The Plagues for Two Clarinets and Piano

Happy Friday, everyone, and welcome to another "behind-the-scenes" look at my latest YouTube video. This week, I chose to do "The Plagues" from The Prince of Egypt. Growing up, I really loved this film along with the other film done in the same style, Joseph, King of Dreams. Recently, I was able to see both again and fell back in love with the beautiful animation, the great stories, and, of course, the amazing scores. Since I had the sheet music for The Prince of Egypt, that made it easy to decide which movie I would pick a song from. Although, side note, I'd like to do "You Know Better Than I" from Joseph, King of Dreams at some point. But anyways, of all the songs from Prince of Egypt, I felt the most passionate about "The Plagues." The truth is, it's really fun to wail on the piano for that song.

So off I went with my music notation software, my tiny little Korg keyboard, and the original sheet music. I wanted to clarinets, one for Moses and one for Ramses, but I ended up splitting the chorus parts between the two clarinets to beef up the arrangement. The piano part was probably the most fun part of the arrangement because I could play with it a little more since it wasn't the melody.

It took me probably four or five hours off and on over about a week to get the arrangement exactly the way I wanted it. It also took a lot of listening to the soundtrack to try and get some of the details that weren't added into the original piano sheet music.

The next step was to record. I practiced the parts for about a week and I felt like I had finally gotten the piano part just right. But let me tell you: when you put that camera in front of the piano, it's like the mistakes just come back and laugh at you. It took me two days and about ten takes to get the piano part just the way I wanted it. The clarinet parts were significantly easier, but took a few takes because I switched cameras in the middle of filming.

The hardest part of this arrangement was the tremolo in the piano part just before the key change in the middle of the piece. The formation was originally in the strings in the orchestral score, and the chords were a little bit awkward to trill. My other option was worse, though, which was to play repeated sixteenths of the chords. That was the painful option, so I chose the hard but not so painful option of tremolos.

The editing was a little more difficult with three parts but I think it came out pretty well. Check out the finished product: