Water Music Hornpipe

On the evening of 17 July 1717, King George I went up the Thames by barge from Whitehall to Chelsea, and a second barge carrying about fifty musicians followed him playing Handel's new music. The Daily Courant reported that the king liked it so much he had it played three times over, on the way up the river and back.

Handel never published the Water Music as a set. The movements circulated in manuscripts and in piecemeal prints for decades, and the tidy division into three suites, one in F, one in D and one in G, came from later editors. The D major music is the loud outdoor part, with trumpets and horns, written to carry across open water, and the hornpipe is its most famous movement. Its name has nothing to do with sailors. In Handel's England a hornpipe was a dance in three beats with a kick in the rhythm.

That kick is in the first bar here: three long notes climbing from A to E, then quick notes tumbling down over the bar line. Handel wrote it in 3/2, and this page writes it in 3/4 at half the note values, which changes the look and not the sound. It carries the opening strain as the strings play it, eleven bars passed from the first violins to the seconds and back, up to the cadence where the trumpets take over.

On a mandolin in D the strain lives on the A and E courses, from the open A up to the A at the fifth fret, and the hand never moves. The long notes on the beat want to ring, and the eighths after them want to be light, so let the pick lean into the first beat of every bar. The repeated A's in bars 5 and 7 are the trumpet call Handel gives the violins before the real trumpets arrive. Once the eleven bars are steady at 100, try playing it outdoors.