Happy new year everybody!
Jasen: Many thanks for the excess praise, The Good Lord Knows a composer can use all the encouragement they can get (and discouragement in the right cases...). It was about two or three years after that track when I wrote something I felt was unquestionably mine, full flavour, and my confidence in continuing studies in composition was sealed (the vagaries of youth...), so top points for not discerning influences, I have none to my knowledge. I consider melodic writing to be my strongest point, and I never post anything of mine on the net, I don't know how William's 'challenge' and your post compelled me to do it. The "embarassment" in posting this track after so many decades since its creation is not the melody, but the most generic chord progression (even though so many beautiful melodies have been buttressed by just such a progression).
Jos: a/a, many thanks. Having posted that documentary track in good humour I thought I'd post something more recent and representative. If you can write melody you usually can do so from an early age, however harmonic and structural development can come over time, and over studying (usually the masters). The piano accompaniment is more than basic accompaniment as it develops the material, has three and four voices going on at times, pedal points, etc.
Now, it is BLASPHEME time! More so as this is a Viennese forum!! This is the track I should have posted to begin with (humourously):
Somewhere in the mid-late '90s I was approached by a girl (music dept. piano student) in a panic. The Music History teacher (a composer) had given the class an assignment, to compose a brief work in the manner of one of the early Romantics. The works (solo, duos, etc.) were to be performed in class! She had left this for the last minute and could come up with nothing, so she offered me about €300 today's money to ghost-write a song for her in the manner of Schubert! And she needed it 'tomorrow'!! Also it couldn't be sophisticated so as to not raise suspicions...
I smiled, thinking a) I needed the money, and b) my age was within Schubert's own lifespan, and he was reputed to go out for walks and habitually return with a full song (sometimes more...)
I accepted that challenge, went straight to the library to have a look at a couple of the great composer's song-cycles to get lyrics and look at accompaniment patterns. I chose Die Stadt from Schwanengesang. I went home, composed through the night, and gave her a song the following morning.
As a result the lecturer was enthusiastic (and somewhat suspicious), but the important part that makes this story worthy of posting is that years later a baritone switched Schubert's own song for mine(!!) in his recital of the whole Schwanengesang at the Liszt Academy Concert Hall (Budapest's premier concert hall), in front of what was and is an educated audience, and the whole thing went like a charm. In my unmitigated arrogance I attribute their acceptance and applause to their thinking there might have been an alternative/additional version that Schubert discarded... The following (ersatz) track is a bad recording from that concert:
https://soundcloud.com/errikos-vaios/die-stadt-m
