While I was a member of New Age Theatrics, a professional dance company in the San Francisco Bay Area, I arranged and produced music for one of our showcase pieces, a string arrangement of “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence + the Machine. This intention of this particular showcase was to bring awareness to mental health, depression, and suicide prevention. It tells the story over nine scenes of a girl who falls into depression, loses motivation to continue living, and slowly begins to find her way back as her friends learn to support her.
My arrangement appears in between the fifth and sixth scenes as a transition between the girl fighting her inner demons and her friends starting to reach her emotionally. Florence + the Machine’s original version is about the turning point of “the dog days being over,” or the tough times in one’s life passing, but for this staging, I needed to convey a gentler transition. The intention was to show the girl’s first fragile moment of hope rather than a singular extravagant success. Using orchestral instruments allowed for more intimate and mellow textures, reflecting the first signs of light shining through the emotional darkness.
I used Musescore 4 to create the arrangement, and I exported the stems into Ableton Live 12 to produce the final track. I used the Berlin Free Orchestra plugin (violin, viola, cello, and double bass) because the sampled instruments capture the natural articulations and bowings of these string instruments incredibly well without heavy post-processing. This helped create an organic, vulnerable sound, matching the mood of the scene and the girl’s choreography in this piece. The production focused on creating a richer sound for an auditorium by balancing dynamics, adding slight reverb, and aligning phrasing with the choreography.
This piece reflects the way I approach storytelling and emotional design through sound and music, shaping it to communicate the character’s narrative and inner experience. I hope to bring my love for musical storytelling into the technical work I do in a graduate program.
You can also take a look at the sheet music here.