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Children's Music
In the 1990s, I collaborated with author/educator Carol Cummings, an educator who has developed teaching programs with the University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University, and who travels around the globe working with teachers and students alike. She has written a series of books focusing on social/emotional and reading skills, and since she writes the books in verse, she thought it would enhance the impact of the texts to set them to music.
Each book had not only its own theme but its own set of characters and settings, so I had to develop works more like a radio plays than songs. And since none of the books had middle-aged white men for characters, I had to think of ways to sound like owls, kitties, elephants, possums, frogs, and even a young black girl who is a tattle-tale. In addition, each book had several different sections that needed different sounds, but the whole work had to be a continuous piece lasting sometimes 10 or 12 minutes, a challenge for a writer and musician and a tremendous engineering feat to mix into a coherent whole.
More information about this series of books and their author is available at cummings11.home.mindspring.com. To find out more about the individual books, click a title at left. Each book has a sound clip included; it may take a few moments for the mp3 to load.