Product Description
Silver Clouds Chasing the Moon
Silver Clouds Chasing the Moon was composed in 1935 for the EMI Chinese orchestra by Ren Guang and Nie Er. It is also known by the title: Colourful Clouds Chasing the Moon, which creates the image of a colourful (or silver) night sky, in which the clouds and moon chase each other. The moon is an important symbol for Chinese people, who have a custom of worshipping it, dating back 3,000 years. Every year, the mid-autumn festival is held in China, on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, which usually falls in September. During this festival, Chinese people celebrate with their families and admire the full moon whilst eating moon cakes. Colourful Clouds Chasing the Moon is commonly performed during this festival and is also used by Chinese cake shops to advertise moon cakes, which increases its association with the mid-autumn festival and popularity amongst Chinese people. As well as being used to sell cakes, this piece is a staple of Chinese instrumental repertoire and has been arranged for a number of different instruments and ensembles, including solo piano, solo guzheng, guitar duo, harp duo, and wine glasses.
This guitar arrangement is quite challenging; it includes a lot of intricate lines and arpeggios. Play the semiquaver sextuplets in the intro by dragging the thumb across the bottom three strings and quickly plucking each of the top three strings individually with the first three fingers. Most of this piece is played with standard classical fingerpicking technique, apart from the tapped arpeggios in bars 36 and 37.
This product was created by a member of ArrangeMe, Hal Leonard's global self-publishing community of independent composers, arrangers, and songwriters. ArrangeMe allows for the publication of unique arrangements of both popular titles and original compositions from a wide variety of voices and backgrounds.