Variations

[Katie]

Any good suggestions for sources of theme and variations. I'd like to maybe add one of those as an etude style exercise for learning finger patterns. I could use my old Arbans, but that's for trumpet...not really ideal for mandolin as you won't find any chords or double stops. Any violin books or whatnot?
*^_^*
Katie

[Dena Haselwander]

Two things from my violin arsenal that I use are:
Tartini, <u>The Art of Bowing
</u>Corelli, <u>La Folia

</u>La Folia [U]is really fun.

[Dena Haselwander]

Sorry, my typing skills fled there for a second.

[John Craton]

Corelli, La Folia
Salieri (among others) also wrote a wonderful set of variations on this theme, 26 Variazioni sulla Follia di Spagna. An arrangement for violin and piano is published by Wolfhead Music (http://www.wolfheadmusic.com/catalog.htm). These would be quite challenging on mando (heck, they're hard enough on violin!) as they are rather more difficult that the Corelli variations, but they are truly wonderful representations of this genre. It was Salieri's last work and reveals the true artistry of a much-neglected composer.

[Dena Haselwander]

Thank you, operaguy, for that great web site. I ordered the Salieri (and several other things); I don't know that work and am anxious to try it on both mando and violin. Thanks again!

[Martin Jonas]

As dmarie mentioned Tartini, it might be worth pointing out that our own Victor Kioulaphides has spent the entire last year playing "The Art of Bowing" on mandolin at a rate of one variation per week and providing copious performance notes for each variation, which can be found in this (http://www.mandolincafe.net/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=6;t=21257) epic thread in the classical forum. The Tartini edition he used can be found free here (http://icking-music-archive.org/ByComposer/Tartini.html).

Martin