SKU: HL.35030078

ISBN 9781495007422. UPC: 888680038182. 5x5 inches. By Jill & Michael Gallina.

“Shake It Up With Shakespeare” is part of the “Rise and Shine Series”. This musical for 2-part voices will provide your students with a fun and unforgettable introduction to English literature's most famous writer, William Shakespeare. Shakespeare not only wrote a wide range of plays and sonnets that touch upon all aspects of the “human condition,” he also created words and phrases that are still very much a part of our everyday language. Through the use of an easily memorized rhyming script and a healthy sprinkling of his most famous quotes, this musical serves as the basis for an overview of five well-known Shakespearean plays. The opening song is followed by five musical selections that highlight the essence of the plays featured: two comedies, two tragedies and one history. Along with his ability to expose the darker aspects of human nature, Shakespeare also demonstrated a gift for highlighting the humorous side of everyday life. The six original songs written for this musical are more reflective of the latter perspective of his works. The Enhanced Teacher Edition includes piano/vocal arrangements, rhyming program script as well as choreography, prop, staging and performance suggestions. The enclosed CD-ROM offers reproducible singer and speaking parts. A performance/accompaniment CD is available separately or in a kit with the enhanced Teacher edition. Suggested for Grades 2-5. Performance Time: 20 minutes.

SKU: PR.114423630

ISBN 9781491136447. UPC: 680160689187. Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road.

Whitman’s epic “Song of the Open Road” is an inspiring metaphor encouraging us to find and explore our own paths, free of anchors or artificial boundaries. Dorff uses 5 brief passages from the poem as movement titles, setting the stage for a suite of sometimes-edgy soliloquies in which the music (and the flutist) explores these open roads.

SKU: HL.277282

UPC: 840126915006. 6.75x10.5 inches.

Program note:

Looking Up is a piece for large chorus and orchestra, and is in three sections, played without pause. In the 16th century, a variety of psalters in meter were printed in England, with the idea of making psalm-singing something that could happen easily at home, with the rhyming meter being an aid to memorization. These translations are wonderful exercises in brevity and sometimes clumsy rhymemaking, and were usually prefaced by a lengthy explanation as to their merits; the title of one of the first such volumes in English is: The Psalter of Dauid newely translated into Englysh metre in such sort that it maye the more decently, and wyth more delyte of the mynde, be reade and songe of al men. I thought it would be appropriate to set one of these introductions, and the first section of Looking Up sets the preface to Thomas Ravenscroft's psalter (1621), in which he writes: “The singing of Psalmes (assay the Doctors) comforteth the sorrowfull, pacifieth the angry, strengtheneth the weake, humbleth the proud, gladdeth the humble, stirres up the slow, reconcileth enemies, lifteth up the heart to heavenly things, and uniteth the Creature to his Creator.”

It begins meditatively, but eventually grows agitated and fervent, with a vision of the “quire of Angels and Saints” “redoubling anddescanting” - an ecstatic and terrifying vision of the skies opening up. Ravenscroft then encourages the use of instrumental musicfor worship, at which point, a long, acrobatic orchestral interlude with jagged edges antagonizes the choir, who sing a kind of private, anxious meditation on two pitches.

One of the most delicious biblical texts is an Apocryphal prayer known as the Benedicite or the Prayer of the Three Children (the same who were rescued by an angel after King Nebuchadnezzar tried to have them burnt in an oven for not bowing to his image). The text is repetitive, obsessive, and a gift to composers - each line is an invocation of an element of the natural world, followed by the phrase, “blesse ye the Lord, praise him & magnify him for ever.” In Looking Up, the setting begins with three solo voices, and then grows to include the whole choir, itemizing the whole of creation. The idea that these boys are spared from the furnace and then five minutes later are saying, “O ye the fire and warming heate, blesse ye the Lord...” has always felt very loaded to me, and the orchestra plays with this conflict between joyful praise and a more terrible (in the 16th-century sense) awefor the divine.

The text for the third, and shortest, section is taken from Christopher Smart's (1722-1771) A Song to David, purportedly written during his confinement in a mental asylum. This ode to King David points out how David, as the author of some of the Psalms, observes the whole world from the “clustering spheres” to the “nosegay in the vale.&rdquo.