My Blog

As a young clarinettist growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I became familiar with many works by Sir Malcolm Arnold. I remember performing his Sonatina for Clarinet and Piano Op.29, his Fantasy for solo clarinet Op.87, the Three Shanties for Wind Quintet Op.4 and, of course, the Four Scottish Dances for orchestra. I was also familiar with his Tam O’ Shanter Overture, the Padstow Lifeboat March, and some of his film scores.

I have always had a particularly soft spot for the Three Shanties, which have been lifelong companions, featuring in the repertoire of all four wind quintets that I have played with, including, since 2000, the Melville Wind Quintet.

I love Arnold’s sense of fun in the outer movements, combined with a beautiful middle movement which has a gentle sadness to it. One of my favourite 20th century composers is Francis Poulenc, and I think both Poulenc and Arnold share the ability to juxtapose effervescent joy and humour with moments of melancholy and sadness. I think that is what draws me to both composers.

Rather than being lifelong companions, the Four Scottish Dances are more like good friends whom I meet every few years and whose company I always enjoy. I first played them with the Edinburgh Secondary Schools Orchestra as a teenager in 1976, the Caritas Orchestra in 1979; and more recently I have played John Paynter’s wind band arrangement with the Glasgow Wind Band.

I have enjoyed playing both these pieces immensely and had often thought that the Four Scottish Dances might work as a wind quintet but had never found the time to try it. I was also aware that Malcolm Arnold’s music was still in copyright, so any arrangement would have to be for my own personal interest, rather than being of any wider use.

My background and experience

I have played the clarinet since 1972 and studied it to a professional level, with Clarinet Performance as a final year specialisation in my music degree at Manchester University in 1981. My clarinet teachers at university were Barry (John) Gregson of the Hallé Orchestra and Neville Duckworth of the RNCM.

Although I decided to make a living outside music, a love of music and musical performance has remained a fundamental part of my life. During the Covid-19 restrictions of 2020-21, I kept myself playing by arranging clarinet quartets which I recorded alone or in remote collaboration with others. I shared the recordings on social media and people started asking if the arrangements were published, which prompted me to set up Woodwindly Music in January 2021.

Thus I emerged from lockdown with a micro publishing business, some practical experience of copyright and licensing, and the prospect of being able to play wind quintets again. My thoughts returned to the idea of rescoring Malcolm Arnold’s Four Scottish Dances.

Why arrange it for a wind quintet?

There cannot be many wind quintets which do not have the Three Shanties in their repertoire, because they are such great fun to play, and audiences love them too. I thought it would be great to have another fun and accessible Malcolm Arnold work for wind quintet to act as a companion piece to the shanties. The Four Scottish Dances fitted the bill because they hold a similar position in the orchestral repertoire, being especially popular with youth orchestras and their audiences. Of course, that was no guarantee they would work for a wind quintet.

When arranging a piano work for a chamber music ensemble there is the opportunity to add more instrumental colour by utilising the different timbres available to the arranger: flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon in the case of a wind quintet. When rescoring an orchestral work for the same ensemble, the opposite is true; you have a smaller palette of instrumental colours, so you must be really careful with your choice of piece.

Although the Four Scottish Dances were brilliantly scored for full orchestral forces, a lot of important melodic material is played by the woodwind instruments. This is particularly true in the second movement where the reel melody is introduced by clarinets, with the bassoon playing a slower ‘drunken’ version of the tune later in the dance, and the wind instruments also play chromatic flourishes and runs throughout. The third movement is a beautiful Scottish air where the main theme is introduced by flute and then oboe, accompanied by harp and shimmering strings, with the horn section featuring later in the movement. 

The fast and furious last movement has a lot of orchestral tutti where the wind players play the same music as the strings, the piccolo often being heard through the texture. The quirky quieter section where Arnold uses his typical shift from simple to compound time, and back, is mostly wind. As a strathspey the first movement naturally lends itself to string playing, but once again the wind players usually double the same material and the horns and brass are prominent, especially in the triple tongued più mosso section. As in the second movement, the flourishes and runs are mostly played by the wind instruments.

In summary, Malcolm Arnold features the wind prominently in his Four Scottish Dances and I was confident that the smaller ensemble could cover the important musical material well. Even though the orchestral score of the Four Scottish Dances has 26 individual instrumental parts (9 woodwind, 9 brass, 2 percussion, 5 strings, and 1 harp), there may be as few as 3 or 4 different strands of music at any given time. The art of the composer and orchestrator is how they share that musical material amongst the forces at their disposal to provide varied colour, timbre, volume, and attack. The five instruments in a wind quintet, therefore, can cover all the musical lines that Malcolm Arnold wrote (with some exceptions). In Part 2 I will discuss my approach to writing the arrangement, the challenges I faced, and how they were addressed. The arrangement can be purchased here https://www.woodwindly.com/product/four-scottish-dances-by-sir-malcolm-arnold