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Alberti Bass type feel in the strings, Am I approaching it right?


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Posted

I've progressed further in what is to be the second movement of my Duo Sonata. I have a B section going with first an Alberti Bass type feel in the accompaniment and then what is to be a circle of fifths progression starting with the subdominant(I've seen Mozart do exactly that, a circle of fifths progression starting with the subdominant such as G -> C -> D -> Em -> Am -> D7 -> G). But before continuing with the progression, I figured I would ask, am I approaching the Alberti Bass like accompaniment starting in measure 22 right? Harmonically I am, but I mean in terms of playability. Especially for the cello, I'm starting to question that. I mean, what I did was this:

  1. Started with the Alberti Bass that I see all the time in piano music
  2. Contracted it to Double stop, High note

And I did that because I figured A) regular Alberti Bass would be too pianistic(though I have seen it in string quartet scores by Beethoven and Mozart, I didn't want to risk it with just 2 players) and B) It would be hard on the players to do the regular Alberti Bass for an extensive passage(16 bars in my case) instead of just a few bars.

But now that I've written it out, I'm second guessing myself. Like for the first bar of the accompaniment, the D would just have to be played on the G string, which would mean second position for both the D and F#, okay, that's doable, but what about the dominant seventh at bar 26? That's fourth position on the G string and second position on the D string, at the same time. And then that alternates with second position on the A string.(I'm just getting these position numbers from charts I'm finding online, I'm no experienced cellist). Is that doable? I don't know, it sounds hard. The violinist would probably have an easier time with the accompaniment as I've written it than the cellist would, because the violin is a smaller instrument.

So, is this Alberti Bass like accompaniment playable as written or do some of the chords take too much of a stretch to be played by the average person?

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Posted
5 hours ago, ClasiCompose said:

cello ;
m23 dgb -->  bgd
m26 egc#  --> c#ge
 
violin ;
m33 egc#  --> c#ge
m34 f#ad (hard)  -->  af#d
m35 gbd (hard) -->  bgd 

 

I thought the dominant seventh would be one of those hard chords the way it's written, I'll make those changes now.

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