Mad Dog and Clever Cat for female choir and piano

Part 1 – Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog Part 2 – The Clever Cat

Instrumental audio files on Google Drive for practising and getting familiarised with the music: https://bit.ly/SayppoMadDogCleverCat After clicking/tapping the file, playback starts with a (possible) short delay. Just wait some seconds.

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PRESS RELEASE 2017

Sayppo gives life to two deceased poets

Helsinki, Finland, Thursday 16 March 2017 – With his ‘Mad Dog and Clever Cat’, Mr Sayppo makes Oliver Goldsmith and Mary Hannay Foott alive again.

According to composer Tapio Sayppo, the creator of ‘Mad Dog and Clever Cat’, he in summer 2010 found two interesting books of poetry in English in a library. In those books, two poems were strongly ‘talking’ to him, ‘Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog’ by Oliver Goldsmith (1730–1774) and ‘The Clever Cat’ by Mary Hannay Foott (née Black) (1846–1918). He decided to compose them. In February 2017 he completed the creation after working on it for a very long time.

Mr Sayppo talks about the poems.

‘”Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog” in a nutshell: In a town there was a man considered to be kind and gentle. A stray dog went mad and bit him. People swore the man would die. But the man recovered of the bite, and the dog died! (What an allegory.)

“Clever Cat” in a nutshell: There was a hungry cat called William, the poorest ever seen, who did not go a-mousing, but only played the tambourine. One day he met a female cat, Princess Felina of Catland, who fell in love with him and his tambourine. They started dancing and from then on, she gave him as much food as he wanted. Now there is a cat, the fattest ever seen, who need not go a-mousing, but only plays the tambourine.’

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ISMN 979-0-9001707-4-3 (wire bound) ISMN 979-0-9001707-5-0 (PDF) ISMN 979-0-9001707-6-7 (CD-ROM)