Seeking ideas for a piece for children (Narrator+Orchestra)

[MichaelSel]

Hi all,

I've an upcoming commission for 2017-2018 where I am required to compose a 20-30 minute piece for orchestra and narrator for an audience of children.

I'm looking for an interesting story or approach for the work. I want to see if a can find an interesting concept for this piece.
It would be could if there will be an educational value from the piece (like becoming familiar with the orchestra like in Peter and The Wolf), but it is not a must.
Any crazy ideas?

Thank you all!

Michael

[Karl Henning]

Good luck, Michael!

You accepted a commission for such a piece, without yet having decided on a text or theme?  How very interesting!  I am curious to learn how things develop.

[Turner]

Perhaps, I wouldn´t make it too "sweet" - some edgy & percussive music also, and some surreal/unpredictable elements & humour in the story?

The age group & exact institutional circumstances are if course also important in this respect
- but children nowadays are used to a lot of condensed, entertaining information at a time.

Just a few, scathered ideas:

Some of the funnier, edgier children´s stories are the burlesques of Ole Lund Kierkegaard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_Lund_Kirkegaard

The Czechs also have an impressive tradition for children´s stories, but I don´t know the extent of translations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Czech_children's_literature

[Florestan]

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm008.html

[Ken B]

I, Pencil http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html  You'd have to write the narration based on the idea of course.  (You wanted crazy!)

[Mirror Image]

How about an adaptation of the old nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpy? It can be a variations type of piece. Never mind I see the piece has to be 20-30 minutes in duration. Yikes!

[Monsieur Croche]

Well, accepting a commission for something topical without asking more specifics about the nature of the topic is completely ass-backwards, but this is spilled milk now, so...

Address this question to those who commissioned the work.  No matter how 'lame' those suggestions might be, they can give you a much better idea of the general nature and disposition of that which they hope to receive.

An approach that will not show how at a loss or at sea you are might be to ask specifically about the intended target audience and what sorts of things the commissioning people or agency think are suitable for that audience.  Much of what might come back will help you determine a 'flavor' of the particular demographic and sociopolitical climate they come from, giving you a limited topic / genre / intent area to target.

That said, one near-pandering and I think successful idea would to be to ask for some selected paintings and / or poetry or stories from the collective group of children who are to be your audience.  (I would personally opt for the non-textual pictures before any written texts, allowing more personal latitude as the composer, then write the narrative as stimulated by those images, or hire a good writer for that.)  Shorter and more directly to the job, select the texts....  The pictures could still be used as visual entertainment, engagement as (also timed) upstage projections during the presentation of the piece.

These could trigger in you an ocean of ideas.  If well-selected, you then engage (and flatter) that audience -- and most importantly, the adults who write the checks and who commissioned you -- and if done right, will have a general appeal beyond that specific audience.

Edward Lear's nonsense poems have been set to music, and kids love nonsense / silly, but these are certainly still under copyright, a very real consideration.

Once you have a topic, since you are somewhat 'late' in having the prime material for the concept anyway, I would kabosh any thoughts of writing 'a guide to the instruments' unless you are that well-practiced that it is near to incidental / reflexive while working on the piece.

Those narrators who perform in this genre almost always know how to read a score and its specifics; their part is often notated in the score with much of that in mind... otherwise, you end up with a reader who needs endless and repetitive rehearsals to pick up on cues and the timing of their delivery.  Ergo, look at the scores of Peter and the Wolf, Stravinsky's Persephone, and Copland's A Lincoln Portrait.

Best of luck, indeed.


Best regards

P.s. Having taken note of your location...
Even if suggested or directly asked for, at any cost avoid religion, politics, cultural jingoism and nationalism of any stripe as if any of those were the black death itself.  Write FOR the children, not AT them :-)

P.p.s.  There are other professional composer members on GMG, a public forum;  these suggested concepts are offered to any and all.