The Squirrel

Available from Cypress Choral Music!

A playful piece for young beginner choristers. This piece is designed to present plenty of learning opportunities to develop musicianship in young artists.

The Squirrel was commissioned as a gift to Ottawa conductor/educator Leslie Bricker, to honour the occasion of her retirement from the Cantiamo Choirs of Ottawa. Having worked with Leslie in many different capacities over the years when I lived in Ottawa, I had the joy of seeing firsthand her passion, talent, and craft for teaching music and the arts to young people. Inspired by this, I aimed to set this text in a way that would offer a wide variety of fun teaching opportunities, and so you’ll find in this piece opportunities to explore many different musical elements, including word-painting, arpeggios, solfège, dynamic contrasts, different articulations, places to work on tall vowels (including right on the word “tall!”), spoken text, extended vocal techniques (squirrel sounds!), structural contrasts, part singing, watching the conductor, modulation, and reharmonization. My hope is that conductors and singers alike will have a lot of fun with this piece and will enjoy learning about music and choral technique from singing it. I absolutely encourage adding the use of movement and props to this for performance