Second Sunday Workshop Recap: A Song for a Forest Fairy

“Oh, that’s Daisy Rae floating on a cloud, and she meets a friend, and who’s the friend?” Odd and fantastical images and sentences flowed freely in our January Second Sundays workshop, where we combined snippets from Shostakovich and Saint-Saens with original motifs to create the idiosyncratic theme song of a day in the life of a forest fairy with a southern drawl. Our guest Haleigh Overseth’s vibrant imagination has produced a bevy of multimedia material including podcasts, paintings, and a novel, all featuring vivid original fantasy settings and characters. After making contact with Haleigh, we decided to base our January workshop on writing music inspired by one such character, the bubbly fairy Daisy Rae. 

The idea for this workshop’s theme began with an email exchange between the New Harmony Line Team and Haleigh, where she shared some of her musical stylistic inspirations for her character Daisy Rae the fairy. Specifically, she named Waltz No. 2 by Shostakovich and Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saens. The Hyperscore team then prepared some iconic excerpts from these pieces as Melody Windows in Hyperscore. The plan was to collaboratively rearrange these motives in the Sketch Window to create a brand-new piece that evoked Daisy Rae’s idiosyncrasies.

This workshop ended up being a vision of collaborative storytelling through a back and forth communicative process of composition, interpretation, and translation. Haleigh and frequent Hyperscore collaborator Derek Thorn provided compositional ideas for Peter to translate into Hyperscore – flexing and morphing the motives from Shostakovich and Saint-Saens into exciting new configurations. 

Watch the resulting composition below, and join us for the next Second Sundays workshop to share your ideas!