Note:
“Amplify” looks at the responsibility of social justice through the eyes of a new superhero. Through a licensing deal with NPR’s podcast Planet Money, Takach has written an accessible and powerful piece on what it means to listen to and amplify other voices. Hagen’s text uses material and ideas from Planet Money’s first comic book, and the music is filled with musical theater and pop influences.

Gather round friends, it’s story time.

I’m a regular listener to NPR’s podcast Planet Money. I like digging into the economics of different corners of society. Those folks are informative, fun, and pretty geeky at times.

In 2021 when they ran a series of episodes on creating their own superhero from a public domain character, I was intrigued. Over the course of three episodes, Micro-Face was born. I wrote in to pitch them an idea for licensing the character and comic book content for a new piece of music. Over a Zoom call and a long chain of emails between the hosts Kenny Malone and Robert Smith, and other folks at NPR, the idea took flight. You can hear my pitch on the April 30, 2021 episode “A Superhero Goes to Hollywood.”

I asked composer Jocelyn Hagen to write the lyrics for the piece. After reading an early draft of the comic book’s first issue, I gave her an elevator pitch of what I thought the piece could be about. Micro-Face wears a helmet that not only allows him to amplify and throw his voice, but also gives him super hearing. It seemed that someone with the power to both hear and amplify unheard stories and voices could fight really well for social justice, so that’s the direction we took. The opening line “A smart man once told me to speak up when I was told to be quiet” is a direct quote from the comic.

AMPLIFY exists in this SATB + piano version as well as a Vocal/Piano/Chords score.

– Timothy C. Takach, 2021