Danse Macabre (Brass Band Version) by Camille Saint-Saens Brass Band - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.790955

The Versatile Brass Classical Collection

This is the Full Brass Band Arrangement

I did this arrangement originally for Versatile Brass, which we played on a number of concerts.

This is not an arrangement for the 'faint of heart'. It is difficult, because the piece is difficult... but what a magnificent piece of music it is. 

According to legend, Death appears at midnight every year on Halloween. Death calls forth the dead from their graves to dance for him while he plays his fiddle (here represented by the trumpets). His skeletons dance for him until the rooster crows at dawn, when they must return to their graves until the next year.

The original piece opens with a playing a single note, D, played twelve times on the Harp, in my arrangement this is played by Tuba and Tubular Bell (the twelve strokes of midnight). The trumpet enters playing the tritone, which was known as the diabolus in musica ("the Devil in music"). Out of interest in the original, the solo violin plays this, during the Medieval and Baroque eras, consisting of an A and an E♭-in an example of scordatura tuning, the violinist's E string was actually been tuned down to an E♭ to create the dissonant tritone., no need for such alterations here.