If you are lucky enough to have miraculously stumbled across this wonderful hoot of a piece, then you are in for a treat! Cootamundra is a town in country New South Wales, Australia, and has nothing to do with the character of this piece. It is quite near where I currently live and made a fun alliteration while choosing a title for this piece. When writing music, I often allow the character and form of the piece to evolve with development of the motifs being employed. When writing student pieces, however, I tend to map out the work in my imagination fairly thoroughly first. This helps to keep the end result within the technical and musical limitations of the students in mind. Such was the case here where I decided to build on a nursery song with some drone-like accompaniment, a little “Scotland the Brave”, and then superimpose it on a conga line motif.

This work is designed for a student orchestra (Grade 3) and includes lots of doubling and cues to cover absent parts.