Immigrant Day

On a more positive note, here is an inspiring little song, "Buffalo Nickel Photoplay, Inc." from the musical Ragtime. The character singing is an immigrant named Baron Ashkenazy who starts a motion picture company -- it seems fitting with the recent visibility in the media about the push for granting citizenship to illegal immigrants in the U.S.

I love the B section in this song because of the sudden change in orchestration that adds the high descending piano sixteenth notes. It's such a shift in texture that it reminds me of a key change even though it's just moving from the tonic to the subdominant. After 8 measures, though, it does modulate up a half step. Like many of the pieces from Ahrens and Flaherty, this modulates a lot -- I count 5 times in just 2 and a half minutes.