Music for a Found Harmonium
Before Simon Jeffes formed Penguin Cafe Orchestra he was playing mostly avant garde and rock music. After a dream inspired him to change direction, he began writing a quirky, understated, hypnotic kind of music that drew mostly classical and various other styles. The result is a sound that is modern but accessible, loose but also arranged. A few of the catchy of his pieces have ended up being used in advertising and films quite a bit. I saw a quote where he said it was meant to be music that might play in a metaphorical cafe, where people come to communicate soul to soul, or something along these lines.
Music for a Found Harmonium was originally recorded on a small organ called the harmonium. The story Dean Magraw tells is that Simon Jeffes happened upon an abandoned harmonium in an alleyway or somewhere while touring Japan. It was still working and he came up with this cool melody. I’m not sure if he took the harmonium back with him or not. Eventually, the Irish band Patrick Street got a hold of this melody and began playing it more like an Irish fiddle tune— faster, with a lot more bounce— and their recording probably helped bring this tune into the fiddle repertoire.
A couple notes about playing the tune
Use a light accent to bring out the notes that aren’t D’s in the A section. I have put accents there to show which are the important notes. This forms the hook of the tune, but we need the D’s to be a little quieter so they don’t stick out too much.
You will want to put your finger on both strings for the 5th in measure 9-12, which I have indicated with a bracket above the notes
Stop the bow firmly (with a slight weight as you stop) during the double ups, so it doesn’t move on the string or make a “ghosted” down bow
You will see at the bottom of the music, I show some variations. The first one is an alternate pattern that Penguin Cafe did sometimes (sounds like it may have been left up to improvisation exactly where it fell) which I thought was interesting and which most people don’t play. The next two are easier versions for the pattern in measure 17, since the C# might be tricky for some students to master right away. (That is always a hard note to find for my students, I know.) The last variation is of measure 1 and is an Irish super fast bow technique followed by a slur. With that, I have found the key is to have a lot of weight on the string throughout and to use the absolute smallest length of bow possible.
Most recordings I’ve heard use the structure ABBCB' but the original recording does not stick to this. I mention this because that means you can be creative about how much you use that last section, if you are putting your own arrangement together.
Speaking of the last section, I have included a little variation of measure 27 that not everyone plays, but is in the original during only that B section with the C naturals. I thought it was kind of a cool thing.
One easy variation I haven’t written down is to take out the quarter note in the first measure (and every other time) and play 2 eighth note D’s instead. That makes it 3 eighth note D’s in total, but it’s a little easier than the syncopated way that is written.
