Love Song For Dusty
Cheryl Frances-Hoad
Early Advanced
4 min
Commissioned by William Howard for his Contemporary Love Songs project and premiered by William at the Forge on the 6th June 2016.
When William asked me to write a Love Song for his wonderful project (the recording of sixteen new contemporary love songs for solo piano on the Orchid Classic Label), the first thing that occurred to me was that it would be a fabulous opportunity to completely let my compositional hair down! I wanted to pen something utterly heart-on-sleeve, with big melodies and grand pianistic gestures, something unashamedly over the top but also totally sincere, perhaps occasionally even a little romantically unhinged...
The inspiration came from various sources - primarily William's existing disc of Romantic Love Songs, but I also imagined my piece to be the result of what Chopin or Liszt would have written if they'd had lived in the 1960s and been heavily into Dusty Springfield (a temporary obsession of mine when I discovered that other types of music existed other than 'Classical'). As a composer I am usually scared of repetition, but in this work I wanted to keep as much as I could to a typical love song structure, with verses, choruses and bridges. This commission also fulfilled a long standing ambition to write a piece with an 'up a tone' key change at the end.
© Cheryl Frances-Hoad, 2016
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