In August, I decided to partake in the Composer Quest Olympics Challenge. For Awhile now, I have been listening to Charlie McCarron’s insightful podcast called Composer Quest, while I build printers as a way to educate myself while working a day job . Charlie sometimes releases challenges to his listeners to create projects that he calls Composer Quests. Until now, I had been too intimidated to submit anything . Sadly, he is wrapping up the podcast, but as a last hurrah (in addition to his World Tour), he has devised this multi challenge Composer Quest inspired by the Olympics and Bryan Schumann’s thing a week challenge. I chose to push myself to partake in all of the challenges in part because it is the last one (and thus my last chance to try it in real time), because I am trying to break my introverted habits of finding every excuse to not share my music with strangers (and avert the anxiety that comes with it) and as a chance to get to know/ collaborate with fellow composers (and again get over some anxiety that comes with talking to strangers).
The first challenge was to pick a national anthem and arrange it in any way you choose.
After hours of listening to find the right one for me, I settled on Nepal’s National Anthem,”Sayaun Thunga Phool Ka” (Made of Hundreds of Flowers).
It is one of the more recently composed National anthems and, according to my Fiance, it has a bit of a Pirate flair to the melody. I chose it in part because I liked the melody and because I find the country’s history intriguing.
The Instrumentation I chose is Flute, Trombone and Piano. I wanted to make it playable by real people and to represent the diversity of people that live in Nepal by picking an instrument from each family.
Arranging this anthem inspired me to do bit of research on Nepal, so here I will leave you with a link to this fun Infograpic with a few interesting facts about the country.
Also, Charlie has graciously organized all of the participant’s pieces into free downloadable albums. I encourage you to listen to all of the compositions created for this event (not jut mine). You can listen to and download the first album here.