This is another post about an ongoing music project. This one’s a song to which I set the lyrics of David Petersen’s “Oh Day Away,” published in a comic, and how I ended up arranging the song for choir in a traditional style. Unlike with “Monk Suite,” there’s actually a sound clip, albeit just rough MIDI… but it’s something to listen to! It’s a setting of a lovely lyric by Mouse Guard author David Peterson to a melody of my own, arranged for choir.
I mentioned a while back that I’d been working on “Oh Day Away”—a choral arrangement of the song by the same title, from the last volume of the Legends of the Guard collections that I read to my son last summer. It’s a pretty, modest little lyric, and very mousey, and when we were reading it I was inspired to sing it to an improvised melody, which made it a little more exciting to my son. I managed to remember the melody, wrote it out, and then set about putting together a choral arrangement of the song for a regular, unaccompanied choir.
It took a while, but over the winter holiday I finally finalized that arrangement. Unfortunately, I have no connections with any choirs that could sing it. That’s unfortunate, since I would love to have the track as a memento of that afternoon spent with my son and a good comic, but also because I think it’s actually a pretty nice little piece of choir music, and maybe others would agree if they heard it as it’s meant to be heard.
However, I noticed that EastWest offers a free one-month trial of its Composer Cloud + subscription package. They have Symphonic Choirs and Hollywood Choirs, a couple of VST plugins that let you build lyrics so that the software actually sings the words you assign to each voice. It has its limits, and there are some specific things in my score that I’ve read these choirs can’t quite do, like legato holds of a word across a run of notes, but there aren’t many of those, so I figure I can put together a pretty good facsimile of the score in audio form.
Still, for now a rough MIDI-output with no lyrics, just the voices, will have to do:
I’m especially happy to have composed this, since otherwise a lot of my music projects lately have involved resurrecting “lost” projects. I’m sure someone with more experience in choral writing could give me pointers, but as it is, as my first real piece for a proper choir, I’m pretty happy with it, and eve happier that it is is something new! It’s nice to know I can still sit down and compose something starting with nothing but a melody I’d been humming to myself for a day or two. I’ll update again if I ever get a proper recording of it to share.