What's on the stand- Don Mclean's Waters of Babylon

It’s been the merry Mesopotamian month of May around here. It all began appropriately with the opening of the new Mesopotamia exhibition at the Melbourne Museum

http://museumvictoria.com.au/melbournemuseum/

where I was really chuffed to play alongside the very nice flautist Taryn Richards

The only request they had of us was to perform Waters of Babylon from Don Mclean’s American Pie album.

It’s actually a rather old melody written by English composer Philip Hayes who lived in the second half of the eighteenth century. This is a completely unflattering cartoon of him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Hayes_(composer)

Nice.

Anyway, this simple little tune is not to be underestimated; it works brilliantly as a round. What this means for those of you sitting the exam at the end of this blog is that you can overlap the melody at certain points and it just all fits together. If you have a listen to the YouTube clip you can hear Don Mclean overdubbing himself always with the same melodic material, nothing new introduced. 3 Blind Mice and Row, row, row your boat works the same way.

Pretty clever isn’t it?

There didn’t seem to be any sheet music out there of Don Mclean’s arrangement, so I got creative and did my own for flute and harp based on the Philip Hayes’ melody. I was pretty happy with how it turned out so once I’ve polished up the look of the score I’ll post it for your general perusal.

And where Don Mclean leaves off William Walton picks up. We’ll tuck into that in the next instalment of ‘What’s on the stand’.

P.S. If you’re in Melbourne check out the Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia exhibition at the Museum. There are artefacts dating back to 5500 BC which are completely mindblowing. There were a number of carvings of ancient harps as well, though I seemed to be the only person at the opening night who noticed that which I think says more about me than the rest of the guests…

P.P.S The music is now posted here. Enjoy!