The transcription of select violin works by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor for the viola

In the spring of 2019, while a doctoral student at another institution, I discovered the music of English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) in a seminar on Black classical composers. I rediscovered his music when I transferred to the University of Iowa and had the opportunity to research his Violin Concerto in a violin seminar taught by Dr. Scott Conklin. Upon the first listen of the Concerto, I knew that I wanted to be able to play it on the viola, which sparked the idea to do a doctoral recording project after transcribing the piece. Soon after, I came upon four shorter violin works of his with accompaniment and found it more suitable to transcribe those pieces and write about the process through an essay. I do play on transcribing the Concerto in the future.

In the summer of 2023, I began transcribing the four shorter works I found: Suite for Violin and Piano, Op. 3 (1893), Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 28 (1897), Legend, Op. 14 (1897), and Romance, Op. 39 (1899). I used the popular software music notation software Sibelius to accomplish these transcriptions. The piano accompaniments for Legend and Romance are piano reductions of the original orchestral accompaniments.

These transcriptions provide violists with a greater variety of repertoire. There is a rich tradition of creating transcriptions for the viola taken from the violin repertoire, especially of César Franck’s Violin Sonata. By maintaining the outline of the original violin part and key for each piece, accompanists, who would more likely accompany violinists than violists on these pieces, would not need to learn the accompaniments in a second key (typically transposed a fifth lower for the viola). My changes to each violin part include octave equivalencies and re-voicing of double stops, with the piano part unaltered.

The process took about one year to complete, with the additional need to notate the piano accompaniment, find errors in the original scores, format my new scores, and make changes as needed. My goal was to preserve the violin part's original charm and character while showcasing the viola’s rich tone and deeper range when appropriate.

The first part of this essay examines the transcriptional process, and the second part provides the scores.