What do the songs “EARFQUAKE” by Tyler the Creator and “HOT TO GO!” by Chappell Roan have in common?
Besides the song titles having all capital letters, there isn’t much. However, juniors Isabelle Chau, Shreyas Kolwalker, and Bella Franck bridged the gap – they’re both new songs that the band are going to play at football games and events.
When band students started to show interest in playing new songs, Chau, Kolwalker, and Franck decided to arrange new songs for the band themselves using a program called MuseScore, adapting the music to Liberty’s band and specifying parts for different instruments.
Starting in late August, Kolwalker began to arrange “EARFQUAKE” by Tyler the Creator for the band to play. At the end of last year, band students filled out a form asking what music and artists they’d be interested in playing, and lots of answers included Tyler the Creator.
“The song choices were between that and ‘See You Again’,” Kolwalker said. “I decided to pick ‘EARFQUAKE’ because I saw a lot of really good marching band arrangements the band could do.”
While Kolwalker was working on his arrangement, Chau and Franck decided to arrange a version of “HOT TO GO!” by Chappell Roan for the band. Since “HOT TO GO!” blew up on social media and started various trends, Chau thought it would be fun to incorporate it as one of their songs.
“I hadn’t really expressed much interest in arranging music at first, but hearing other’s excitement when discussing the possibility of playing ‘HOT TO GO!’ was one of the main reasons I decided to arrange it,” Chau said.
For the first-time arrangers, however, there were difficulties in the process, especially because the pop songs had a lot of parts that were hard to replicate.
“‘EARFQUAKE’ has a lot of quiet synth lines that are hard to recreate,” Kolwalker said. “There’s a lot going on in the background of the song that isn’t obvious, so I had to remove things that our band wasn’t able to play.”
In addition, since almost each band instrument had to have a different version of the arrangement to play, the juniors worked together to transcribe parts of the song to other instruments.
“Since I play the snare, I did most of the percussion parts as well as added chords and melodies,” Franck said.
Altogether, the juniors agree that in the future, they’d love to continue arranging music.
“Arranging music helped me learn about composition, music theory, and how instruments interact,” Chau said. “It felt rewarding getting to hear the final product at the end of all our hard work.”
