Jonathan Shaw

     Now well into the New Year, this was one of my coursework submissions to a semester 1 module 'Orchestration and Arrangement'. We had a choice of three tasks for the coursework; arranging a pop song from a recording, arranging a musical theatre number from a vocal score, or writing an overture to a musical. This latter option caught my eye the most.

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     The biggest issue was deciding which musical to write an overture to. Ultimately, I concluded on writing an overture to either "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" by Disney, or "The Prince of Egypt" by Dreamworks. Well, from the title you can tell which one I went with, but I would have enjoyed doing either.

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     This coursework was both a transcription task and an arrangement task. Foremost I bought the soundtrack for the film and did some transcriptions of the songs I was planning to include in the overture; “When You Believe”, “Deliver Us”, “Through Heaven’s Eyes”, “All I Ever Wanted” and “The Plagues”. After discovering that many of the songs were in the same key, I was in a spot of trouble as to how I was going to modulate (a requirement for the coursework), which is one of the reasons the overture sounds rather awkward with regard to its modulations and keys.

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     Nevertheless, even though the expected length should not exceed 5 minutes, I exceeded it marginally just to fit in a return to the opening song “When You Believe”. Unfortunately, there is no commentary to go alongside this one, as the coursework only required a musical director’s score to be submitted. Though, there is little to analyze regardless. The overture received 75%.