Vessigny Secondary School (SONG)

  Date for Entry: (Thursday 15th October 2015)

Actual Date of Online Entry: (Thursday 11th November 2021) 

Dear Diary,

    On Thursday 15th of October 2015, I was able to succeed in completing a music transcription of the Vessigny College Song. This was a music 'summer challenge' that came from Uncle Ram. He said that he wanted me to learn it and I was thinking that I would have to play the song back at some time. I did not know when exactly I would have been. I preferred to have written music for the playing with me so I took off to a LONG process of having that done personally. Uncle Ram gave me a recording of their college song on a disc and I tried my best to get everything I heard out on Musescore.

    My first thought of the score was that it should be a piano and melody one because of the lady singing with piano accompaniment. I wished that there was music for it so that the work would have been easier. This attempt in the eyes of a musician will not look appealing but somehow the trial sounded like something useable (see archives for Voice and Piano score).

    I recall there was a general election period when mommy was working for the season. Daddy and I had to go up home to Tunapuna because they were coming to get the recording. Uncle only wanted to get the pan music so I got headphones to play what I had on Musescore and uncle sat on the floor to get the sound from the instrument before. We did three separate recordings that evening. I learned that a teacher was leaving and that the person liked steelpan. 

STEELPAN ARRANGEMENT (V1).

    Towards the early beginning of Summer Vacation after the completion of my Certificate program at UWI, I decided to visit the piano and voice score that I made and create a score of the same song to a steelband version. I thought that if the school had a Steelband maybe they might have wanted that too. The idea came after I had finally been able to get Hillview's College anthem written out for Steelband. 

    Even though I knew in the case of Hillview the steelpan tutor said "nobody goes wants to have that," I still found that it was good to have. I could have seen that some of the boys in the group appreciated it when I made copies for them.

STEELPAN ARRANGEMENT (V2).

    I think that at the end of my Steelpan Arranging 1 course, I decided to revise and fix the entire score I did in version one. I could see that from this second version that a huge improvement was seen but I had to leave it as it was when I revised it again (as seen in the provided PDF). 

    As the sound and the 'feeling' of the arrangement felt like it was coming along and I was satisfied to some small percentage, I still knew it was not good enough in my view. I felt that if a real arranger for steelpan was to take on this arrangement it would have needed more and been better than mine. 

STEELPAN ARRANGEMENT (V4).

** Monday 11th October 2021. **

    At this period in my life, I completed with Degree program at UWI. It was on Thursday the 3rd of June 2021 that a plan was taken to review the Vessigny College Anthem again for the fourth time. My mind was not so focused on the project and ideas for tackling this was not many resulting in a longer completion date. 

    One time I had a change in sleeping pattern and I sat down from twelve in the morning all the way until five in the morning and got the whole thing completed. I must admit for the journal that Sections C and E were super challenging but I was now proud of myself for being able to accomplish it along with the entire arrangement. I was not most pleased with it that it was good to share with Aunty Anmarie and Uncle Ram.

    On the Wednesday of that same week, I was able to send an email to Aunty for Uncle copies of the separate steelpan parts. Getting pitch names leveled was a challenge until I was taught how to make them in a straight line by someone on a Musescore Facebook group by inspecting. 

    In case the school chooses to use this arrangement that I have done in the future I hope that it brings them enjoyment and the proud amazing feeling that I would have gotten when singing Hillview's anthem at the school. Version four was the same as version three. Minor changes were done to the ending.

STEELPAN ARANGEMENT (V5).

** Thursday 8th December 2022 **

A matter with the school’s logo was difficult. We did not have an electronic logo to work with. I was only able to find one on their school’s website and use it. This created the steelband arrangement and all of its accompanying parts to become version five.

    I saw that the shape of the ‘shield’ was not shown properly but was darkened out to the lower portion. It was inserted and sent over by email. I did not feel satisfied with it but took it since the writing was bolder and more legible than the others provided to me on the internet.

 

STEELPAN ARANGEMENT (V6).

** Monday 19th December 2022 **

I saw another version of the same Vessigny logo given to me by aunty. It was pixelated lightly but I believed it was workable. However, the challenge presented was that it was stained with a grey colour that should have been white to give the particular shape.

    It took about two and a half hours in total to clean the image and ‘perfect’ the shape of the ‘shield’. My biggest insecurity was spoiling the image in the process of trying to fix it. The same thing occurred and I had to do the entire work to get it to how it stands today. I had all the score parts with the changed logo and they became version six.

 

SCHOOL SONG BOOKLETS.

** Tuesday 20th December 2022 **

Had a very late morning today in getting to Isa. I had all the parts for the school song and the national anthem sent over to print yesterday. It took me three hours in waiting on my legs to sort the pages of all twelve booklets. It was surprising to see that it was smaller in size compared to Tunapuna Secondary’s School Song.

    The back and front covers were inserted last. The moment I had seen the front over, I was very pleased with the work done on the school’s logo. It seems to feel like it is how it is intended to be. I should have been a white border around the edges to make it more effective.

Daryl Zion M. Ali