Last week, a woman named Michelle Wallace posted a video on TikTok that showed a bit of sheet music written by her 10-year-old daughter, Olive, and asked if anyone out in the digital ether could do her the favor of playing it “to see if it makes any sense.”
In the days that followed, the internet responded with a rare display of communal goodness and performed the kid’s composition—“For Greatness We Bring”—in the form of harp and piano solos, a group string rendition, and much more.
The most impressive of these comes in the form of an arrangement by Christopher T.F. Hanson, performed by string educators attending last week’s NAfME Northwest Conference.
As the above video makes clear, Olive’s debut work not only makes sense, but also sounds really good. It inspired others to take a stab at versions of the piece, like a pianist and violinist in two different solos, a video of a piano and violin accompanying one another, a harp soloist, and, shown in a compilation clip from Michelle Wallace, a whole lot of other musicians, too.
Hanson’s video description also includes some background on the piece, describing “For Greatness We Bring” as Olive’s “first attempt at composing music” following two years of playing violin “at her elementary school in southern Pennsylvania.” The note also explains that Olive sings and plays clarinet and comes from a family that includes two music teachers. The most eye-catching bit, though, mentions how Olive “wrote this song as a folktale for a civilization she created called the ‘Elps,’” which she discusses through “a website, a blog, and a podcast.”
A link to Olive’s Elpjungle site leads to a wealth of information about the creatures, including some information on the Elp political turmoil her first composition was written to chronicle. We present this information unedited and in full:
“for a long time Elps had kings. King after king the elp kingdom was lead, until one king,king whirlpool, suddenly for unknown reasons, started to go insane, it was later found that there was a flower grown deep in his palace.,he was later overthrown and the queens took over.this song was created to show the end of the kings rule and the beginning of the queens.it was titled ‘for greatness we bring’ because shortly after the new queen was elected a whole new kind of elps was brought in. After the war be dipchips (credit to friend fake name emerald.) the new kind of elps was a massive help so that’s how it got there name ‘for greatness we bring.’
Kick rocks, James Cameron. Olive Wallace is a true world-builder.
Our only hope is that none of the success that she’s enjoyed so far goes to young Olive’s head, driving her toward a career as a ruthless, manipulative genius composer. We’ve seen how that sort of thing plays out and it isn’t pretty.
[via Boing Boing]
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