The two reels are "Sleep Soond in da Mornin'" and "Merry Boys o' Greenland". I love them. The very first time I ever heard then, I was hooked - they’re just so exciting and exuberant. For that reason, I haven’t put any dynamic markings in: to be prescriptive about when to play loud and soft seemed somehow...pompous, and not at all in the seize-the-moment spirit of the music. Just be swept along by it and do whatever your mood dictates...

One other thing (it may seem an obvious point, so forgive me for making it): this music goes fast, so don’t risk slowing yourself up in the melodies by playing them all in your right hand just because they’re all in the treble clef. There are plenty of nifty ways of keeping both hands in action.

Something it’s also important to add is that the pieces still sound great even if you don’t have all the parts: as long as you’ve got the Melody and the Harmony, any combination works well - Melody, Harmony and Low Harmony, or Melody, Harmony and Countermelodies. Or just Melody and Harmony. Whatever you’ve got at your disposal...

Have fun!

I wrote Pachelbellies originally for a pupil who had been asked to play at a relative’s wedding. The problems were that (a) she hadn’t been learning long; (b) she found it hard to read music; and (c) anything that required her two hands to play different things simultaneously left her somewhat flummoxed. These aren’t really the ideal attributes for a wedding harpist. However, there were also three positive points: (a) she was very good at arpeggios shared between the hands; (b) she could remember patterns and chord sequences very well; and (c) there was going to be a violinist at the wedding. The obvious solution was to give her a repeating sequence of lovely-sounding arpeggios and write a melody for the violinist to play over the top. The girl had been studying Pachelbel’s Canon in class, so it seemed a logical step to use the same chord sequence that Pachelbel used, and reshape it to create a new piece. Pachelbellies was born. I have lengthened the amount of time given to each part of the harmonic progression, so each segment in the sequence lasts for a whole bar, which allows any melody to have a flowing cantabile arc. That very first version for harp and violin obviously only had one melody line and one harmony part; but, as you can see, in this ensemble version there are two harmony parts which interweave their quavers, and two melody parts which move together in a frequently parallel dance. Harp 2 takes over the upper part for verses 5 and 6, before the parts switch back again for the final verse. The harmony players might find it useful to keep the chord sequence in their heads, rather than laboriously reading every note of every “verse”, so I’ve printed the chord symbols for the first run of the sequence. I arranged this for a different selection of instruments for another wedding, and the bride thought the title was a little flippant for something as serious as a wedding, so it was temporarily changed to “Chaconne”. I certainly don’t think of the piece as something flippant - in fact I think it’s really rather lovely - and I’ve got rather used to the name Pachelbellies, but I will quite understand if you’re using it for Solemn Purposes and want to give it a pseudonym...