70 More Variations on "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"

The popularity of my piano album The Young Person’s Guide to Composition: Variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” inspired me to compile a second volume of variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, this time from composers around the world. My international call for scores has brought forth an enthusiastic response from composers old and young, professional and amateur, experimental and conservative, and the pieces they have submitted, presented here for your enjoyment, are delightfully diverse.

I would like to thank my good friend, composer and pianist Michael Kieran Harvey, who volunteered several days of his time to record them all. His talent for bringing manuscripts to life is second to none. Enjoy!

In the pursuit of some misguided personal Parnassus, I used to torture audiences with excruciatingly long performances of solo piano playing. Having endured a particularly longwinded recital I gave of a renowned cycle of sacred French pianistic pomposity, a beloved family member was able to reduce her impressions of the work to: “You know, it reminds me of Three Blind Mice teeheehee”. She was absolutely right; and cured me of any pretensions that music could ever have any transcendent, “spiritual” meaning or significance, apart from pandering to the prosaic and pitiful human yearning for nostalgia and connection in a world gone stark raving bonkers.

Like “Three Blind Mice”, “TTLS” is another famous popular melody which has fascinated and irritated composers through the ages. In this wonderful collection Julian Yu has assembled a staggeringly diverse cornucopia of stylistic arrangements of the tune. The unpretentious nature of the nursery rhyme belies some pretty surprising musical outcomes.

In preparing the CD of the book I can attest to the unique challenges each of the pieces presented to my ageing brain and fingers, and to the very strong candidacy the melody has for “Greatest Earworm Of All Time” status. The compositional treatments range from the supreme virtuosity of those by Gyger, Orlovich and Canfield to the humorousness of Yu, Johnson, and Kučinskas; from the familiar quotidian inflections of Jia Jie Chen, Quaife and Pan Minya, to the indigenously-influenced Hu Haipeng, Lin Tong, Roitershtein and Triantafyllou; from the sheer beauty of Lyons, Zhang Yanpeng and Siek, to the out-and-out weirdness of Tang, Dillon and Clarence Zhang.

The absurdity of the challenge to each composer from every part of the globe to focus their talents on such a restricted common task is fascinating – the results range from the frivolous to the frenetic, the fragile to the fragrant, the popular to the profound. Every composer has responded with good humour and imagination … I don’t know if life gets much better than this.

This collection can be dipped into at random, used as teaching aids, radio fillers for nervous public broadcasters, encores for professional pianists bored with their traditional repertoire but too timid to play anything modern, and young wunderkinds looking for a new book to devour. But I have genuine concerns about the long-term health effects of playing it through in one sitting …