Italian waltz: "Parla d'amore" (O. Di Bella, 1917)

[Martin Jonas]

Onofrio Di Bella: "Parla d'amore"
Published by Di Bella Music, New York, 1917

This is another Italian-American waltz published in 1917. Like most of these ballo liscio dances, it was arranged for two mandolins and guitar. I have extracted an additional mandocello part from the guitar bass line to make it a quartet.

The first mandolin part is from Sheri's Dropbox folder. The second mandolin and guitar parts were posted by Christopher Stetson on the Cafe here. For easy reference, I'm attaching all three parts to this post. There are a few editing mistakes -- they're fairly obvious, but watch out when sightreading.

I tend to try for some degree of subtelty, but this tune works for me best as a flat-out tremolo blast -- fast, bright and loud to get everybody on the dance floor.

1890s Umberto Ceccherini mandolin
Mid-Missouri M-0W mandolin
Vintage Viaten tenor guitar
Suzuki MC-815 mandocello



Martin

[phillawrencemandolin]

I have a nice recording of this tune I am about to publish in the next few weeks on my new CD "Echoes of the Silent Fountain". I overdubbed my mandolins and my guitar. There is a wonderful bass player as well. http://phillawrence.com/Echoes%20of%...0Fountain.html

There's a sample track on my Recording Page http://phillawrence.com/RecordingsDream.html

[Christopher Stetson]

Hi, Martin. If you let me know the mistakes, I'll fix them!

[Martin Jonas]

Hi, Martin. If you let me know the mistakes, I'll fix them!

Hi, Christopher -- thanks again for posting those parts!

There are three mistakes:

1. In both mandolin parts, the last bar of the B section ends with two rests. These rests should only be played on the first repeat -- on the second repeat they are replaced by the two quarter notes from the incomplete bar that follows. That should have been notated by using first and second time bars.

2. In the guitar part, there should be two quarter rests and a repeat sign added to the very start, to give the guitar players some warning that the mandolins have two pickup notes before they come in.

3. Most significantly, the B section in the guitar part has only 31 bars -- the D7 chord about two-thirds through the B section should be held for two bars rather than just one.

Martin