Something about the southern hemisphere I still haven’t been able to wrap my brain around is the reversed seasons. It’s currently August, the middle of winter, and schools are still in session from June through August (with a couple weeks off in July for winter break). While most of my friends and family post their summer runs and beach days on Instagram, I’ve been spending a lot of time indoors hiding from the rain and recovering from the flu.

On the bright side, this allowed me the time to try my hand at something new: writing an interactive children’s show from scratch! Allow me introduce you to The Pepperoni Collective:

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND: The Pepperoni Collective. From left to right: Myself (Taran Plamondon), Katie Danforth, Adrian Whitehall, and Henry Meng.

Back in April, I started chatting with the Auckland Philharmonia’s Learn & Participate team - the community outreach and education branch of the orchestra’s administration - and they planned performance dates and locations, as well as helping me refine my idea into something that would resonate with the kids. The Pepperoni Collective existed for just two weeks, from July 27 until August 8, for the specific purpose of performing our show for 1,500 kids in schools around Auckland. It was a big hit, and I thought it was worth sharing here since it centered on the concepts of musical composition and arranging.

What kind of name is “The Pepperoni Collective??”

I’ll concede that “The Pepperoni Collective” was really just a working title that I never got around to changing, but it suited our purposes just fine. The big-picture concept behind the show was to explain and draw attention to the components that make up a song, so the kids can form a deeper understanding of how they all come together. We talked specifically about melody, bass, and harmony and their function within the music. Our target audience were students aged 8-12, so in order to avoid unnecessary jargon, we used the analogy of a pepperoni pizza.

It’s a simplification, but it worked well as an analogy because kids can intuit how fundamental each component is. They can imagine what a pizza would be like if it was missing an ingredient (Henry: “a pizza without sauce… that’s just a sandwich!”), and they can understand how swapping ingredients could drastically change its flavour and feel.

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND: The Pepperoni Collective at Takaanini School in South Auckland. I promise I had no hand in picking comic sans for the title.

The Show

We began each show with a quick introduction of each of us, where we’re from, and a little tidbit about the instrument we play. We represented four different countries of the Anglosphere (Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand) and four different sections of the orchestra (brass, woodwinds, strings, and… piano is basically its own category), so there was plenty to talk about, but we kept this portion to about five minutes.

The mic was passed back to me, and I asked our audience: have any of you ever written a song? Usually a few hands went up, and I informed the audience that we needed their help to create a brand new song today. But first, it was time to learn the components of what makes a good song. I then introduced the pepperoni pizza analogy as our framework for the next portion of the presentation.

Cue Katie, who talked about what a melody is and its purpose in the music. The melody is the pepperoni on top of the pizza; the most memorable part of the song that evokes a unique personality. We performed three contrasting pieces to demonstrate melodic interest: In The Hall of the Mountain King (start with a bang), the third movement from Brahms’ Third Symphony (slow and romantic), and “Steve’s Lava Chicken” from The Minecraft Movie (our catchy sing-along).

In case you’re not familiar with that last one: it’s the jingle that is taking Generation Alpha by storm, performed by Jack Black in The Minecraft Movie (2025).

While the rest of the program consisted of cute little abridged 1-2 minute versions of each tune, Lava Chicken is only 30 seconds long, so I arranged it with a repeat to double it in duration. I was relieved that this shameless attempt to appear relatable to the younger generation did not, in fact, come across as cringey! It sparked a flurry of enthusiasm as nearly every kid in the audience sang along, which illustrated my point really well about the melody being the most memorable component of a song.

Up next was Adrian talking about his role as the bass line. Much like the crust of the pizza, the bass serves as a foundation to underpin the ensemble. The bass line is not usually the star of the show, but it’s vital to the overall ensemble and sound. We performed three pieces that begin with the bass in order to demonstrate its varying roles: the Habanera from Carmen (active but understated), Pachelbel’s Canon (our notoriously repetitive bass line - Adrian would pretend to fall asleep by the end), and finally Herbie Hancock’s Chameleon (the funky bass feature).

Next, it was Henry’s turn to talk about his role filling out the harmony of the ensemble. We likened the harmony to the sauce on a pizza; it glues the entire song together, and it can determine the character and mood of the piece. He briefly explained what a chord is in basic terms, and that a song’s harmony is made up of a sequence of chords. The final three tunes on our setlist were Hakuna Matata from The Lion King (lightly jazzy and carefree), the first movement of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony “Pastoral” (to evoke delight and serenity), and the “evil” harmonies of Darth Vader’s Imperial March. With those last two, I was aiming to demonstrate “lots of major chords” and “lots of minor chords,” but in practice we opted for mood descriptors over the technical terms “major” and “minor.”

REMIX TIME

The final interactive portion of the presentation at the 40-minute mark was our pièce de résistance, the gimmick of the entire show. At this point in the show I had written “MELODY,” “BASS,” and “HARMONY” in large letters on a whiteboard, and I reminded our audience that it was now time to help us create a brand new song. I asked them: do you remember which component is the most important?

Naturally, it’s a trick question, since we’d spent the entire show establishing that they’re all the most important. You cannot make a pepperoni pizza without the pepperoni, without the crust, or without the sauce!

First, to pick the melody, Katie performed short excerpts of the first three pieces to remind the audience of what they were as I wrote the titles on the whiteboard. We had the kids raise their hands to vote for either option # 1, 2, or 3. We repeated the process for selecting a bass line and a harmony line.

This is what the whiteboard looked like at the end of this exercise.

With the three musical elements chosen by the audience, we asked them to do a drum roll while the four of us huddled together to “discuss” how we were going to accomplish it. It was pure theatre; I actually worked out all 27 permutations in advance, but in practice every single school chose the melody from Steve’s Lava Chicken, mixed with the bass line from Chameleon, accompanied by the harmony from Imperial March.

The “Flows” feature in Dorico was a gamechanger managing the order and layout of the 27 different possible permutations.

I’m very pleased with the learning outcomes of the remix portion. The end result was pretty wacky and engaging, and since we had built some familiarity with the concepts of melody, bass, and harmony, the kids could now listen actively: focusing on one musical element at a time and considering the interaction between the different musical elements holistically. Plus, hopefully they got to feel a sense of ownership over the music since they contributed to creating it in some way. Unfortunately, I did not get a recording of “Steve’s Imperial Lava Chameleon March,” but I’ve created a MIDI mockup with NotePerformer in case you’re curious:

Arranging & Engraving Considerations

The process of creating the arrangement booklets was the biggest piece of preparation for this show. All in all, the sheet music consisted of 129 pages, which is the kind of task where “work smarter, not harder” can really compound into massive time savings. Thankfully, after over a decade in this line of work, I had a few tricks up my sleeve to shave the time scale of this project down to weeks rather than months.

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND: The Pepperoni Collective show booklets in the Learn & Participate team office. The piano booklet has 50 pages while the other three were around 30 pages each.

Gotta Go Fast

Firstly, the arrangements did not need to be complex - in fact, simplicity is baked right into the nature of the show. When Katie talks about the function of melody, it follows that she should pick up her oboe and play something that is obviously the melody. Because each instrument’s role is delineated so clearly, making too many “fancy” orchestrational decisions would risk undermining the show’s overall message. This might seem obvious, but arrangers (myself included) often lose sight of the bigger picture and “over-bake” their music, to the detriment of the performers and the listener. It’s a trap that can be easy to fall into as you get more experienced with writing music, and I might talk about it more in-depth in a future article. Suffice to say: keeping it simple is a win-win, cutting down arranging decision paralysis and reinforcing the concepts we talk about in the performance.

Secondly, I used Dorico for this project for a couple of reasons. I switched over to Dorico as the primary software for in-house publications a few years ago since I’ve been generally impressed with the development team’s work and the direction it’s headed. For this project, I knew my setlist would crystallize during the process of writing the arrangements, so I wanted access to the Flows feature to extract and re-order songs as needed. I also think Dorico is currently much better with horizontal spacing and distributing measures more efficiently than its competitors. Sibelius means well, but it tries too hard to optimize page turns and as a result is heavy-handed in its automatic system break placement. (Finale was out of the question; aside from it being officially discontinued just a few days ago, I’ve done projects with 20+ individual movements before and it was an absolute nightmare). I believe I saved at least an entire workday of revisions and formatting work because of the decision to use Dorico for this project.

Thirdly, I repurposed existing arrangements wherever I could. For instance, I was able to complete the Pachelbel’s Canon arrangement in under half an hour by reconfiguring a wedding arrangement I created last year and adding a few cuts. I’m pretty quick with note input, but it can sometimes be faster to source an arrangement from musescore.com. In some cases like the Beethoven Pastoral Symphony, someone has actually gone ahead and engraved the entire movement.

Symphony No. 6 "Pastoral" 1st Movement by user100657631

Sure, it looks terrible - it was done in MuseScore 2.1 and is almost certainly riddled with errors, but that’s okay because someone else has done the work of note input for you. It’s useful as long as you cross-reference it with the score, which is also freely available thanks to the incredible folks at IMSLP. If you’re aiming for speed, Copy-Paste truly is your best friend.

A Fun, Effortless Gimmick

“REMIX TIME,” the final portion of the show, took up 68 pages, a little over half of the overall sheet music. This 1-minute gimmick, meant to appear fun and effortless to the audience, was actually 27 little 1-minute arrangements stacked on top of each other in a trenchcoat. A lot of things in show business are like this; tons of work behind the scenes that isn’t apparent in the final product.

An arranger who isn’t Working Smarter, Not Harder, might consider writing 27 unique arrangements (on top of the other 9 main setlist arrangements!). But I have other commitments in my life so I knew this process would need to be streamlined.

To bring together these stylistically very different songs into a coherent mashup, I first decided on a universal tempo that would apply no matter what songs were chosen by the kids. I landed on quarter note = 108 beats per minute. A happy middle ground, a bit slow for Steve’s Lava Chicken, but brisk for Pachelbel’s Canon. Next I decided the universal time signature would be 4/4 - this covered every piece on the setlist except for the Brahms, which I rhythmically warped to fit the time signature.

The oboe part for one of the REMIX TIME permutations. This melody from Brahms’ Third Symphony has been flipped into major and reworked from 3/8 into 4/4.

I started a new Dorico file with 27 flows, then copy-pasted the melody from Mountain King into nine flows and the melody from Steve’s Lava Chicken into another nine flows. In the remaining nine, I pasted the modified Brahms 3 melody you see in the above image. Only ten minutes in, and the oboe part is nearly complete!

Next, in preparation for creating piano parts, I set up all of the key signatures. Two of our melodies are originally in C minor while the other one (Mountain King) is in A minor. The minor keys work fine for the Imperial March variations, but for the nine Hakuna Matata and nine Beethoven Pastoral Symphony variations, I modified them into their parallel major keys. Hakuna Matata also was given the “swing eighths” tempo indication.

The next step was the most difficult of the entire process and required some creative problem-solving. I needed to create nine piano harmonizations - one for every permutation of melody and harmony (ignoring the bass for now). I couldn’t simply copy-paste the piano part from my Imperial March arrangement, since its harmonic structure isn’t compatible with any of our melodies. What I went for was to mimic the character of each; Imperial March with its blocky minor triads, Beethoven with bouncy major triads and chorale-like voicing, and Hakuna Matata with a sing-songy lilt and a few jazzy chords sprinkled in with added sixths, sevenths, and ninths. As an arranger, I was on the lookout for ways to work in portions of the original in places that it could act as a countermelody responding to the oboe.

The piano part for our most popular REMIX TIME selection. Darth Vader’s Imperial March Theme is included as a countermelodic figure, doubled in the horn part.

Almost none of the arrangements included any music in the left-hand staff of the piano part. I originally wrote it for someone whose secondary instrument was piano, so I wanted to minimize the amount of time they would need to learn the music, but it accomplished a few additional things. It kept our distinctive roles as melody/harmony/bass better compartmentalized, reinforcing the message of the show, and it also conveniently cut down the arranging time.

The horn part was next, and derived directly from the piano and oboe parts. Wherever I could create interplay between the piano’s part and the melody, I would use the horn to double it and reinforce the countermelodic line. Everywhere else I simply doubled Katie’s part down the octave. Once the nine piano and horn arrangements were complete, I copy-pasted them three times over, once for each bass line. These took me about two afternoons and an evening, and all that remained were the bass parts.

There was no getting around it at this point: Each of the 27 arrangements needed its own distinct bass part. This involved taking the 1-2 bar motive from each tune (Habanera from Carmen, Pachebel’s Canon, and Chameleon) and manually expanding it out into the harmonic structure laid out in the piano part. The project was now essentially a paint-by-numbers - not particularly tricky, but tedious at times.

Creating all 27 bass lines took the better part of a day, and I was able to tidy up the formatting and engraving that same evening. It was easy to set up the Flow Titles in Dorico so that each of the 27 permutations were automatically labelled and easy to sift through. 

Finally, since all of the music for the show is in 1-2 minute abridged arrangements, I was able to work out the page layout so nobody had a mid-song page turn at any point. This involved adding a number of page breaks (Frame Breaks in Dorico) and a couple of blank pages. Our librarian Madison really appreciated this - I’m astounded at how much new music crosses her desk with no thought given to page turns.

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND: Loaded up in the rental van for our first show in the Papatoetoe neighbourhood of Auckland.

Acknowledgements

Whether you’re planning classical music shows for kids, or just a curious passerby, I hope you enjoyed this exploration of The Pepperoni Collective and what we were able to accomplish in a few short weeks.

To end this article I want to thank the Auckland Philharmonia Learn & Participate team, specifically:

• Hanna Wiskari for reaching out in the first place, contacting and booking all of the schools, finding Henry as our amazing replacement pianist, and helping me refine my show idea.
• Miriam McCombe for helping me sort out logistics including van rental and procuring a keyboard!
• Thomas Hamill as Auckland Phil’s Director of Connecting, for making it all possible in the first place.

Community engagement staff have so much work bringing together countless moving parts, and the Auckland Phil team is good at what they do that the end result feels seamless.

You can learn more about the Auckland Philharmonia Learn & Participate programs on their website.