What Child Is This Trumpet Duet [Greensleeves]

Description

Important Note: This trumpet duet is also available in the Trumpet Christmas Duets book. It’s a book of 21 Christmas carols arranged for trumpet duet. Click HERE to go buy that book.

What Child Is This Trumpet Duet

[Greensleeves]

Christmas Trumpet Duet

William C. Dix, Traditional English, Arr. Eddie Lewis

A lot of people have been very creative in their arrangements of What Child Is This/Greensleeves. If you have been following my work, then you know that some of my stuff is meant to be less creative and more authentically traditional. My objective in this series is to honor the mood and harmonies of the original Christmas carols. That’s where this arrangement is coming from.

For that reason, I cannot take credit for how beautiful this arrangement turned out. The simplicity is what gives it that beauty.

Something worth mentioning here is that these arrangements have been teaching me a great deal about composing and arranging. I have been writing arrangements since the mid 1970’s and composing original compositions since about 1980. I have literally hundreds of compositions under my belt and at least over a thousand arrangements (maybe as many as two thousand). And yet, striving for simplicity in these arrangements has taught me lessons I never had access to when I was younger.

In that sense, every time I finish one of these Trumpet Christmas Duets, I feel like I’ve just passed another course in arranging.

The arrangement begins without an intro. Some of my duets have intros, others don’t. If I remember correctly, I chose not to use an intro because I didn’t want the piece to exceed three minutes. So it begins right away on the first statement of the Christmas carol.

The second “verse” is up a whole-step with arpeggiations.

Trumpet Christmas Duet Series

This What Child Is This trumpet duet arrangement is the next duet in a series of Trumpet Christmas Duets. The Christmas Trumpet Duets is like part two of the Trumpet Hymn Duets series (which is now also a book). There is a very specific format behind the arrangement that I’ve adhered to for almost every duet in the series (the exception for the Christmas duets is Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence).

You can browse other duets in this series by clicking the following button:

Trumpet Christmas Carol Duets

When we reach twenty-one of these duets, we will begin to look at publishing them in a book like we did with the first twenty-one Trumpet Hymn Duets. Then I will go back to writing more of the hymns again. We put our emphasis on the Christmas carols because so many people requested them.

Skill Level

In our skill level system, What Child Is This trumpet duet is at the Trumpet Player skill level. This is the third skill level in our system, the first of two intermediate skill levels. Most high school trumpet players should be good enough to play this arrangement.

Practice Recommendations

What Child Is This trumpet duet is fairly easy and can probably be sight read by most good high school students. Probably the most important things to watch out for are the intonation and phrasing.

What Child Is This Trumpet Duet Play-Along

We have a free trumpet play-along video in our You Play First Chair video series for What Child Is This trumpet duet. These trumpet play-along videos are educational tools meant to help trumpet students practice their sight reading and ensemble playing. But they also work very well for letting prospective customers take the piece for a proverbial test drive. Click on the following button to access the trumpet play along video for What Child Is This:

What Child Is This Trumpet Play-Along

What Child Is This Trumpet Duet Score Video

The following is a score video for What Child Is This. We offer these score videos so you have an opportunity to see and hear the piece before you buy it.