Another gift: Rachmaninoff's "Zdes Khorosho" sheet music

[Janis Cortese]

After a bit of my newbie amateur noodling, I think this is actually playable:

Zdes’ Khorosho — “How Peaceful Here”
Rachmaninoff, Op. 21 No. 7

It’s a really, really pretty piece of music written for voice and piano. I wrote it to be playable on a lever harp although there are two absolutely unavoidable and irritating lever flips in it. On a pedal harp, it could be much more lush; there’s some places where I’d like to have a super-low Bb and a few others where the C#7 needs an E# and I had to leave it out to keep things from getting out of hand.

Nevertheless, please let me know how this looks to you, and if you’d like to upload audio or video so I can hear you play it, I’d love that as well.

If you’d like to hear it, here’s a really nice version with trumpet and orchestra.

Anyway, let me know what you think!

You’ll note that the dynamics are a little … thin. 🙂 You should get a good idea from listening to that video how it’s supposed to go.

[Janis Cortese]

Whoops! Found a mistake — the chord in the bass in measure 12 should be an EM chord. Fixed it. 🙂

ETA: Still tweaking it … it’s fun, though. Thickening it up with some chords.

[Gretchen Cover]

Janis, you have a lot of potential as an arranger-composer. Thank you for sharing your works. You will get better and better as you have already shown.

[Janis Cortese]

Thanks — the piano experience is really helping with the harp. It’s mostly a matter of writing an idea down with the peculiarities of the instrument in mind, and knowing where its “sweet spot” is. On the harp, ascending things fall most easily to hand, and the pleasantest part of the instrument seems to be that three-octave compass starting on the viola C.

At any rate, I did manage to clean this up from the rough version I linked above — especially the last few measures which were really mixed up — and I uploaded the finished, polished version on my profile. Feel free to grab that. 🙂

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