Critters & Creatures: Title Track Back Story

Critters and Creatures started out as a creepy little song that I sang quietly into my phone after I quickly walked under and away from what seemed like a swarm of bugs, flitting and fluttering around the lamp outside my house during the summer of 2019.

The critters... The creatures...

They spook me sometimes

They're creeping, they're crawling...

They're jumping, and they're flying...

They're lurking, they're sprawling...

Day by day, they're multiplying!

They squint their tiny eyes

And carry their disguise

They stop, and they stare

They drift down to my hair

Their spirits all align

And at the same time

I freeze, and I see

They're just like me.

I took that recording and went to the piano. I cut out pieces to use and also ended up throwing out entire sections. I wrote such a Rachmaninoff-esque main melody from the notes (almost) that I sang to the words "Day by day, they're multiplying." I added in heavy, pulsing octaves slammed in the left hand bass along with continuously growing harmonies in the right hand, which starts in the bass and eventually climbs up to treble.

The second melody maybe came from the creepy little song, at least loosely inspired. It took on a life of its own though and I just followed it. Some of the harmonic motion, particularly the Gb - Bbm/Db - CbM7, seemed to come out of nowhere, but hit so perfectly and so dramatically!

The entire piece, except the last few notes, is in Eb minor (6 flats). This was new for me—I like to write in Eb major (only 3 flats, my favorite key). It was a challenge to wrap my brain around how, as I was notating it, the VI chord was Cb and not B.

I played around with a new structure, too:

Intro

Transition 1

Main Melody (played many times, adding layers)

Melody 2

Transition 2

Main Melody

Melody 2 (an octave down)

Transition 2 (repeated two octaves up, end)

At some point I knew I wanted it to end in Eb major with a picardy third, so I put a 4-suspension in the "Transition 2" section to prepare the listener for the G♮ in the end.

Critters and Creatures has become a magnum opus of sorts for me now. Time will tell if I ever write a piece that's more dynamic and/or memorable. But for now it's probably my favorite piece of music I've written, not only because of the dynamics and catchiness, but also because it's quite technically challenging. I really had to practice a LOT to get it to the performance level that it's at now. The hardest part is definitely where I play a five-note chord which starts off a triplet and lands in a 9th and immediately jumps up an octave!!

I started this piece, as I mentioned earlier, in the summer of 2019. It became the last original composition of mine that my mom heard before she passed away in February of 2020. She loved the second melody—I remember hearing her sing it around the house, and of course she told me many times how she really liked it.

I had ideas about how the piece would end, but I didn't know exactly what the final structure would be, and I ended up shelving the near-complete piece for two years...

It wasn't until I met a beautiful man that I ended up dating for six months, that I decided to pick it up again and put in the work to finish the piece, and then practice it obsessively so I could play it for him, last November. I had the idea of writing an entire insect suite shortly after I started writing C&C, but the ideas were just left in a note in my phone... The ending of the little poem is "They're just like me", so I ended it with the picardy third in Eb major, to show the lift in perspective, and then it would transition into the next buggy piece... But after shelving C&C, I also soon forgot about the entire insect suite idea, too...

That is, until I told the idea to the aforementioned man, who really loves bugs! I vividly remember that day I texted him about the rough ideas I had. He got sooo excited that he actually went outside, during work, to his car, so he could record a few voice memos to me. It was equal parts adorable/charming and encouraging. I saved one of the voice memos by emailing it to myself:

"The whole concept of you realizing that hey, these insects are just like me... That full-circle realization is a nice little bow to wrap things up with. I think that's very nice and reflective of how extremely diverse and evolutionarily successful insects are. They occupy pretty much every nook and cranny of this planet. And they have lasted a lot longer from a geological time scale, compared to how long I think humans will last on this planet. They don't consume resources like us. Yeah, it's true that we have our technology and we're super fancy, and bugs are just dumb and ugly and nasty, and we like to squish 'em and stuff. But when you think about how many food webs that insects form the basis of on our planet... They're nature's trail mix, and they are these little robots that push our ecology, and push our planet forward. There are so many examples... So many animals are insectivores, and insects are plentiful, and they form the basis of food webs. Not only that—there are so many insects that are incredible pollinators that just spread plant life all across the globe. They just perpetuate life, and they represent so much about the success of life on Earth. I think it's really amazing that you were able to be inspired by that, and not only see bugs as these nasty critters that need to die. Because that is not what they should be looked at like, and it's always wonderful when people can translate that into art and music, and recognize that in different ways."

Critters and Creatures has a peculiar chord progression that's basically responsible for the crunchiness and unsettling nature—at least in the Main Melody (and parts of the Intro and Transition 1).

I learned about tritone substitution in my jazz piano/theory private lessons in high school, and I've applied the concept now to two of my own compositions. I'm particularly proud of that because when I first looked at the handout that my teacher gave me, I didn't know what in the world it was about.

The bass notes in the Main Melody of Critters and Creatures are Eb - E - Bb (Eb minor - E7 - Bb7). The two chords after Eb are a tritone apart, and their 3rds and 7ths are flipped around.

A bass line that moves up a half step, and then up a tritone is very odd indeed! And then when you add flat 9s in there... We have entered CRUNCH CITY!! Melody 2 is so much more beautiful and easy on the ears, a wonderful contrast to the Main Melody.

Critters and Creatures is in Eb minor, ends with a picardy 3rd (G natural), and the rest of the pieces are in Eb major—my favorite key! Hence the ambiguity of the whole suite's title that it's simply "in Eb", because it's in Eb minor AND Eb major! Even though the way I originally sang the line "They're just like me" was maybe a little mysterious, unsettling, and unwilling, I realized that I wanted the rest of the suite to focus on how I see myself—my own emotions and experiences—reflected in different types of insects.