Barbie — Princess and the Pauper: If you love me for me

A song I’ve been obsessed with since around 2023-11: it starts simple and relatively expected for a children’s/teen’s movie soundtrack, and is a complete earworm just in that respect, but it’s the duet that really makes it — and which, for me, came as a complete surprise on the first listen. I had never expected the two motifs to fit together as a duet!

I wanted to record it instantly, but something held me back about the original soundtrack: it was too short. So beautiful, but over far too quickly.

So I spent a number of weeks, on and off, creating my own arrangement (and simultaneously re-learning Lilypond after not having looked at it for a good 15 years).

The instrumental part, if considered an introduction, seems rather lengthy, but this was inspired by Les Arts Florissants’ recording of Rameau’s “Tendre amour” (uploaded to the “France Musique concerts” Youtube channel on 2020-08-17) in which the orchestra plays through pretty much the full piece before the singers come in. Atypical, perhaps, but I love the idea of extending a beautiful melody in that luxurious way and really taking one’s time with it.

I wrote in some pretty tough fingerings for the violin part and this was to maintain consistent timbre on the Tricolore unwound gut strings: for the purposes of this piece, a totally anachronistic setup — I get the impression that this issue of keeping one phrase per string was more a mid-20th century discussion — but one which I’m pretty sensitive to both in my own playing and others'.

My flute playing here is definitely the biggest let-down and part of that is due to my lack of experience in microphone positioning for flute. The other part, of course, is a basic lack of technical prowess.