Christmas program music

[Sherry C]

Hi,

I use Composer not only to get sheet music, but often times to create backing tracks for performances. This year for our kids' program at church, we decided it would be cool to hear the Christmas story as told by the animals. The basic idea is that we have different animals along the way tell things from their perspective. There are five songs, and there will be a narrator that ties things together. We decided to do "mask opera" this year as money is a bit tight for costumes, and we need to be flexible in case someone has to switch roles. Holding up a mask is easy

The following are the General MIDI (GM) versions of the songs. I'm using some soundfonts as well as Garritan Personal Orchestra for my accompaniment versions, which have the final annotations. I think you can still get the gist of what's going on.

So, we have:

1. Donkey Song - This song is the trip to Bethlehem as described by Mary's donkey. Totally original, though modeled on the "mozy" song.

01-DonkeySong-GM.not


2. Wise Camels and Horses - Traditionally we think of three wise men and three camels, because of the three gifts mentioned in the Bible, and all the creche manufacturers think three is a good number However, such a caravan would most likely have contained a number of different animals, and having a conversation between haughty camels and clueless horses seemed like a fun take on this trip. Traditional tune, to connect the conversation with the journey.

02-WiseCamelsAndHorses-GM.not

3. Herod's Cat - The feel of this song ties in somewhat with the Camels and Horses song, and I owe Michael Dodd a debt of gratitude for the inspiration and chord progressions from his Herod's Waltz. If Herod had an animal at the palace who was a know-it-all and would have the gall to talk down to camels and horses, it had to have been a cat (apologies to those who own cats and like them )

03-HerodsCat-GM.not


4. Sheep Song - Sheep are fairly timid and not so smart, so it was rather fun coming up with a song that would reflect what they might have thought about the appearance of angels in the night. Thank you, Mr. Tchaikovsky, for the perfect accompaniment

04-SheepSong-GM.not


5. Sleepy Little Stranger - The only other totally original song, and is sung as a sort of lullaby by the stable animals. Some of them know more than others about what is going on, and it's a bit of back and forth between them. The General MIDI (GM) version posted here does not have the annotations for which animals do which phrases.

05-SleepyLittleStrange-GM.not

These are close but not quite performance-ready. I'm planning to make videos of the melody and lyrics to use as the accompaniment and for the kids to be able to see and hear the music. I've found this to be very helpful when performing songs

For what it's worth, for the original music songs, I don't play keyboard worth squat. But I can hear what I want to do in my head, and so I record the rhythms into Composer by banging them on the keyboard (the pitches don't usually sound so good - you'd think I'd be able to play piano by now, as much as I bang on it to compose songs) and then go back and change the note pitches. It works for me

If you have any suggestions for improvements, I'm all ears

ttfn,
Sherry

[rrayner]

Hey, Sherry, what a HOOT! I finally had some time to take a listen to your Christmas Pageant. You've done a masterful job. I love the animal lyrics and your tongue-in-cheek humor. Also, the calliope part was fantastically discordant -- just like the real thing! Keep up the good work.

Ralph Rayner

[Sherry C]

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for the kind words

We had our first real rehearsal tonight, and it all went pretty well. I've got things set up where I'm running the whole thing - narration and the music - off my laptop hooked up to the sound system. I have a second monitor which duplicates my laptop monitor, and it's turned towards the kids. So, they can see the narration (if they need it - I'm encouraging them to memorize) and the songs as they play on Composer. I formatted a "Lyrics" part for each that has oversized lyrics along with the notes and I'm getting everything off the screen that is possible (eg. not showing Palettes and such) so that only the pertinent stuff shows.

Even though the kids weren't familiar at all with the music (they'd only heard it once a couple weeks ago) they were singing along fairly well with this set up. Having the lyrics and notes highlight as it plays is a great way to help them learn it, and to keep everyone together

I have some tweaking of the instruments to do while going through the sound system at church. I had things sounding pretty good here at home through my headphones, but there were a couple of violin parts at church tonight that sounded sort of like one of the camels had trodden on Herod's cat's tail I'll probably work around those peculiarities of that sound system this weekend.

ttfn,
Sherry

[Sherry C]

Howdy,

Well, we pulled it off

Sunday's Christmas Celebration went very well. My son Josh made his violin debut, with another son Tom on drums and me on pennywhistle (we did a nice celtic-feeling rendition of "I Saw Three Ships" as a prelude). We've got a lot of kids at church that are starting to learn to play various instruments, and I've been trying to work with all of them to have some performance pieces for church (and elsewhere) so it's been pretty hectic here for the last month or so.

For the musical (titled "If We Could Talk With the Animals") the kids did a great job, especially with only four real practices that we had for all five songs. I set up a dual monitor (as described previously) with my laptop to use as a prompter for them, and that worked quite nicely. I played the songs directly from Composer using some soundfonts and Garritan Personal Orchestra instruments, using Tracktion 3 as the "tie it all together" VST host. The kids made the animal masks using foam board which they painted (I made holding sticks, and we did "Chinese opera" style ) to go with the characters for each song. They all did well with their narrative parts. We had a very enthusiastic response from the rest of the folks there

I did end up tweaking the songs somewhat from the originals that I posted previously. Some was the lyrics or notes, but a lot of that tweaking was performance-related, especially in regard to the GPO instruments as they sounded over our (not so hot) sound system at the church. I got lots of really nice compliments about the sound tracks.

I've since acquired both the Garritan World Instruments library (Christmas from my Mom and Dad) and the Jazz and Big Band library (from my mother in law). I'm pretty stoked about working with these new sound libraries for future tracks. I've even found that I can convert the sf2 soundfonts that I have into sfz format, which will work in the Aria player. Doing that, I can have some really interesting pads that I've found go along with some excellent "real" instruments, all in one easy to manipulate player. Very cool indeed

Merry Christmas folks!
Sherry

[dj]

Hi, Sherry:

Congrats. Sounds like a very enjoyable event.


And the new extensions for the Garritan Personal Orchestra sound exciting.

Merry Christmas.

David

[rrayner]

Hi Sherry,

Congratulations on the successful performance of your Christmas show. It must give you great pride to see the blossoming of young artists under your guidance. Keep up the good work. And Happy Holidays to you and your family.

Ralph

[Ralph Sirvent]

Donkey's Song was very well scored. It has rhythm and all the good things that a good piece of music should have. I wasn't able to take a look at Jazz in F major, that's the first piece listed in the shared music file. Yours I was able to see and hear.

Ralph Sirvent

[dj]

Christmas!

Let's get the kids back to school first, please!

(Just returned from a ten hour round-trip drive to get one of my kids back to university. The other one goes next week.)

THEN, we can fa-la-la-la-la!