Galactic Swamp Dance

By the time May is over this year, we guarantee that many of your young charges will have their minds on galaxies far, far away. So we decided that we would end the year with a tune for your young recorder students that was out of this world...as it were. If the reaction of the kids in the studio is any indication, they should have a lot of fun with this piece.

The work begins with almost 50 seconds of "galactic swamp ambience" to set the mood. The tempo is established in bar 1 with a tongue-in-cheek hoedown, which is cued on the music. Part of the fun in the piece is the improvisation that is available to your performers during the intro, at bar 3 each time and at the end of the piece.

We have separated the improvisation into two types, though you needn't use the same restrictions. As recorded, we use the intro for "non-recorder sounds", which can include vocal sounds, taps, scratches, or non-rhythmic percussion sounds. For this section, we asked each child to come up with his "alien sound" and to just contribute that one sound to the landscape sporadically. Otherwise, it may sound like chaos all the time. You will hear the results on the recording, and can hear some of the individual sounds on the last track of the issue which we have titled, "Alien Outtakes." (You can ask the kids not to make "bodily function noises," but you probably won't have any more luck than we did.)

For the section at bar 3, the players are to improvise on their recorders. Ideally, they will only play the notes that they have learned to this point, though to sound more alien, they may wish to also make unpitched sounds, clicking sounds with their tongues, or any other sound they can concoct. As with the other improvisation, ask the players to think about the overall sound of the ensemble, and not just play as much and/or as loud as possible. For the final improvisation, you can combine the two types of sound. You may also wish to add hand percussion to some sections of the tune, or let your players make costumes to add to the performance fun.