This is what I've been doing during COVID lockdown. This was my version of a jigsaw puzzle, where the jigsaw pieces were song fragments chosen from a set of self-imposed parameters. I started with over 100 songs about San Francisco that were written between approximately 1890 and 1920. The largest concentration of songs were written between 1912 and 1915 as promotional songs for the Panama Pacific International Exposition. I took the melody and chord fragments for bars/partial bars where the lyrics were "San Francisco," "Frisco," "Golden Gate," "San Francisco Bay," "Frisco Town," and "Golden Gate Park," and wanted to see I could arrange these fragments into an order that made musical sense.
The structure is the standard structure for nearly all of the source songs. I outright composed a couple of bars and slightly altered a few rhythms, but my chief goal was to maintain as much of the source material as possible. I have not yet tried writing any lyrics for this song, because when I hear it, all I hear in my head is "San Francisco Bay Golden Gate Golden Gate San Francisco Frisco Town."
The performance is by Finale. I chose oboe for the vocal line because Finale's oboe sounded less synthetic than most other available voices/instruments.
The photos are all photos I took in the last six years or so. There is no logical story to be found in them, rather the photos are just to give you something to look at while listening to the song.
17 сен 2024
