Great Denmark Street waltz

This beautiful tune was composed by Emer Mayock and is played by her on her first album Merry Bits of Timber. She has graciously given her permission for the transcription to be presented here. It is, like all transcriptions, a pale reflection of the reality of the performance and is missing all of the cuts, taps and the many other subtleties that make Emer’s playing so special. My hope is twofold: (1) that those curious as to how the tune is structured will be helped to see the structure by listening to it with the dots in front of them (I confess that its structure eluded me for many years and many listenings until I finally sat down and transcribed it), (2) that those wishing to learn the tune will be helped by this transcription. The tune is repeated 3 times on the recording, and each time there are interesting melodic variations, some slight and some more substantial. Note that the tune has a 16-bar A part and a 16-bar B part, but I’ve written out the repeats in full, making the transcription 64 bars in all.

Here is the link to thesession’s listing of Merry Bits of Timber: https://thesession.org/recordings/913