Composed May 19, 2005; sequenced & mixed May 21, 2005.
This is my final composition project for Music 232 at SFSU (Diatonic Analysis and Synthesis). The assignment included a simple melodic line and a fairly long list of required compositional devices. The harmony, voice leading, and rhythms are mine. There’s a PDF of the score which is what I turned in, and a MIDI version too.
This took me about seven and a half hours to write, including checking for errors, making sure voice leading was good, making sure all the required compositional elements were in there, adding all the analysis text under the staves, formatting it nicely, etc. Making a nice-sounding recording of it in GarageBand took about a half hour (mainly picking instruments and tweaking audio effects).
As the title suggests, this is the first draft of a vocal pop tune intended for a female singer. This is the first song I’ve written that incorporates classical composition techniques I’ve learned at school, as well as being the first song I’ve written where the melody was designed to be sung rather than played.
The opening is a plagal cadence (destabilized by using inversions of iv-i instead of root position IV-I), which sets up Dm as the tonic. The verse uses Dm-C in a few different ways to lead into the V/III-III motion of C-F in the chorus, which initially returns to D but then repeats and follows a ii-V-I progression to F, the relative major of Dm. The coda follows an extended descending circle of fifths down to end on F.
It’s a work in progress: the voice leading could probably be better; there’s no bass line for most of the song; there aren’t any lyrics; the repeat structure as recorded isn’t what I intended. I’m happy so far, though.
I composed this in Sibelius 3 and then saved it as a MIDI file and imported it into Garage Band 2 which sounds much richer than the built-in Quicktime Musical Instruments that Sibelius uses.
