Happy Birthday Howard!

The composer Howard Skempton celebrates his 75th Birthday this year. BCMG are celebrating his birthday with concerts, workshops and new resources. This resource is one of them.

In this activity you will explode the melody Happy Birthday and put it back together in your own way to compose a new piece of music.

Many composers borrow or steal snippets of other people's music to use in their own music. One of the most famous of these is Hammered Out by composer Mark Anthony Turnage who borrows from Beyonce's Single Ladies.

Turnage's son Milo loved to dance to the track and so he created this piece. Here it is performed by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain:

Composer Thomas Adés uses Cardiac Arrest by Madness:

Here, Thomas Adés arranges a much older melody Les barricades mystérieuses by Francois Couperain:

Your Turn!

Play or sing the melody of Happy Birthday (see below):

Now look and listen again. Play the melody section by section. What do you notice about the melody: the melodic shapes, rhythm patterns, structure etc. Create a list and mark the different sections/phrases.

Choose a short excerpt of Happy Birthday. Play it again and play around with it by varying it in different ways. You could change the pitches, dynamics, duration, speed, articulation, play it backwards, repeat it etc. Use the downloadable variation ideas to give you ideas. Try it with different bits of the melody and note your favourite ones.

Here are some examples - a dramatic loud version of the first three notes repeated:

or a soft trilling version of the arpeggio falling figure:

Choose some of your favourite ideas from your explorations to use for your final composition. Play around with putting them in different orders to make a longer piece until you find a combination and sequence you like. Think about how you will begin and end. You can repeat ideas as many times as you like. 

You could record your different ideas and use Audacity to organise the different sound clips/variations. 

Please send any music you create to learning@bcmg.org.uk

For a printable version of this resource CLICK HERE