My Father’s Dragon - Part One: Meet the Cat!

Feeling grateful for cooler weather this week! Even when you can’t see the mountain, there are still mountains of clouds to enjoy!

Welcome to the official part one of this miniseries, covering the composition process of My Father’s Dragon! If you’re just popping in now, you can read the introduction for the series at the link here for more background.

Just want to listen? Click here! I will be starting a playlist of the movements from this work on my Soundcloud with new tracks added for each new post. I’m working on getting a better microphone, so I thank you for your patience as I develop my equipment along with this project! In the meantime, you can read the full text for this section in the score excerpts below.

If you have any questions about terms used in this post, about the process, the text, or anything else from the series, leave a comment down below and I’ll be happy to answer you! Thank you so much for sharing this experience with me—I hope you enjoy this series!

Some Quick Notes on the Text

The original book also includes some really beautiful illustrations by Ruth Christian Gannett.

Finding the Text

Flutist Emlyn Johnson first introduced me to the story of My Father’s Dragon when we were discussing material for her and her partner, cellist Daniel Ketter, to use for their tuo duo ensemble. Emlyn and Dan have done some really wonderful work for composers through both their American Wild Ensemble and their New Music Listening Club, and I was ecstatic to have the chance to work with them. Emlyn has been extremely passionate about curating more music based on children’s stories (they’ve just recently complete a great collaboration with composer Daniel Pesca based on a children’s book by Leo Lionni), and this story seemed to be the perfect fit.

The original children’s book by Ruth Stiles Gannett is rather substantial—over 80 pages long, divided into 10 chapters—but every page is packed with personality, wit, colorful descriptions, and oodles of charm.

The Story

The basic outline of the story is as follows: Elmer Elevator (the narrator’s father) meets an old alley cat, but Elmer’s mother throws the cat out when Elmer tries to take it home. Elmer and the cat go for a walk together and talk about how Elmer wants to fly, so the cat tells him about a place called Wild Island—the cat had met a baby dragon there. The baby dragon is being kept hostage by the animals on the island to ferry them across the river. The cat assures Elmer that if he rescues the dragon, the dragon would fly him anywhere. Elmer packs in secret and runs away to Wild Island. The cat warned Elmer that the animals would try and eat him if they found he was there, so Elmer tries to sneak through the island to where the dragon is being kept. Along the way he runs into all kinds of trouble, crossing paths with tigers, a rhino, a lion, a gorilla, crocodiles, and more. Through each interaction, Elmer ends up using things he packed in his knapsack to avoid being eaten—often helping the animals he encounters. Just as he reaches the dragon, all of the animals from Wild Island have finally found him and try to catch him before he can run off with the dragon—but Elmer successfully frees the dragon and escapes.

Adapting the Text

To all the boar and mouse fans, I understand if you’re fur-ious they were cut, but I hope you can forgive me and don’t get too boared without them!

The text was adapted and reduced as I composed, so throughout the series I’ll be talking about how I came to certain decisions and how I worked around some of the wordier sections of the story. In general, I tried to stay as true to the story as I could, but certain elements had to be cut out for time. The biggest edits occurred in Elmer’s travel to Wild Island (which I reduced to a few sentences) and the elimination of the boar and mouse characters from Wild Island. It was a difficult decision to cut them out, but ultimately they really weren’t needed for this version of the story. Essentially the mouse and boar start following in Elmer’s wake and alert the animals that there is an “invasion”—eventually leading them to the dragon—but there was a more efficient way to get the animals there, and it significantly cut down on text to not have them included. The mouse character was charming, and consistently flipped beginnings of words around (for example “Queer, queer, what a dear little dock! I mean—dear, dear, what a queer little rock!"), but it just couldn’t be squeezed in.

With all that out of the way, let’s dive into the music!

Chapter One: My Father Meets the Cat

Chapter Summary

In the opening chapter, Elmer meets an old alley cat and takes her home. His mom is furious and kicks the cat out, but Elmer sneaks out to meet the cat. They go for a walk, and Elmer reveals to the cat that it is his greatest wish to fly. The cat tells Elmer he might know of a way, and begins to tell him about traveling to Wild Island.

Text

I found this first chapter’s ending a bit strange, as it moves to chapter 2 in the middle of what the cat was saying. For this movement, I focused only on their meeting and getting kicked out, moving the discussion of flight into the next movement. Otherwise, for this first movement, the text is more or less exactly how it appears in the story.

In a live performance, I would expect the reading of the text to ebb and flow a bit with the performers—so while it may not always line up exactly, there are spots with fermatas, natural breaths, or other fluctuations where the text and musicians can realign at key points. One narrator may go through the text rather quickly with lots of energy, where another might want to take more time. It’s sometimes hard to imagine with just the MIDI if there’s really enough time for everything, but by building in these little safety nets it helps to give the performers both flexibility and confidence!

Track

As I mentioned above, I’ve decided to share the MIDI with my own (rough) narration of the piece! I’m still working on getting a new microphone, so thank you for your patience!

How to Start?

Sometimes—when faced with a larger project—I will write some placeholder music. It helps me to begin, and to get the pressure of starting such a big project out the way. I’ll often change the music later as I get further into the piece (or even eliminate the section altogether), but every once in awhile the placeholder music ends up being the perfect thing to start the work—and that was the case here! I loved the big grace notes in the flute punctuated by the cello as a way to “wake-up” the listener, coming down in energy after that for a few short bars. The playful flutter-tongue run in the flute, culminating in a low purr helps to set up what will follow immediately in Chapter One. It also gives the flute some room to crescendo back up to a dramatic hold in measure 4, before falling in the opposite direction from the opening to start the next movement. The cello’s use of pizzicato here is grounding, yet playful—working it’s way down from a mid-register F to the warm, resonant open G at the end of the introduction. The result is a short, but effective opening that sets up the next movement and doesn’t waste time in starting the story ahead: we have a long way to go!

Composing The Cat

Cello and flute proved to be a surprisingly useful combination to depict an old cat! Between the flute’s flutter tongue texture mimicking purrs and the cello’s pizzicato slides imitating meows, it was easy to create a shorthand for this character. One nice thing about this texture also, is that I realized it would be very easy to recall later on in the story whenever Elmer is remembering something the cat told him.

The melody itself here is playful, but a bit a morose. The pizzicato sitting higher up in the cello’s range creates a nice, dry texture (almost like paw prints). The flute, in the same register, is quiet and rather warm; this adds resonance to the overall sound of the cat, while allowing the flute to break away from the texture to express Elmer’s actions or feelings. The result is a texture clear and unique to the cat that can remain in dialogue with other music!

Mood Swings

The whole movement is only about 1’30” long, so there was a lot of changes in mood to cover in a rather short time. Switching from the playful histrionics of the alley cat to the tempest of frustration in Elmer’s mom gave me an opportunity to change the texture rather dramatically. From playful counterpoint, the texture changes with a snap (literally! and with a jet whistle sound), the flute and cello now furiously fluttering and tremolo-ing in eighth notes—sometimes moving in the same direction, sometimes in opposing directions—working their way towards a dramatic forte-piano hold.

This helps to set up the histrionic sorrow in measure 28, which I chose as a mood here because (in my own experience growing up with cats), every offense to a cat is a capital one.

Dramatic pitch bends in both the flute and cello mournfully sound their displeasure; the cello returns to the tremolo texture briefly at the mention of the mother, and the quips out another disgusted jet whistle as the movement draws to a close. The flute returning to a soft purr before meeting back up with the cello, much like Elmer and the cat.

Setting Up the Next Movement

One advantage to the end of this movement is the hold acts as both a resting point and a leaping-off point for the next movement. Here the flute and cello both end on a low C, and it sounds a bit final. However, the next movement starts in the key of F, so it recontextualizes the “C” as feeling like a lead-in (since C is the dominant to F’s tonic) when the movements are played sequentially. Since the first movement already moves through a variety of moods—some of which are transitioned to with a hold—a sudden change to the quicker, lighter feeling of the next movement is a bit surprising, but not jarring. This is also aided by the fact the next movement starts with the cello sounding a pizzicato while the flute starts in a lower register—a similar texture to the beginning of the first movement. All of these elements help create a convincing tie to the next movement without being too heavy-handed.

Up Next: Chapter 2

Next week, I’ll dive into Chapter 2, which was split into two different parts. While movement 1 was pretty straight-forward in terms of setting text along with the music in a linear way, music for Chapter 2 makes use of several different combinations of vamps, the introduction of material that will be used throughout the rest of the piece, and some really fun sounds in the flute!

Since you made it this far, here’s a picture of my mom’s cat, Snoop! Thanks for reading - and happy music-making!!