Getting Around

Instrumentation: four- & five-part chorus with optional piano accompaniment

Composed: 1981-1994

Duration: ca. 5.5 min.

Pages: 22 pp.

Website: library.newmusicusa.org/allenbrings

Like most youngsters who grew up when I did, I used to sing rounds like Row, Row Your Boat and Frére Jacques and thought I had great fun doing it. My studies in counterpoint as a music major in college, of course, gave me a truer appreciation of the skill and imagination required in composing something as apparently simple as a round, in which everybody sings the same melody but begins to sing it at a different time so that, even though one is singing the same melody, one is hearing everybody else simultaneously singing a different part of it. Several years ago, as a gift to a dear friend of mine on his birthday, I decided to set an appropriate text by the 18th century English poet Robert Herrick, whose work I had recently enjoyed setting to music in my A Herrick Suite. During the birthday celebration I played a recording that a very good college chorus had made of the piece with no piano accompaniment. Again several years later I thought it might be fun to write–and to hear sung–three additional rounds so the four together would form a kind of suite. Being something of a punster, I decided to call the suite Getting Around. Still later, to make the music available to singers who might wish a piano accompaniment, I supplied the music with a piano part that I thought would enhance the choral parts without distracting the listeners–or the singers–from what was being sung.

Website:	http://amc.net/allenbrings
Email:	miramusic@aol.com