Today’s challenge comes to us once again via Charlie from composerquest.com, who asks us this time to make a piece of music based on a fortune cookie. It took some doing, but the fortune cookie that I eventually found said this:

Which I translate thusly:

No extraordinary wishes, only some choice words

No sweet talk, only one concern for you

My eyes see only you! Dearest, merry Christmas to you.

After I had my text, I felt it necessary to give my singer her part right away, so that she could start preparing as quickly as possible. That would still allow me to continue to edit the music, just as long as I didn’t make any further changes to the vocal part after I sent those pages out. When my singer came in to record I played back the early version of the track that I had sent to her and made sure to put her in a pair of clamshells. With the vocal recording isolated like that, I was then free to mix it in with the final draft of the accompaniment.

The melody is doubled in the erhu to help the singer pick up the part quickly and without much hand-holding on my part. I considered removing the erhu for the final draft, but decided to leave it in place to reinforce the several bent tones that give the line its Asian character.

Allow me to point out a few idiosyncrasies in the score that may be unfamiliar to those of you in the Western world. Above the vocal line you’ll notice a row of numbers corresponding to the scale degrees of the notes in relation to the relative major.

This is how folk music is commonly printed in this part of the world, and in fact you can also get songbooks printed in this shorthand, with numbers and characters but no staff. When I learned the bamboo flute, for example, the textbook was written exclusively in this notation, with a few additional markings to show rhythm. I asked my singer and she said that she used this line of numbers to help her translate my song into solfege in order to learn how to sing it. After she was finished she left her score behind and I was intrigued by her pencil markings.

The large markings above the staff are breath marks. The smaller ones below the staff indicate the duration of the long notes – two chevrons for a half note, three for a full measure and so on.

Here’s the finished product, then. As always you can find this track on soundcloud.com.