pedagogical songs by Andrea La Rose

At some point, I decided there weren't enough easy songs.

I was trying to incorporate what (little) I knew about various music pedagogies, leaning heavily on Kodaly, into a beginner book on flute. I started going through every folk and children's song I could get my hands on, analyzing them for their melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic ingredients. There were so few songs that just had do, re, and mi and only used the simplest of rhythms. "Merrily We Roll Along" — that was about it.

Who was going to fix this problem? I could either continue to scour the world for songs or start writing them myself. Option B seemed a lot easier, until I started mapping out a plan of what kinds of songs to write, what kinds of musical materials to use, and what order I should add new concepts and materials. Suddenly, I was looking at writing an unwieldy amount of songs. Better to start and leave it unfinished, than to be overwhelmed by the task. The flute book was abandoned and the songwriting continued.

I’ve never considered myself a songwriter. I love word play, yet I find coming up with lyrics tedious and arduous. Everything is stupid. Most classical composers use other people’s words, for better or worse. Writing your own texts to set is frowned upon. Get a word expert (e.g., a poet) to do that for you. While you can compose a piece and a choreographer will make up a dance for it, you can’t compose a piece and then get a poet to write words to it. Not in the classical universe. About a year or so before I embarked on this project, I got a little gig fluting for an indie-pop gentleman to workshop some songs. Imagine my surprise, then, during rehearsal just as we are going into the third verse, the guy stops us and mutters something about not having finished writing the lyrics for that yet. Wait a minute. You mean, you can write the music first and then put lyrics to it? Imagine how stupid I feel for not coming up with this myself. Ah, the cages we build for ourselves…

Over the years, I have collected a slew of mostly tiny instruments. In my mind, there was always a project on the backburner involving those instruments. Eventually, I connected that imaginary project with this real one. It was time to start the home recording studio, with whatever equipment and skills I had at my disposal (in both cases, paltry). I entered my list of instruments into a randomizer and then simply picked the next 3-5 instruments to accompany the song, until I got sick of doing that.

My music is often about a lack of clarity and how performers and listeners make decisions about what they hear. When it's not about that, it's about clapping.

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