"Tournament Galop" - L.M. Gottschalk. The South Puget Sound Comm College Orch - arr by Gerry Amato

**FREE SHEET MUSIC!!** If you would like free PDF copies of the score and parts to "Tournament Galop", please email your request to [e-mail]
"Tournament Galop" is a piano composition written by American-born composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk in 1854. It is a high-spirited circus galop Gottschalk performed at all his concerts throughout the United States. There are numerous similar ‘end-of-recital’ galops from this time period that were guaranteed to bring the house down…Liszt’s Grand Galop Chromatique being, perhaps, the best known. But none bears a closer resemblance than Mazeppa, étude-galop de concert by the obscure French composer Alfred Quidant (1815-1893). The key is Eb, same as Tournament Galop, the first four bars are exactly the same and, the first eight bars of Quidant’s second theme match Gottschalk’s third theme note for note! Plagiarism or just a coincidence?
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Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869):
• As a young boy born in New Orleans, he heard the "bamboula" drum rhythm from the African slaves performing in Congo Square (now Louis Armstrong Park). Oral history has it that slaves often practiced the traditional bamboula art form in the “bush.” Bamboula is a dance that originated from Africa and spread throughout the West Indies, South, Central, and North America, and other regions of the Western Hemisphere where Africans were imported as slaves. He incorporated this 'syncopated' dance rhythm into his own piano compositions that later became the roots of ragtime and early American jazz.
• He was the first international American pianist/composer who travelled to Europe, and even performed for Frederick Chopin. Chopin complimented Gottschalk on his composing and performance, and Debussy later mimicked Gottschalk's bamboula dance rhythm in his Golliwog's Cakewalk.
• He created the first USO-type shows by traveling to the front lines of the Civil War with his Chickering grand piano and performing for the troops. He would also travel by train to perform for small towns across the southern United States that had never heard classical music.
• He composed almost exclusively for solo piano and multiple pianos.
• In the last two years of his life, he performed 1000 concerts throughout parts of the United States and South America.
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If you would like free PDF copies of the score and parts to "Tournament Galop", please email your request to [e-mail]
**Special thanks to Nickolas Carlson, Cameron May, and The South Puget Sound Community College Orchestra for performing 4 of my Gottschalk arrangements for the 2024 season.

[@dmprdctns]

Perfect commuting music... I'm wondering how I might get this to my car... Thanks...