ELENOR JANEWAY HICKS

Richard composed this fantasia based on the name of his granddaughter.

There are many ways to translate words into music.  One approach is to assign each letter of the musical alphabet with all the letters in the alphabet.  Maurice Ravel used a German model for this, using the German system, where B natural is ‘H’ and B is B flat.  The rest of the alphabet lines up as seen in the chart below.

See below to understand how the name translates into pitches on the staff, using Ravel’s technique: