In late October of 2019, a few friends and I drove an hour from our hometown of Lawrence, KS, to take in the grain silos and abandoned cement plant in the ghost town of Mildred, KS. Inside of a cement drum, my friend Stella made use of the structure's natural resonance to spread the contagious earworm with which she had become afflicted after a long day of nannying: John Walter Bratton's "The Teddy Bears' Picnic". The piece that follows is the result of nearly three years' worth of attempts to understand what "The Teddy Bears' Picnic" has come to mean to me since moving to New York. There are numerous quotations and transformations of the tune, though the motivic material of primary importance is not consciously related to the tune itself but rather represents figures associated with the memory.

This rendition of the piece is generated by NotePerformer.