, you have to stay at least a perfect fifth away, if not more! Otherwise it becomes far too cacophonous and you lose any sort of pitch centre. In a way, three contras as an instrumentation was determined for me as it’s really the most I could get away with if I wanted to avoid the negative tonal effects mentioned above.

Видео Moon River (Contrabassoon Trio) канала Michael Elderkin