Product Description
The hippopotamus has always interested me. I can clearly remember the first hippos I ever saw, at the Detroit Zoo and the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. After a slight ebb in my interest in adulthood, it came back alive with the birth of Fiona at the Cincinnati Zoo in January 2017. A severely premature birth, Fiona was not expected to live beyond a few days, let alone the eight years she has thrived.
My love of hippos led to my desire to tell the stories that deeply interested me, in a medium I deeply enjoy: The bassoon sonata. Each movement of this work tells the story of a different hippopotamus. The opening movement, The Most Famous Cincinnatian, tells of Fiona. The dark story of the unexpected early delivery, certain to lead to death of the newborn hippo, which brightened with every
successive day that Fiona lived.
Broussards Idea tells the story of The American Hippo Act, an unsuccessful piece of legislation seeking to solve two problems in the United States at the turn of the 19th Century: The water hyacinth that choked the rivers of Louisiana, and the meat shortage throughout the country.
Malagasy Cryptid is about the now extinct Madagascar Pygmy Hippopotamus. Despite dying out roughly four hundred years ago, locals have made many claims that lone individuals might still live in the forest of the island nation.
The piece ends with Hipopótamo de Cocaína, about the hippos abandoned in the mountains of Colombia following the arrest of Pablo Escobar. These four individuals have multiped into more than a hundred, wrecking havoc on the environment in the area.
This product was created by a member of ArrangeMe, Hal Leonard's global self-publishing community of independent composers, arrangers, and songwriters. ArrangeMe allows for the publication of unique arrangements of both popular titles and original compositions from a wide variety of voices and backgrounds.