A six and a half minute version of “Danse Macabre” by Camille Saint-Saëns, arranged for advanced console organ / Yamaha Electone by Simone Collins.
I first heard Danse Macabre in a music class in high school, and instantly fell in love with it. Having arranged another Saint-Saëns piece (Carnival of the Animals) for an organ festival the year before, I decided to arrange Danse Macabre to perform on a Yamaha HX-1 for the 1990 Yamaha Electone Festival in Perth, Western Australia.
With a six minute time limit, I had to cut some parts out, shortening some sections, and decided to end at the climax of the piece, before the cock crows. The resulting organ arrangement takes 6 and a half minutes to perform at it’s original speed; I performed within the time limit by playing it faster – I was picturing a frenzied skeleton dance! Like my performance of The Holy City two years earlier, my arrangement of Danse Macabre was a hit, and I was selected to go through to the State Finals again.
I’ve since lost the original registrations I had programmed, and the one video recording I have managed to digitise from 1990 is very poor quality and it was hard to determine some of the sounds used. So in digitising the arrangement, I consulted the original orchestral score while listening to an orchestral performance to try to pick out which of the instruments I had focused on in each part. I’ve made some small tweaks to my original arrangement to reduce the number of registration changes. Since I made heavy use of the timpani (which seemed to be my hallmark of orchestral HX-1 arrangements!), I’ve made an alternate arrangement that cuts out the simulated timpani rolls and changed up some of the pedal work.
3 different PDFs are available, all included with the one purchase, so you may choose your preferred option:
- The original arrangement for Yamaha Electone (A4 size)
- An adjusted arrangement for any console organ (A4 size)
- The adjusted arrangement for any console organ (US Letter size)
Each PDF is 13 pages long, comprising a cover page, the 11 page organ score, and a page of suggested registrations.
Price in Australian dollars. Purchase in US dollars from Gumroad
