Smiley Face

This is an instrumental performance piece that offers an opportunity for several groups of students to play together. Each of the instruments are optional, however, except the recorder, who has the melody. So you can add or remove as many or as few players and instruments as you want. For example, though we did not say so on the piano score, you could include autoharp. Boomwhackers® could be done in octaves if you have multiple sets of various kinds of them. (Just the basic sets would yield Cs in octaves at the least.) The chords for both ukulele and guitar are basic four-string versions, but you could let your players do more full versions and/or more complex rhythms. See? Change it up and make it your own.

For purposes of discussion, we will use the version we have as we recorded it. There are two measures of stick clicks so that everyone knows when to come in. Your own rhythm stick players continue similarly until the last bar. This same quarter note pattern is what the ukulele and guitar follow as well. The cowbell/tambourine part is also a repeating rhythm that continues till the end.

While the score gives you an overview, we have extracted parts as well which you will find on pages 55 and 56. Included on the ukulele/guitar part are TAB and chord diagrams for quick reference. The recorder only uses low D, low E, G, and A, which makes it playable for beginning students ready to go beyond BAG.

As easy as the piano part is, you could definitely play it yourself, however we would like to note that the recording is pretty neat. As it goes into the second time at measure 5, it becomes a halftime hip hop groove. The third time, strings join in with a punctuated countermelody that's just part of the happy build-up. In fact, it's this combination of sounds that led us to name the tune as we did. Even so, just all the student parts played by themselves with the drums sound awfully cool, and we wanted you to hear it that way. So we created an audio MP3 which you can download for free and share with your students.