MILL CREEK — The kids gathered in the gym at Woodside Elementary School on Oct. 27 are excited and fidgety, even though it’s an hour and a half before school starts and it’s still dark outside.
About 80 fourth- and fifth-graders are part of Tricia Hill’s elementary choir. They got a unique opportunity Tuesday to meet the composer of a piece they’ve been working on.
The song is called “Spook Walk,” a Halloween-themed choral arrangement. The composer, Rick Brown, retired to Everett after a career teaching music in schools around the country.
He wrote the music for “Spook Walk,” he explained to the choir, 20 years ago for a Halloween concert in a school in Albuquerque.
Ten years later, while teaching in Portland, he wrote the words for a choral arrangement.
“So it took you about 20 years to make this?” fourth-grader Cade Stephens piped up from the back row.
No, Brown explained with a smile, it took one day each to write the music and lyrics.
“I called it ‘Spook Walk’ because zombies weren’t popular in those days,” Brown said.
Hill then led the students through the song as they’d learned it so far.
They sang: “Spooks are coming out tonight/They can give you such a fright/Mid-night (clump! clump! clump! clump!)/Moon-light (clump! clump! clump! clump!)”
The first challenge was to get the kids to hit the high C-sharp on “moonlight.” Hill makes them go over the line several times until more kids are on the note than off.
The next issue, Brown said, was to slow down the entire piece. The clump-clump sounds, he said, should sound like heavy footsteps of a creature slowly approaching.
The second part of the song broke into rounds, and featured an ear-splitting shriek from fifth-grader Sydney Antonius and an evil cackle from fellow fifth-grader Amandeep Basmal.
Hill said she made the entire choir audition for both of those parts. It was a grueling morning, she said.
Hill then tried to get the kids to sing the “clumps” in a lower register.
“You don’t want to be all beautiful,” she said, striking a formal pose with her hands locked in a recitation clasp.
She and Brown demonstrated a zombie walk with arms out to help the kids better interpret the song.
Brown, while retired from teaching, still composes, self-publishing his scores and uploading recordings to his personal website: dackermusic.com.
He composes for both adults and children, and pieces ranging from stand-alone songs to multipart concertos for orchestras.
“Spook Walk” is an a cappella in this incarnation, and incorporates a “Jaws”-like ostinato, Brown said: the steady up-and-down shift in pitch on the clump-clumps.
But the piece was originally instrumental, and calling to mind the famous score from “Jaws” wasn’t the intent, he said.
“I was just thinking about what beginning trombonists could do,” Brown said.
Brown reached out to Woodside, offering to work with the kids in exchange for the opportunity to record the kids singing.
“He had heard we had a good choir and he asked if we would able to work on his piece,” Hill said.
Brown will record “Spook Walk” with the choir Nov. 3, and Hill said the choir will perform the song along with the rest of its repertoire at the group’s Feb. 25 concert.
She hopes to add the song to the choir’s permanent repertoire for future classes.
The kids, Hill said, are excited about their opportunity to record the piece and later listen to it.
“Who knows, maybe one of the kids will remember their time in the Woodside choir when they’re one day recording in New York?” she said.
Chris Winters: 425-374-4165; cwinters@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @Chris_At_Herald.
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