I’ll be honest: this is the fifth version of this opening number that I have written, and I’m still not sure this is it. However, as Frank Gehry always says, let’s let it sit there and annoy us for a while.
After whatever I work out for the plunging motif, we are presented with the chorus. As it says in the libretto: The Event is on. Observers attend the moment in amazement and delight.
A brassy Baroque anthem launches right out of the gate, and the chorus sings. It’s all extremely standard harmony, except for their paean to Apollo, the bass line of which is the labyrinth 12-tone row.1
At the very end, you can hear the Zadok-arpeggios beginning, and in performance we would head straight into Daedalus’s “Fly and fall.”
“Let us joyfully gaze” | score (pdf) | mp3
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1 I promise it gets more “modern” with Icarus’s first dream aria, right after “Fly and fall.”