The Happy Prince Composition Projectis an Arts collaboration built around the beautiful tale of The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde. This project took up the major part of a year but with the talented composing skills of my students from the International Grammar School, Sydney Australia.
“I enjoyed this touching tale and the music that complemented the themes with such subtlety. A great initiative from the composer and the school!” (iTunes Review)
iBooks, Storytelling meets Van Gogh.
The plan was simple, to teach students composition. But within the realm of music education, this means so much more. To unpack their creativity and truly find a collaborative expression that gave everyone a voice, we turned to the story of The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde. Then for the artwork, the stylised swirls and mixtures of light/dark by Vincent Van Gogh became our visual connection. With further brainstorming and improvisation sessions, the students developed themes for each character, developments and ways of expressing each stage of the story (seen below). As an inter-disciplinary project of Theatre, Music and Visual Art, this project would work well in any school and it was created entirely inside the application called iBooks Author.
The final book is a culmination of student group work, instrumental choices, melodic construction, the placement of rhythms as well as co-developed harmonic material. They did an amazing job! I then took the Sibelius scores, ran them through ProTools with East West samples to produce the audio alongside @MrsLauraw’s voice-over.
The real joy was getting to publish their work. Each student felt like an accomplished author & composer. As the book is read and enjoyed by others there will be more to come. Stay tuned to this website and wrightstuffinteractive.com for other iBooks collaborations. This and more can be found in the book free on the iTunes store as The Happy Prince Composition Project
