Chanson Algerian

Lyricist. Edward Lockton

Publisher. M. Witmark & Sons

Date. 1926

Key/Range. G Minor (d' -- a♭")

COMMENTARY

Frank Tours began to work for Paramount Pictures as a movie palace music director in 1925. The following year, he was hired as a composer at the studio’s Astoria lot. He shared credit for all of his work on the music for Beau Geste, a 1926 film starring Ronald Coleman based upon the book by P. C. Wren. This song reunited Tours with one of his most frequent lyric collaborators, Edward Teschemacher, who had changed his name after World War I to shield him from anti-German sentiment. In retrospect, his lyric for “Chanson Algerian” is more expressive of the orientalism common in American popular arts at the time than the north African culture it attempts to portray. Similarly, the shifting minor modality—between harmonic minor and the Aeolian mode—was a form of musical essentialism that was common in film scores as well as Tin Pan Alley songs with “Arabian” lyrics and themes.