Song Conversion Sunday:

I have returned my Hal Leonard songbook, "The 90's, to the shelf where it belongs and am now in search of my next song to consider as a therapeutic music experience (TME). I think I'll go to another area of my home (I have music all over the house - it's embarrassing, really) and grab something from that area. Here I go...

So, I rarely walk away from two things - sheet music books and old books. My home is full of books, and many of them are resources that others have given away. The book for this time around is one that my workplace threw away about 15 years ago.

It is a book written by Roberta Wilson Dolana called Musically Speaking. It is described on the cover as "A Complete Program for Speech Improvement," and was published in 1969 by Word Making Productions from Salt Lake City, Utah.

My cat helped me choose the song that I'll be focusing on during this series - it is on page 115. Bella actually chose page 112, but the song is referenced on page 112, so I took a bit of liberty with the song - went to the closest song page.

You can find this book on Amazon, sold by third-party sellers, but the cost is $32 right now. I'm not sure that this book is really worth it. A quick overview of the contents shows that the songs are specifically composed to accomplish speech production goals and are pretty dated. The illustrations are representative of the time period, and I would think that the songs themselves would be fun, but only for very young children. I will have to do quite a bit of musical adaptation in order to use any of these songs with my clientele. That's fine, though, and sort of the point of this particular series of posts.

The song that is on page 115 is called, "Lullaby - Lopalong." I don't believe I can publish it, but I will try to make a video of the music for use on this channel so you can hear the music. Fair use for educational purposes...

The lyrics include repetition of the letter "L" throughout the session. "A lovely little lady" in verse one sings a lullaby to her doll. "A laughing little cowboy" lassos his lamb in verse two. I see problems with the lyrics first of all. So, I may need to make things a bit more "late early 21st century politically and socially responsible" before I can even start to use this song.

The melody is scalar in nature - it goes up and then down regularly. There isn't much to make the song memorable - the melody moves on the beat and has two measures of syncopation. Song itself is 12 measures long (just like most of my songs - short, sweet, and repetitive). The only performance instruction given is "merrily." The accompaniment is very simple (also my type of music) including one note per beat until the end when there are three chords played (IV, V7, I).

My first inclination for this particular song is to change up all the lyrics, add some more syncopation, and flesh out the harmony to make the song a bit more musically interesting. This may detract a bit from the composer's initial intention, but I cannot present this song to my clients as it is. They would not have any interest in it at all. So, I'll probably spend most of my time this series of posts with rewriting words and coming up with ways to make the music itself more.

(More what? All I've got is just more.)

Next week, I'll work on making a restricted video so you can hear the music and some of the ways I think I'll enrich the music. I'll do some experimentation...ugh... on video (the "ugh" is for the video, not for the experimentation).

Random song - make it into a TME - that's the deal.

Happy Sunday.