This is a dance megamix of themes and songs I wrote for Crouching Giraffe/Papermoon's 2021 Canberra production of Margaret Atwood's "The Penelopiad".

I was commissioned to set several pieces of verse in the script to music, in styles stipulated by the Director. Having a little time on my hands, I took those melodies and themes and smashed them into this dance medley. Two of the songs were originally in 3/4, and you can pick them through the use of triplets.

I added an original linking piece to this, which appears at the start, and then in abbreviated form between most part of the medley, and heavily borrowed and bent the piano line from Black Box's "Ride on Time". There's a version of that line in every part of the medley, but it's always different. The third theme was written as a round, and in this version it builds to two delayed lines, where in the play there is only one delayed line.

All composition and synth output, and some level setting was done in MuseScore3, with topping, tailing, and other engineering in Audacity.

This was not used in the show - it was never meant to be - it's just a bit of fun for me and the company.

The Penelopiad Megamix

This is a podcast theme that I wrote for the Super Flans Podcast, which is co-hosted by a friend of mine. The podcast discusses episodes of the UK Channel 4 series "Great British Bake Off", and the brief was to write something that was like the theme music for that show, but not actually it.

I therefore aimed to match the orchestration and feel, while swapping various rhythms from the original to different instruments. This would deliver a familiar feel without being a direct rip-off. I also noted the very chime-y nature of the piano part of the original, and thought I could get away with blatantly inserting the famous "Big Ben" chime tune for the piano part. Not much says "Britain" musically than that. I liked the result so much that it was my favoured version.

Given it is for a podcast theme, it needed to be pretty short, so I aimed to deliver an arrangement of no more than 30 seconds, and to also provide shorter versions (e.g. last 12 bars and last 8 bars) for use as segment dividers. I wrote a non-Big Ben version as well, just in cast the hosts of the podcast didn't like the Big Ben version - but thankfully, they did. I also delivered three different potential segment stings, completely unrelated to this theme, and they picked up one of them for their "Flan Favourite" segment.

This final version was accepted, and I think was quite successful. You can listen to the podcast in most places you can find such things, including Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/6xWrqmDVsQKSqEza9IfzrI?si=LL9lIsuQR2a-mlyYgB85Uw&dl_branch=1) and Google Podcasts. Super Flans is not endorsed by the Great British Bake Off, Channel 4, Foxtel or any associated persons. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.

I scored and arranged the theme using MuseScore 3, exported it using the onboard synth, and lightly engineered it in Audacity.

Super Flans Podcast Theme

This is an upbeat medley of themes and songs I wrote for Echo Youth's May 2023 production of "Puffs", staged at The Q (Queanbeyan, NSW, Australia). It was arranged for use as the bows music at the end of the show.

The show follows the same 7 years as that other rather more famous boy wizard, but from the perspective of the "Puffs" (you know who they are), presented in two action-packed acts.

In total, the script called for around 20 music cues, sometimes with very specific requirements to imitate popular songs, so there are some subtle and not-so-subtle nods to known songs in here. The show was a lot of fun to write for, it is very silly at the same time as being affectionate to the source.

"Puffs!" Megamix

The script here calls for "Dramatic music and just epic stuff as Oliver maths". The scene is the Battle of Hogwarts, and Oliver is requried to calculate ballistic trajectories for spells. Thus the ridiculously complex musical cue.

Oliver Maths Hard

The script says "We flashback to a dance club." My idea was that this cue should be an 80s treatment of the same Puffs formation dance cue. And so it is.

80s Flashback Dance

The script called for "Snogging music again." The director advised me that she wanted something "with a bit of raunch", because the characters here had to get raunchy. And so I observed that Ed Sheeran hadn't been successfully sued for using a specific, raunchy, chord progression, and used the buggery out of it.

Snogging 102 With Raunch

The script here simply said "music starts playing", and the director advised that it should be the sort of music that the lights dimming at a Blue Light Disco would prompt 13 year olds to suck face. So I instantly went to my teenage years and heard Queen's orchestral settings for "Highlander" and went from there. And here we are. In three, of course.

Snogging 101

The script says "Something that sounds like "Kiss From A Rose" might play." This drops into a scene in which two main characters kiss for the first time - bearing in mind, it's set in the 90s. In keeping with my literalist approach, I arranged and performed a parody/pastiche of the introduction to Seal's brilliant song.

Puffs From A Rose

For no readily justifiable reason, the Puffs peform a formation dance at the Halloween Ball, which involves them calling out their names on a particular beat, and failing miserably. To help them fail to identify a beat, the last part of this song has double beats on the bass drum, hand claps and snare, none of which match. I was a particular bastard with this arrangement.

Upbeat Puffs Formation Dance

The script here called for "A very short slow dance song plays. Enough time for the two to have a nice little moment that ends far too soon. The lyrics could simply be, "A Very Short Slow Dance Song”."

And so it is. The lyric is quiet in the mix, so as not to distract from the action on stage, but it's there.

A Very Short Slow Dance Song

This song underscored a Halloween Ball scene with dialog, and I find that actors find it easier to improvise dancing in 3/4 than 4/4, so this is set as a country waltz.

The keyboard in this track is a live capture of the original concept I developed for the cue. Everything else is programmed through MuseScore 4, including the sax lead. I have to say, I'm not a confident melody writer, but this one just flowed, and I was reasonably happy with it.

A Nice Little Slow Song

This was a major scene in the show: it's Three Wizard Tournament time, and the magical bathroom gets a little ballet scene as it forms for Cedric to take his egg underwater, meet that oddly voyeuristic ghost, and be told it's all about mermaids. The cast hilariously used toilet seats and yellow streamers in a mini ballet to create the bathroom, with many running water and fart sounds, as requested by the director.

The cast had begun rehearsing this scene before I wrote the cue, using  a Tchaikovky "Swan Lake" cue as a temp track, so I matched the tempo, orchestration and pattern of what they'd been using to create this cue. It references the "idee fixe" I'd used in the earlier fanfares and later battle music.

The Bathroom Forms

The script calls for "Entrance music fit for a '90's WWF wrestler.". I used the same "idee fixe" theme as I'd used for Cedric's entrance, but spread it out, having listened to a few WWF entrance themes from the 90s. I played a flanged and distorted guitar line live, over the programmed backing track for this one.

Enter The Dragon

The script called for "Epic entrance music" for Cedric's entrance to the Three Wizard Tournament. I used an "idee fixe" fanfare theme that would be repeated later, in this arrangment, knowing that the one following would need to be grander.

Cedric Enters 3 Wizards

Unfortunately only about the first eight bars of this made it into the show, ending in a record scratch effect, because the scene really needed to keep moving.

The script literally says "A 'We Are The Champions'-esque song plays, all about winning third place". Being a huge Queen fan I made it my mission to write a perfect parody-pastiche of sufficent brevity to meet the brief, and to do it by recording myself singing four different parts at least three times each in the process. This I did. I wrote the lyrics, composed a piece close enough but far enough from the original, arranged and peformed every bit of it. It is my favourite thing in the whole project.

Third Is The Best Place

This is a piece intended to underscore a Halloween dance scene and dialog, with the script prompt "At the snap of the Narrator's fingers, a song that sounds something like an off-brand version of the 'Monster Mash' plays. Let's call it the 'Monster Bash.'"

I did love these very explicit prompts. This is literally a new backing track based on the actual 'Monster Mash' and nothing more. The tremeloed guitar was played live over a programmed backing track made in MuseScore 4.

The Monster Bash

The script here said "Blaring guitars, drums, and rock concert lighting greet Cedric as he in turn greets everyone, audience included".

Since the whole score required consistently 90s references, I decided I wanted a bit of Slim Shady at the top of this one, followed by some loud distorted guitar nonsense. As it turned out, time didn't allow the Slim Shady reference, but here it is in full for your enjoyment. The guitar was played live over a programmed backing for the recording.

Meet Cedric

The script for this cue says "A light piano theme plays. Not the one you are hearing in your head. It’s a different one."

When I was first asked to write for this show, and I was sent the script, I wrote this cue in about 15 minutes and sent it to the Director as, essentially, my audition. It was accepted, and was used several times during the show to reference "the chosen one" and the alternative narrative that everyone already knows. 

It's essentially a parody-pastiche of the John Williams theme closely associated with the source material, with notes swapped about but preserving the feel. I'm not ashamed.

A Light Piano Theme

The script here called for "A rollicking 1990's partying song", and I was hard pressed to go past a parody of Toploader's "Dancing in the Moonlight". So this is essentially a retread of the backing for that.

In production, the sound crew alternatively stretched and sped up this track, as the scene depicted the Puffs encountering inebriating butter-substances for the first time, getting altered and sometimes spewing at each other. It was barely recognisable. But here it is in its unaltered glory.

Field Trip

This is a sample of the Epic War Score music I wrote for the "Battle of Hogwarts" section of the show.

The script says "The music should bounce between an epic war score and an homage to the sweet hits of the 1990's. Sometimes it would like to be both." And so I decided to bowdlerise two enormous 90s hits, Blur's "Song No. 2" and The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony". You can hear both in this cue.

The scene that this music underscores is a long series of mini-scenes, like a Scooby-Doo corridor and door scene, with people rushing in and out, casting spells, exchanging dialog, and exiting again. It needed breaks called by a sound operator. And so I delivered this cue, but was asked to break it down into it's constituent parts, with a long drum line underscore over which the bits could be played. I ended up delivering a five minute drum line and 17 different music fragments of 4, 8, 12 or 16 bars in length, that could be dropped in as desired. This worked nicely in the show, but is impossible to present here. And so this is the sample I provided to the Director. I was still very happy with it. I'm particularly proud of the bit where I superimposed a 4/4 section of "Song No.2" over a 6/8 backing. That takes concentration. ;-)

Epic War Score

One of the characters is seen in a short vignette in the background performing an ice dance routine, and this music needed to be a short cue appropriate to that purpose.

Ice Dancing Music

The cast enact a "cell phone ballet", moving around the stage in a dreamlike way, with snippets of conversation overlaid. I've made this a bit spooky, and put it in 3/4, which I always find is the easiest time for even the least skilled dancing actor to hit a beat.

Cell Phone Ballet

A very specific cue, that needed a lot of musical flags for the cast to time dialogue and action against. So that's what they got - key changes, tempo changes, time signature changes and lead instrument changes.

Film Noir Fight

Two characters meet in the lobby of an upscale hotel, and the director asked for some uptempo jazz popular in such establishments. There's some early Miles Davis influence in here. For the show, pretty much the entire track repeats 4 times to make up the required scene length. I've dropped the repeats for this version.

Uptempo Cool Jazz

Quite a short cue, to round out the first act. The director asked for a string swell like the one that appears in the Gerry and the Pacemakers version of "You'll Never Walk Alone", and having gone there, the resulting cue is kind of a mixture of that and the Honeydrippers' "Sea of Love", but without any lyrics.

Swelling Romantic Music

Two characters meet, and the director asked for some "lazy, seductive" film noir music to underscore the scene, up to 5 minutes. To make that length I put in a DC al Coda, to repeat the whole thing. I've removed that for this version.

Film Noir Background

The main character attends a funeral, and the script calls for background church music. So this is an original church music piece to underscore part of the scene.

Church Music

The show opens with a scene in a cafe, and I was asked to provide any type of background music that wouldn't detract from the action on stage. I recalled being in a restaurant a few months earlier where some very repetitive, nondescript samba music was playing, so based this piece around that idea. The original cut for the show ran just over 10 minutes, with a few stretches of just the accompaniment and a few loops of the solos. I've eliminated those lengthening tactics for this cut.

The title is a reference to a John Mulaney comedy bit called the Salt and Pepper Diner, in which he describes loading the jukebox in a cafe up with 21 plays of Tom Jones' "What's New Pussycat?" and one "It's Not Unusual" somewhere in the middle. This kind of described my amused sensibility as I wrote something with so much repetition and, as tribute, there is a very small reference to "What's New Pussycat?" in this track.

The Salt N Pepper Cafe

This is the Curtain Call arrangement used in the August 2017 Canberra Repertory Society production of "Neighbourhood Watch". I provided the score from my own curtain call arrangement to Perth's Robert Kay, and this recording was made by ensembles "Boum! Meringue" and "Red Sea Pedestrians", recorded and engineered by Voyager's Scott Kay.

The recording is a bit faster than I had indicated on the score and so, to ensure there would be enough music for the curtain call, they did two repeats instead of the one I had written.

Never Anymore - Curtain Call

This is a four-part performance of Johnathan Coulton's "When You Go", arrangement by Coulton/Reynolds.  The arrangement actually calls for a divisi in two lines in a couple of parts, and I haven't bothered to record those bits, just wanted to keep it simple.  I recorded this because I wanted to perform it for my choir, and couldn't find a karaoke track. Once I'd done the three backing parts I thought I might as well record the solo as well, just for fun.  So here it is,

Hardware is an Audio-Technica USB side address mic straight into Audacity for recording.  Mixing, reverb, and export to mp3 also done in Audacity.  It's a little rough, but so am I.

When You Go (Johnathan Coulton cover)

More of the "Bioncile: Civil War of Frada Nui" project.

This track is underscore for establishing shots of an underwater, militaristic civilisation in the Bionicle universe. I seem to have nicked Brad Fiedl's sparse, syncopated Terminator bass as a motif for this score, but I don't think it's copyright. Here it is again!

I had a little fun getting into a major key for a change and fiddling about with synth voices to get the right underwater feel for this one. There's also a little bit of Vangelis/Blade Runner about the opening parts of this track. Not what I was aiming for, but not sorry it turned out that way.

As with the other tracks, this was composed directly into MuseScore 3, dot by dot, mixing onboard with a combination of mixer settings and dynamic markings, and exported straight to mp3.

Civil War Of Frada Nui - Ga Nui Arrival

This is a suite of themes and treatments that I wrote at the request of my 14 year old son, who has been a longtime fan of Lego Bionicles and the movies, and is in the middle of writing a fanfic Bionicle script with his friends, called "Bionicle: Civil War of Frada Nui".

He intends to film the script, probably using stop-motion of his many, many, bionicle kits, and asked if I could write some music for the short film, which should include: a title sequence theme, a main theme, something reflective, some fight music, and some end theme music. He also wanted me to incorporate the main themes by Nathan Furst from the animated films "Bionicle: Mask of Light" and "Bionicle 2: Legends of Metru Nui", which I did, and I acknowledge Nathan Furst's composition of those themes.

I decided to deliver on my son's request through a suite of music, so that he could excerpt bits of it as necessary, and request longer versions of particular themes or treatments as required.

This is the first time I've written something like this, and so some of it will come off as derivative - I've pulled every little trick out that I know, to hit the desired effects. There is a looping 8 bar chord sequence over which I've progressively laid other lines, including a theme melody. There is a quieter piano treatment of that theme, which gets a little variation. Then I introduce the "Bionicle: Mask of Light" theme with a French horn and piano statement, followed by a grand theme treatment over which I was able to fit my own original theme as counterpoint, modulated to a major key. It then moves into the beginning of the fight sequence, with a slightly Latin treatment of the "Bionicle 2" theme, followed by an extended percussion sequence for the fight music. It has a 5/4 section, for increased disjointedness, and then it moves to a 4/4 section. There is then an urgent/slow build section, culminating in an upbeat rock rhythm recapitulation of my theme through to the end. In all I ended up putting together just shy of six minutes of music. This is also a replacement version of the track, in which I've revised the rhythm section of the final part.

I composed all of this straight into MuseScore 3, dot by dot (including the percussion), mixed it onboard using a combination of mixer settings and dynamic markings, and exported it straight to mp3.

I'm pretty pleased with the result, particularly the Bionicle 2 theme section, and the slow build to the end. In all, it's been a satisfying experience writing something a bit more ambitious, with way more voices than I've ever handled before in a single piece.

Suite: Civil War Of Frada Nui

This is my four part a capella arrangement of Thirsty Merc's "Homesick".

I'm a Thirsty Merc/Rai Thistlethwaite fan, and have been planning to do some arrangements of his songs for a while, so this is the first one I've completed. The song lends itself to this kind of treatment in my opinion, and I think I've done it some justice.

I performed all four parts (and there are only four parts, at all times), and mixed it and engineered it a bit in Audacity, exporting to WAV for upload to Soundcloud.

This performance is dedicated to my love, my life, my wife, without whom I would be irretrievably homesick.

Homesick (Thirsty Merc cover)

Here's an odd thing.  A friend of mine pointed me at Hidden Citizens (check them out on Spotify), who do relentlessly epic trailer versions of popular songs. This stuff went around in my head for a week, and I ended up just having to get into my composition software and let out the ideas that were going around. This is the result. I'm a wee bit surprised by myself with this one. I feel like it might be the theme for a Stranger Things spinoff or something.

Composition and level setting is all within MuseScore3, exported straight to an mp3.

GlennGP

Popular tracks