So, late yesterday night I finally finished getting the notes in for Round Midnight, which is the third and final movement of the Monk Suite.
This one took more work than “Well You Needn’t” in some ways. The reason is that this is the one song I originally arranged from a “bad” chart. (Also, a very commonly-used, and commonly-known, I used the old Real Book chart, which has some speculative harmony that doesn’t match Monk’s very well. I think it’s the chord changes Miles Davis used, as mentioned here.) Ethan Iverson’s discussion of Monk’s misrepresentation in general is what made me want to dig in and reassess the harmony I had originally used, and to take it a little more seriously, plus I wanted added the original introduction by Monk that I’d left out in my original orchestration, and the resulting changes were probably for the better, as they also colored how I approached the original instrumentation and use of forces in the arrangement. Not that everything was radically changed, but the changes did add up, and I like them.
(This also led me to go back and look at the harmony for “Well You Needn’t.” I hadn’t realized that they’d messed up the harmony in the New Real Book, which is strange since it was supposed to be legitimate versions of the songs, but there are those Miles Davis changes on the bridge. The new Hal Leonard Real Book, at least, corrects this… though as that post I just link notes, it’s important to know both sets of changes, so I included both as a hat tip to the mangled tradition, but also as a corrective invocation of the correct changes.)
I also went back and added a longer introduction to the tune, one featured on the first version of the song I encountered (this version by Miles Davis), but which is pretty close to some versions of what Monk played when he was doing the song solo. For good measure I brought a little of pointillism into it—recalling somewhat the thing Webern did with Bach’s “A Musical Offering,” that is, or as I call it in my head, “wacky hocket” (since it’s derived from, but not quite the same as, hocket). The effect is unusual, though I can see the woodwinds cursing out the arranger during rehearsals. I also fiddled a bit with the way instruments came and went in later sections, just to better make the mood and the tonal density match the slightly different story that the harmony tells.
I was actually momentarily tempted to scrap the original and try arrange a literal solo Monk transcription for orchestra, specifically this one, but… that way lies madness, I think. I won’t say it can’t be done, just that I wouldn’t be the one to do it, at least not right now. That’s actually the one unfortunate thing with this suite: I don’t understand piano well enough to write a pianistic part. But then, the piano is set within the jazz quintet subgroup, so we can assume the Monk-aware pianist will do a fine job of it, I guess?
Anyway, now all that’s left is to get the dynamics and slurs in, and then I’ll see if I can hook up Musescore to Spitfire Audio’s free orchestra VST. When I have decent audio samples, I’ll share them here, but that might need to wait till I upgrade my computer later this year, because I’m still working from a decade-old iMac booted from an external SSD and only a little bit of RAM. Even just simple playback with Musescore’s default soundfounts gets a bit crunchy in spots. (And I suspect I’ll need to record at least some of the jazz quintet (especially the sax, trumpet, and bass) parts myself, using my WX5 and VL7-m for the latter two, I suppose).