I am focusing my portfolio content on the development of my songwriting over my two years at Freestyle. Though never directly tied into the curriculum, I managed to build my passion for songwriting into my Freestyle experience through creative interpretations of various assignments. One aspect of this incorporation came in the form of responding to short English assignments in song, as represented in the following examples.
First, a very simple assignment: respond to an essay by George Orwell entitled “Why I Write”. I opted instead to write the following tune.
Next up we have a song that I wrote for our Listener Lyric assignment. This was a project where we were encouraged to seek out a friend or peer with a drastically different identity to our own, then engage them in a conversation about their life as a result of their identity. We were then asked to mold our conversation into a short lyrical essay or poem. For my project I sought out a transgender friend of mine, and wrote the following song based off of our conversation on some of his less obvious plights in high school.
The rest of my portfolio presentation features content belonging to others projects already on this site, namely my Exploration and Zenith projects. For a more in depth look at these two projects you can check out their corresponding tabs.
Freestyle allowed me the time to write two musicals while in high school, and my personal compositional style changed dramatically between attempts. First we have excerpts from my first musical, Solo, which was a satire on Hollywood by way of a Star Wars parody. Unfortunately the full recording of this show has been lost, and only short clips taken by the audience remain, but luckily some parts of my favorite songs were maintained. I present here clips from my first act ensemble number “College in Space” and my second act love ballad turned comedy rock anthem “She Totally Kissed Her Brother”.
Here are the lyrics from that clip, I apologize for the poor recording quality and the lack of microphones.
College boy: Stepping off of the transport, and taking the first steps into the world
College girl: Saying “bye” to my parents *cries*
College boy 2: Saying hello to a bunch of emotional girls
College boy: Walking into the quad now. Boy, this campus is better than the brochure
College boy 2: Hooking up with my squad now. We’ll get totally wasted tonight
Basses: That’s for sure!
Tenors: That’s for sure!
Altos: That’s for sure!
Sopranos: That’s for sure!
All: In college! That’s the place to be
College girl: Can’t wait to start debating intellectually
All: College! The place for you and me
College boy: Can’t wait to start experimenting sexually
College girl: We’ve been repressed from our potential way too long
College boy 2: My head’s been in the game, but my heart’s in the song
All: I tell ya college is the place where we belong!
Finally I have a selected song from my Zenith project: my latest fully original musical, Odd Party. For an in depth look at the process of creating this show, check out my Zenith Reflections recording under the Zenith Tab. Here again is my favorite song from this new show, professionally recorded here at freestyle, “Friends”. For context, this is a song sung between Sally and Keith, two old friends who dated their freshman year and are just now reconnecting at a party after graduation. Through this tune they convince each other that despite their past, they can be friends again, though there is a clear implication that they will soon be more.
Thank you for looking through my portfolio, I appreciate your time and your perspective. If you do not have the chance to check out all of the songs on this page, I would greatly appreciate it if you would take a look at at least one song from each section, those sections being songs from english assignments, songs from my Exploration, and Songs from my Zenith Project. Thank you again for the chance to share my work.