Scherzo is a lively and fun solo for the intermediate or advanced intermediate pianist. "Scherzo" forms one complete movement my Sonatina in Three Styles.
Click here to download "Scherzo" in PDF format or postscript format.
Sonatina in Three Styles is a fun-to-play piece of intermediate difficulty. Each of the three movements is in a different style, and each presents a different set of technical and musical challenges.
One of the most interesting musical challenges is the development of the first movement (Jazz Allegro). In the spirit of the jazz idiom of this movement, the development is to be freely improvised. Those with good improvisation skills will want to improvise the development on the spot, but those with less developed skills should know that it is traditional and quite proper for "improvised" sections to be worked out and practiced beforehand. Students may wish to write out a development and practice it as they would any other piece. Although this written out development may lack the spontaneity of an on-the-spot improvisation, it is still a great opportunity for performers to show individuality and creativity. A sample written-out development section is included, and performers may use this as an example or as a starting point for their own creativity.
The second movement is a sad song or dirge. It began life as a Halloween song I composed as a sample for a class I was teaching. At one time, it even had some really scary words that went with it!
The third movement is an energetic Scherzo. True to the original meaning of the word "scherzo," this movement is full of little musical jokes and puns. It is a lot of fun to play.
Enjoy!
To download the postscript file, you will need about 350K of disk space; to print it you will need a postscript printer or a postcript emulator.
A free postscript emulator called "Ghostscript" is available on the net for many common platforms (MSDOS, Windows 3.1, Windows NT, OS/2, Unix, VMS, Macintosh, Amiga, etc.). There is a very nice web page about Ghostscript that tells you all about it and has links to the latest versions of all necessary files. Be sure to get the previewer program, too (for Windows and OS/2 this is called "GSView").
I have just installed the latest version of Ghostcript on my PC, and I am very pleased with it. The installation will take about 4-5 Meg of disk space (more if you grab a lot of fonts) and may take some tweaking to get working right. But when you get done, your non-Postscript printer will have all the capabilities of a postscript printer at a savings of several hundred dollars. The latest version of GSView even includes a handy utility that allows you to set up Ghostscript as a regular Windows printer. You can then simply print to the Ghostscript printer, and GSView takes care of all the dirty little details--all you have to worry about is pulling the beautiful postscript output from the back end of your printer.
The only complaints I have about Ghostscript are (1) it is a bit slow and (2) some of the public domain fonts that come with it are pretty low quality. The first problem can be remedied by buying a faster CPU (you wanted to anyway, didn't you?), and the second, by spending $15 on a disk full of high quality Postscript fonts.
If you have a real Postscript printer, you'll need to run a special program to send the downloaded Postscript file to the printer. Such a program should have come with your printer; it's probably somewhere in that dusty pile of disks you chucked into the back corner of the closet when you finally got your printer to print something legible.
I have had several people report success in downloading and printing these postscript files. If you have any problems, I would appreciate hearing about them. If the problem is on my end, I will do my best to fix it.
The only bug I know about concerns users of GSView. It may also affect other postscript previewers. Under GSView, it appears that the postscript file only consists of one or two pages, even though the file actually consists of four or five pages. If you print the file, all pages will print. The discrepancy is because GSView depends on some advanced postscript code that Finale--which I used to create the postscript files--does not yet use. Ghostscript itself works fine with either the old or the newer Postscript code.
As of 28 July 1995, the postscript file was updated to to add a Title Page and and Information Page.
Brent Hugh
BHugh@CSTP.UMKC.EDU