During the next two weeks, the John Glenn Middle School bands will perform the world premiere of an originally composed musical score.
Commissioning of the song “Starlight Fantasy” by composer Darryl Johnson II was four years in the making. Discussions between Johnson and Nicole O’Toole, Bedford Public Schools K-12 Program Director of Performing Arts and conductor of the sixth-grade band, began in 2019 but were delayed due to the pandemic.
Johnson is a composer who for the past dozen years has offered “The Composition Experience,” a program designed to (as Johnson’s website describes) “provide opportunities for academic ensembles to gain experience with a living composer and interact directly with the mechanics of music composition.”
That is to say, Johnson works on-site with bands and orchestras, conducting songs he has written, commissioning songs to meet the needs or requests of bands (on a recent school visit to the Midwest, he received a request for a potential piece with an alphorn part – that big tube instrument from the Ricola commercials) as well as talking about the fundamentals of composition and building connections. On visits and through his music, he builds connections with students and teachers, connections between students and music, makes kids think and laugh, and “hopefully give the kids a little more understanding about themselves and the role music plays in our lives.”
O’Toole said meeting a real conductor face-to-face and hearing feedback on a composer’s interpretation of the music is “such a culminating experience” for the student musicians. Jim Felker, director of the Bedford High School and seventh and eighth grade band ensembles, who with O’Toole accompanied Johnson through the visits with students, said a visit from a real-life conductor “humanizes the musical experience allowing kids to see deeper.” O’Toole remarked, “How exciting is that?”
Kiaan Shah, a student percussionist in the sixth-grade JGMS band, thought it was pretty exciting. “I thought that it was super cool that we were the first band to play ‘Starlight Fantasy,’ and we even got to meet Darryl Johnson II in person!”
After Johnson reached out to O’Toole to promote “The Composition Experience,” O’Toole presented it to Bedford’s Patrons of Music Students (POMS), a non-profit volunteer group that supports Bedford school music programs and faculty and helps arrange extracurricular lessons. POMS President Christine Anderson said the board was unanimous in not only supporting the experience, but upgrading the package O’Toole originally presented.
“This is the exact type of music education enrichment experience POMS wants to support,” Anderson said.
POMS supported the commissioning of a new song (“Starlight Fantasy”), the purchase of music for three additional scores and parts from Johnson’s catalog (“March Avenal,” “The Rescue,” and “Aluminum Sharks”) that the JGMS and BHS bands have been playing and performing this spring, as well as a two-day visit across five sections of bands at BHS and JGMS.
Johnson has composed nearly 50 pieces, primarily for middle and high-school-level band and orchestra ensembles, and has traveled across 40 U.S. States and three countries in hundreds of ensemble visits.
When he’s not promoting, traveling, composing, or working on a supplemental income (which has ranged from musical transcriptionist to political advocacy to academic interviewing), Johnson is a husband and also a father to two toddlers in the Los Angeles area.
Johnson grew up in a non-musical family in Southern California, first learning piano, and then picking up the trombone as his primary instrument in high school and college before learning some clarinet, flute, and more recently percussion.
He listens to a range of music, but is drawn to and finds inspiration in the pop genre. He feels that composing 21st-century band and orchestra music with some pop undertones (think of the band AJR) can help students connect and engage with what they are playing.
For Johnson, building “synergistic” relationships between the composer and students and students to music is the most fulfilling part of his role.
“Connecting with students, being able to light a spark, and uncover parts of the musical process and expose fundamentals” is the biggest part of Johnson’s passion as a composer.
Over the two days visiting Bedford students, Johnson, who never worked as a classroom teacher himself, did connect, both directly and through his music.
Johnson worked through “March Avenal” with the nearly 60 students in the sixth-grade band room on Friday. He composed this particular song with community bands in mind, offering many different parts. This worked well for Shah and the dozen percussionists “confidently playing” parts for toms, cymbal, bass drum, snares, tambourine, triangle, chimes, and bells.
As the band played through different sections of the music, Johnson stopped and started the musicians, explained and coached them on expressing parts of the music with “gusto” and “turning corners” from “soft and dramatic” to the “loud and chaotic” sections.
The students were tasked to play a soft section as though they were “tippy-toeing through a house, creeping along the floors so no one hears you.” After a few attempts to make adjustments, Johnson was impressed that the students, most in their first or second year of playing an instrument, “pulled it off” so well, putting prideful smiles on the young musicians’ faces.
Johnson worked through a loud and chaotic section with a portion of the wind instruments, leaving the percussion, saxophones, and trumpets to listen to the evolution as flutes, clarinets, oboes, and trombones trying to represent the music to the conductor’s intention of “falling down stairs.” After a few iterations, with toes tapping around the room as the upbeat section of music came together, some percussionists were full body dancing along, and one whispered “vibe” to his buddy (“vibe,” translated for those not around middle schoolers, is akin to a good feeling – “a good vibration.”)
In the high school band room, amidst senior students wearing togas in their last week of school, O’Toole filling in to play for missing instruments, and a glowing BHS Principal Heather Galante stopping by to observe, Johnson started by running through one of his most popular songs – “Aluminum Sharks,” a piece the BHS band played in concert the prior week. A trumpet player received praise for “making the range seem effortless,” a tambourine received props for her “interpretation,” and the brass section worked on adding “bounce” at the start of the piece.
The students peppered Johnson with questions: “How long does it take for him to compose a song?” About 100-110 hours, most of which is manually formatting and adding notation such as when to play pianissimo or mezzo forte; “Jaws” was not intentionally an inspiration for one section of “Aluminum Sharks;” A song’s copyright is often printed a couple of years ahead of when a new song is distributed because of tweaking that may happen from teacher feedback. After these answers, Johnson broke down the process of composing for the teenagers.
Johnson explained that “most of writing music isn’t complicated.” He demonstrated that concept starting with a music theory lesson on triads. Triads are a set of three complimentary notes that make a chord. The 39-year-old sat at the classroom piano to explain (by playing) how the same limited group of notes can be combined and played in different ways to give the mood of a song, from happy to contemplative to angry to flowing.
“Each chord is a letter, and put together the letters become musical words.”
The composer then explained that music is made of three elements: melody, harmony, and rhythm. Composers can choose to start developing a song with any one of the three, but harmony is almost always “the trickiest.”
Opening up music composition software on his laptop connected to the classroom TV screen, Johnson and the students filled in lines of music with notes – first, just using math and semi-randomly choosing a combination of notes (sixteenth, eighth, quarter, half, or whole note) needed to fill in a four-count measure, working through one measure at a time. The group then assigned the notes a pitch nearly randomly within a limited selection of triad chords to create harmony.
Johnson explained that there are typically only four or five things going on at one time during a song, so that’s generally the number of staffs he starts with, and what the class worked on.
In one BHS band section, the group had time to write five measures of melody, harmony, and rhythm, assign instruments to the parts, and “publish” the short song. Johnson determines which parts play what line when composing, in part, by a process of elimination after the notes are written (some instruments can only play a high or low range), and then factors in the mood of a song. For example, whether he wants to convey a “wispy, or a sharp, or a strident” feel might determine if a French horn versus a trumpet is assigned to carry a mid-staff melody.
After the class assigned the notes, values, and parts, and then titled the piece “The Wilted Kilometer,” Johnson showed how he formats music for publication. He also offered a little life advice: “Always save your work often so you aren’t crying in a closet at the end of the day.”
The group then had time to play the piece together.
Johnson knows that most kids during his school visits are not going to follow the professional music path, but hopes his visits give a little more understanding about life and the role music plays in our lives. “We relax to music, we drive our cars to music, we get married to music, and die to music. We use music to celebrate and soothe, it’s all around us.”
For Johnson, music comes naturally. Throughout the two days in Bedford, he repeated the sentiment, “If you were meant to do something, it’s just in you and part of who you are. It just comes out of you.” He encouraged students to find the thing that they are meant to do and find fulfillment in, whether it be music or something else.
For Anderson and the POMS board, “exposing [the students] to Mr. Johnson is a special opportunity which will open up different experiences to them.”
The Bedford orchestral students, led by Brianna Creamer, were offered a similar opportunity this spring with commissioned pieces by composer Jason Coleman, supported by POMS and a Bedford Cultural Council Grant.
The sixth grade band continued their special musical opportunity with a soft-release of “Starlight Fantasy” when they hosted a Lexington and a California middle school band for pizza and to play with and for each other after school on Friday.
Sophomore percussionist Carinna Dogan-West may not know if music is what she is meant to do in life, but seems to be meeting Johnson’s, POMS’, and the BPS music department’s goal for students. Dogan-West said after the visit, “I want to play music for as long as it brings me joy and connections with others. Music is another language that unites people in ways words cannot.”
Faith Holland, a sixth-grade flutist, said, “I really enjoyed the recent visit of composer Darryl Johnson II. It was special and exciting meeting him and performing his song, ‘Starlight Fantasy,’ which was written specifically for the John Glenn Middle School Band.”
The JGMS sixth grade band will debut “Starlight Fantasy” at their spring concert at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, May 29 in the JGMS Auditorium. The JGMS seventh/eighth grade band will play the song at their spring concert at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, June 5 in the BHS Auditorium.
Learn more about Darryl Johnson II at his website: https://www.darryl2.com/.
Learn more about and donate to POMS at https://www.bedfordpoms.org/.
Loading ...
