Film Score, Free Sheet Music, Intermediate Cellists
First published on May 13, 2024 by Seb
Last updated on Jul 4, 2024 by Seb
The composer relayed this origin for the piece you find here:
Stanley Myers’ Cavatina for the movie “Deer Hunter” is one of my favorite tunes. The guitar arrangement for John Williams is simply exquisite. As has become a custom, I recomposed it for self-accompanied cello, while transposing it from its original E major to G major, to better use my cello’s natural sound. I have by now given up hopes that people would recognize original tunes in these recompositions. I think I’ll let these recompositions stand on their own feet going forward. The original tune and/or chord progression can be thought of as Easter eggs instead.
– the recomposer
Find below sheet music, with annotations by the recomposer on his own approach to playing this piece as an amateur cellist himself. Notes are slurred with suggested bowings. The recomposer also marked fingering positions suitable for an intermediate cellist. But you can, and probably should make your own annotations. Clean sheets with just notes are found further down this post. Following are PNG and PDF versions with annotations.
By transposing the original E major down to G major, the arrangement allows notes from the original melody to be played with the first position on two strings (A, D). It also allows cello’s G and C strings to better add to the overall harmony.
Stanley Myers’ Cavatina is notated with a time signature of 3/4. But if one taps fingers to John Williams’ guitar recording, one would usually tap 6/8 for a large part of this music, due to the way accompanying notes sound. On the other hand, this recomposition is notated in 6/8 time. But you will clearly find many passages sounding like a 3/4. Play it the way your heart tells you to. Written music is just a particular version imperfectly captured in ink, at one moment in time.
If you are an advanced cellists, you will want to figure out your own slurrings, bowings and fingerings. Find below clean sheets with only notes. Feel free to further revise this recomposition. Both PNG and PDF versions are available.
If you plan to improve on this music, start with Musescore files which you can further edit in the free Musescore app. But since you can’t download most Musescore files on the commercial Musescore’s website unless you are a paid user, we store .mscz files on this site whenever we can, so you can freely download them here. They are saved here as .zip files because WordPress does not accept .mscz files. Just download them and unzip:
This recomposition itself is made available for all to play under a Creative Commons license, specifically the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.
You may also consult IMSLP’s excellent discourse on how Creative Commons licenses apply to work of music and derivative work such as recordings of a composition. In short, you can freely use, share, perform and record this work, so long as you credit the composer, and continue to share you derivative work under the same CC BY-SA license, even if you do it for profit.