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Hushabye Mountain is a haunting lullaby from the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In this adaptation for percussion ensemble, Stephen Primatic emulates the cadence of a music box, mostly through mallet instruments, with added color from controlled use of triangle, finger cymbals, and wind chimes.
Relatively sparse in technical challenges, the piece is attainable for less experienced ensembles aiming to showcase lyricism from the percussion ensemble.
This piece comes as a professionally printed and bound score and includes individual parts in PDF format for printing or for tablet viewing.
This hauntingly beautiful melody tastefully orchestrated for percussion ensemble by Steven Primatic is originally from the classic 1968 children’s movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The central keyboard instrument in this arrangement is the glockenspiel, serving as both a melodic voice and a delicate accompaniment for the other keyboards. All keyboard parts require two mallets throughout, the writing is accessible to younger percussion ensembles, and the scoring is relatively balanced in difficulty, with the only exceptions being the active double-stop writing in the bells that is ideal for a confident mallet player, and the sparse suspended cymbal part available to a less experienced member of the ensemble. According to the program notes, if crotales aren’t available, a second glockenspiel may be used as a substitute, but I found that chimes with a triangle beater also works very well as an alternative.
Despite the appropriateness of the writing for strong middle-school percussionists or a younger high school ensemble, a more mature ensemble would likely enjoy preparing and performing this arrangement because of Primatic’s orchestration and the opportunity to showcase some richly transparent musicality. It only took one reading of this excellent score for “Hushabye Mountain” to find its way onto my program for this semester, and I trust many others will find value in programming it as well.
—Josh Gottry
Percussive Notes
Vol. 54, No. 5, November 2016
Hushabye Mountain is a haunting lullaby from the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In this adaptation for percussion ensemble, Stephen Primatic emulates the cadence of a music box, mostly through mallet instruments, with added color from controlled use of triangle, finger cymbals, and wind chimes.
Relatively sparse in technical challenges, the piece is attainable for less experienced ensembles aiming to showcase lyricism from the percussion ensemble.
This piece comes as a professionally printed and bound score and includes individual parts in PDF format for printing or for tablet viewing.
This hauntingly beautiful melody tastefully orchestrated for percussion ensemble by Steven Primatic is originally from the classic 1968 children’s movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The central keyboard instrument in this arrangement is the glockenspiel, serving as both a melodic voice and a delicate accompaniment for the other keyboards. All keyboard parts require two mallets throughout, the writing is accessible to younger percussion ensembles, and the scoring is relatively balanced in difficulty, with the only exceptions being the active double-stop writing in the bells that is ideal for a confident mallet player, and the sparse suspended cymbal part available to a less experienced member of the ensemble. According to the program notes, if crotales aren’t available, a second glockenspiel may be used as a substitute, but I found that chimes with a triangle beater also works very well as an alternative.
Despite the appropriateness of the writing for strong middle-school percussionists or a younger high school ensemble, a more mature ensemble would likely enjoy preparing and performing this arrangement because of Primatic’s orchestration and the opportunity to showcase some richly transparent musicality. It only took one reading of this excellent score for “Hushabye Mountain” to find its way onto my program for this semester, and I trust many others will find value in programming it as well.
—Josh Gottry
Percussive Notes
Vol. 54, No. 5, November 2016
