Cocoa Calypso

A light-hearted and vaguely educational song about the joys of chocolate.

I wrote this song in 2001 for one of my university friends, who was and is very fond of chocolate. It was originally arranged for performance by the a capella comedy quintet The Quadwranglers, and subsequently rearranged in 2011 for solo voice and piano.

In lieu of any decent jokes or better ideas, I did some research into the history of chocolate and based the first three verses around that. The final verse is a comment on fact that they seem to put chocolate in everything these, from hot cross buns to dessert wines. I even had some supposedly chocolate tea once (it tasted more like school-dinners custard). In the light of this, it seems somewhat ironic that, despite the name, the song turned out to be more of a cha-cha.

Summary information – solo version

• Voicing: Solo voice

• Notes on ambitus: 1.5 octaves, from B flat up to E flat.

• Instrumentation: Piano

• Approximate performance length: 2:40

• Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Releases

Version 1.0

Initial release:

• Sheet music (PDF, A4) for solo voice and piano.

• MIDI preview: this is as it comes from Lilypond, so does not reflect the written articulation or dynamics.

MP3 rendering of the MIDI preview.

Source code

This piece was written using Lilypond. The source code for it is available from my GitLab repository. To compile it yourself, you will also need my house style files.