Funny things my kids said
Instrumentation: SATB, Piano, & String Quartet
Purchase:
II. My Name
Contact composer directly
Duration: 16:00 (6 movements)
Language: English
Story: When my daughters began speaking with regularity, I started keeping a list on my phone
called “Funny Things My Kids Said.” Whenever they said something funny , completely
out of left field, or filled with the kind of wisdom that only toddlers possess, I would jot it down
verbatim in an effort to document and later remember one of these precious and all-too-fleeting
moments.
Funny Things My Kids Said is a musical setting of some of the highlights of that list. I
undertook this project in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic after having been diagnosed
positive myself in March. I just needed the wisdom, warmth, humor, and, well, joy of my kids.
For those who are wondering, both of my kids gave me permission to set their words to
music. My older daughter's favorite movement is “Croutons” and my younger daughter's is “The Siren."
Not the easiest thing in the world to explain when your seven-year old runs around in public singing “SALAMI SIREN” over and over again, but hey she mostly sings in tune so it’s a net positive. Of course
they also both still love eating their favorite vegetable, croutons.
Purchase:
II. My Name
Contact composer directly
Duration: 16:00 (6 movements)
Language: English
Story: When my daughters began speaking with regularity, I started keeping a list on my phone
called “Funny Things My Kids Said.” Whenever they said something funny , completely
out of left field, or filled with the kind of wisdom that only toddlers possess, I would jot it down
verbatim in an effort to document and later remember one of these precious and all-too-fleeting
moments.
Funny Things My Kids Said is a musical setting of some of the highlights of that list. I
undertook this project in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic after having been diagnosed
positive myself in March. I just needed the wisdom, warmth, humor, and, well, joy of my kids.
For those who are wondering, both of my kids gave me permission to set their words to
music. My older daughter's favorite movement is “Croutons” and my younger daughter's is “The Siren."
Not the easiest thing in the world to explain when your seven-year old runs around in public singing “SALAMI SIREN” over and over again, but hey she mostly sings in tune so it’s a net positive. Of course
they also both still love eating their favorite vegetable, croutons.
Text and Context:
I. Brunch
Brunch isn’t an adventure! It’s just breakfast at a lunch place!
– Joy
One Sunday morning, I said to Joy “We’re going on an adventure today!” She responded, “Oo, where!” I said, “We’re going to brunch!” Her face immediately turned from youthful excitement to aged exasperation and I could feel her disappointment. In retrospect, it’s really my fault – when I said “adventure” I’m sure she pictured a day at the water park, the zoo, hiking, or really anything other than…brunch.
II. My Name
My name has three letters. That’s not enough letters. Now that I’m four, it should have four letters.
– Joy
Joy daydream-ily posited this thought on her fourth birthday. The matter-of-factness that kids have while expressing ludicrous-to-adult thoughts is hysterical and inspiring. I tried to let the music reflect this daydreamy world that kids frequently inhabit and adults rarely do. True to her sentiment, each voice’s main melody only has three notes until getting to “four letters” when it adds a fourth pitch (a fourth letter! Sorry, Dad joke.).
III. Chickens
Dad: Do you want to know what my favorite bird is?
Summer: What?
Dad: Chicken!
Summer: But chicken's not a bird.
Me: It is though! It's a bird that we eat.
Summer: No, we don't eat chicken.
Me: We do eat chicken.
Summer: Oh because they’re made out of chicken! Yum.
Summer’s maternal grandparents have a chicken coop and several egg-laying hens. One night, we were about to have dinner at their house (some kind of chicken), and we were in the back looking at the chickens. I thought it might be helpful to point out to Summer that chickens are great in many ways – they make nice pets, they lay eggs, you can eat them (not Gramma and Papa’s chickens, but the ones from the store), etc. and while I was trying to help her learn this it became clear that she had never intellectually connected the concept of “chicken” the animal with “chicken” the meat. Her confident declaration that chickens were made out of chicken was hilarious and, frankly, revelatory.
The music in this movement is based on a churning rhythmic motive that’s meant to sound like someone continuously grappling with and processing new information and also like a chicken flapping its wings. It’s set as a dialogue between two soloists, a tenor (dad) and a soprano (Summer).
IV. The Siren
It’s the Salami Siren. The Salami Siren will scare away the giant salami monster.
– Summer
At 11:45am on the first business day of each month in Honolulu, the emergency management department tests the tsunami sirens. They’re loud, and they blare for about a minute or so before winding down. We’re fortunate that we have a great system to warn us in advance of a tsunami wave approaching the islands. We’re unfortunate in that we don’t have a good way to teach little kids how to spell or say “tsunami.”
One day, we were out with little Summer when the test siren went off. She was understandably terrified of the loud noise, and so we tried to explain that the even though the sound was scary, it’s just the tsunami siren and its job is to protect us from a tsunami. Confident that we handled that one well, her mom and I declared parental victory and called it a day.
The next month, the tsunami siren test went off again, and Summer loudly declared to all within earshot that it was just the “salami” siren, and it will scare away the giant salami monster. It’s at this point that we realized we had never really bothered to define “tsunami” in our previous month’s explanation, and so she had heard us reassure her that we have a really great advance warning system to protect us from Godzilla-sized salamis.
In this movement, the violins mimic the sound of the tsunami siren, a slowly-rising and blaring minor third. That minor third interval, combined with the most impending-large-menacing-monster of all intervals, the minor second (thanks Jaws!), yielded a primarily octatonic scale for the movement.
V. Croutons
Dad: Now Joy, we need you to pick out a vegetable from the salad bar to go with your orange chicken.
Joy: CROUTONS!!!
Dad: Joy, croutons aren’t a vegetable.
Joy: Oh no.
Joy and I were shopping for ready-made dinner at the grocery store, and she picked out a bowl of orange chicken with rice. Wanting to make sure she had a balanced meal, I told her she had to get a vegetable to go with her chicken. Great parenting, right? Thanks! She scanned the salad bar with all the intensity of a hawk surveying a cage full of mice, saw the croutons, and her EUREKA moment that ensued was so obvious, so palpable, and so tangible that I think the cartoon light bulb that appeared above her head would have been visible from space.
Something about the way she defeatedly said “Oh no” just screamed Baroque-style recitative “chunk, chunk!” to me, hence the recitative and choral fugue form of this movement.
VI. Behold!
Behold! The island of France! That’s where all the horses live, because it sounds like prance!
– Summer
Somewhere along the journey to full-blown literacy, kids learn about rhyming and the linguistic power it has. We had recently gotten a globe and were showing the kids various things on it, when Summer confidently and correctly pointed out France. Probably punch-drunk with self-confidence on correctly identifying a complicated word like “France,” she doubled down on her linguistic prowess and used her rhyming skills to rhyme “France” with “prance.” Then, noting that prancing is an activity pretty much only associated with horses, she made another genius-level associative leap and declared that France must be home to all the horses, because it rhymes with “prance.” I’m pretty sure that because she grew up on an island (O‘ahu) and always hears people talk about island life, the islands, etc. she thinks that “island” is just a word that is synonymous with “place,” “region,” or “country.”
In tribute to France and all the horses that live there (?), I based this entire movement off a repeated galloping rhythm. I also used fragments of the first phrase of the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, to really hammer home that these are French horses who truly relish living on the island [sic] of France.
It’s amazing what kids can come up with, and even more amazing that I get to be Joy and Summer’s dad. I love them both so much.
Brunch isn’t an adventure! It’s just breakfast at a lunch place!
– Joy
One Sunday morning, I said to Joy “We’re going on an adventure today!” She responded, “Oo, where!” I said, “We’re going to brunch!” Her face immediately turned from youthful excitement to aged exasperation and I could feel her disappointment. In retrospect, it’s really my fault – when I said “adventure” I’m sure she pictured a day at the water park, the zoo, hiking, or really anything other than…brunch.
II. My Name
My name has three letters. That’s not enough letters. Now that I’m four, it should have four letters.
– Joy
Joy daydream-ily posited this thought on her fourth birthday. The matter-of-factness that kids have while expressing ludicrous-to-adult thoughts is hysterical and inspiring. I tried to let the music reflect this daydreamy world that kids frequently inhabit and adults rarely do. True to her sentiment, each voice’s main melody only has three notes until getting to “four letters” when it adds a fourth pitch (a fourth letter! Sorry, Dad joke.).
III. Chickens
Dad: Do you want to know what my favorite bird is?
Summer: What?
Dad: Chicken!
Summer: But chicken's not a bird.
Me: It is though! It's a bird that we eat.
Summer: No, we don't eat chicken.
Me: We do eat chicken.
Summer: Oh because they’re made out of chicken! Yum.
Summer’s maternal grandparents have a chicken coop and several egg-laying hens. One night, we were about to have dinner at their house (some kind of chicken), and we were in the back looking at the chickens. I thought it might be helpful to point out to Summer that chickens are great in many ways – they make nice pets, they lay eggs, you can eat them (not Gramma and Papa’s chickens, but the ones from the store), etc. and while I was trying to help her learn this it became clear that she had never intellectually connected the concept of “chicken” the animal with “chicken” the meat. Her confident declaration that chickens were made out of chicken was hilarious and, frankly, revelatory.
The music in this movement is based on a churning rhythmic motive that’s meant to sound like someone continuously grappling with and processing new information and also like a chicken flapping its wings. It’s set as a dialogue between two soloists, a tenor (dad) and a soprano (Summer).
IV. The Siren
It’s the Salami Siren. The Salami Siren will scare away the giant salami monster.
– Summer
At 11:45am on the first business day of each month in Honolulu, the emergency management department tests the tsunami sirens. They’re loud, and they blare for about a minute or so before winding down. We’re fortunate that we have a great system to warn us in advance of a tsunami wave approaching the islands. We’re unfortunate in that we don’t have a good way to teach little kids how to spell or say “tsunami.”
One day, we were out with little Summer when the test siren went off. She was understandably terrified of the loud noise, and so we tried to explain that the even though the sound was scary, it’s just the tsunami siren and its job is to protect us from a tsunami. Confident that we handled that one well, her mom and I declared parental victory and called it a day.
The next month, the tsunami siren test went off again, and Summer loudly declared to all within earshot that it was just the “salami” siren, and it will scare away the giant salami monster. It’s at this point that we realized we had never really bothered to define “tsunami” in our previous month’s explanation, and so she had heard us reassure her that we have a really great advance warning system to protect us from Godzilla-sized salamis.
In this movement, the violins mimic the sound of the tsunami siren, a slowly-rising and blaring minor third. That minor third interval, combined with the most impending-large-menacing-monster of all intervals, the minor second (thanks Jaws!), yielded a primarily octatonic scale for the movement.
V. Croutons
Dad: Now Joy, we need you to pick out a vegetable from the salad bar to go with your orange chicken.
Joy: CROUTONS!!!
Dad: Joy, croutons aren’t a vegetable.
Joy: Oh no.
Joy and I were shopping for ready-made dinner at the grocery store, and she picked out a bowl of orange chicken with rice. Wanting to make sure she had a balanced meal, I told her she had to get a vegetable to go with her chicken. Great parenting, right? Thanks! She scanned the salad bar with all the intensity of a hawk surveying a cage full of mice, saw the croutons, and her EUREKA moment that ensued was so obvious, so palpable, and so tangible that I think the cartoon light bulb that appeared above her head would have been visible from space.
Something about the way she defeatedly said “Oh no” just screamed Baroque-style recitative “chunk, chunk!” to me, hence the recitative and choral fugue form of this movement.
VI. Behold!
Behold! The island of France! That’s where all the horses live, because it sounds like prance!
– Summer
Somewhere along the journey to full-blown literacy, kids learn about rhyming and the linguistic power it has. We had recently gotten a globe and were showing the kids various things on it, when Summer confidently and correctly pointed out France. Probably punch-drunk with self-confidence on correctly identifying a complicated word like “France,” she doubled down on her linguistic prowess and used her rhyming skills to rhyme “France” with “prance.” Then, noting that prancing is an activity pretty much only associated with horses, she made another genius-level associative leap and declared that France must be home to all the horses, because it rhymes with “prance.” I’m pretty sure that because she grew up on an island (O‘ahu) and always hears people talk about island life, the islands, etc. she thinks that “island” is just a word that is synonymous with “place,” “region,” or “country.”
In tribute to France and all the horses that live there (?), I based this entire movement off a repeated galloping rhythm. I also used fragments of the first phrase of the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, to really hammer home that these are French horses who truly relish living on the island [sic] of France.
It’s amazing what kids can come up with, and even more amazing that I get to be Joy and Summer’s dad. I love them both so much.