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A wonderful video sprang across my YouTube feed a few days ago. All the information in the video was news to me -- essentially, the claim is that we've been playing the Beethoven "Moonlight Sonata" the wrong way for two centuries, inspired by a poor nickname that really doesn't fit the piece at all! The professor's fresh interpretation of the first movement at the end of the video suddenly inspired me to try to orchestrate the piece, as I was having a lot of interesting ideas I thought I might try in order to create a really unorthodox interpretation. Before this week I had always thought Moonlight was a sort of cliched piece, but the professor brought it back to life and showed me it's famous for a reason.... The work was surprisingly quick, even though I was also trying Musescore 4 for the first time. Figured I'd give it a whirl on a short side project rather than a main composition. (Spoiler: it's actually pretty awesome. The sounds are amazing.) My overall aim was to recreate some of the tragic funeral march character that is usually lost in most modern interpretations, but also to emulate the "ghostly" quality of which Carl Czerny spoke. I've accordingly created more active, dense, even "smeary" textures instead of transparent and simple ones. Overall I want to kill the whole notion that this piece is supposed to be "relaxing"! This was a great orchestration challenge for me. Some of the creative decisions I made were born of necessity; others were just pure indulgence on my part. I actually took a lot of liberties; the piece is faithfully adapted insofar as the overall structure and proportions are preserved, but I freely modify harmonies and add new voices and contrapuntal layers where I see fit. The bass clarinet and contrabasses both need low Cs for this transcription.