Found this on youtube today..."On The Mill Dam", Buehling, Miller, Rose, Koken, Peterson.

[Trapdoor2]

[Mike Moss]

Really cool and exciting ensemble performance!

BTW, does anyone how the banjeaurine "works"? I might have missed something in the Stewart magazines but I don't quite understand the theory behind orchestrating for an instrument tuned five steps above the lead instrument.

[Trapdoor2]

What is screwy to me is that the banjeaurine parts are often written in a different key than the regular banjo parts...and then sometimes they're simply the regular banjo part with a note ("Banjo or Banjeaurine"). If you play strictly by fingering, the two won't harmonize...you have to transpose on the fly.

I have TABbed out several tunes having Banjo & Banjeaurine duets and it takes me ages to solve the harmony issues...mainly because they're almost all handled differently by each publisher. Maddening.

However (and it isn't like I've done this a lot), I simply think of the banjeaurine as a truncated banjo that starts at the 5th fret. With TAB, I imagine you could subtract 5 from every TAB note and play that (IOW any position with a 5 or greater would be playable on the banjeaurine). On notation, if you read a 5B (regular banjo), it is the equivalent of "open" on the banjeaurine. An 8P would thus become a 3P on the banjeaurine, etc. But that only gets us duplicate inversions...not really "harmony" (and it ignores the 5th string).

[Mike Moss]

I finally found what I was looking for in the Journal (Aug-Sep 1895):

So from what I understand the theory is that the banjeaurine plays from the banjo score and all other instruments transpose to suit (at sight) according to the chart on the first page, since there was/is little music arranged specifically for the banjo orchestra with all parts transposed.

It's way more than my brain can handle, but interesting nonetheless.