I am a little concerned that work on Seven Dreams of Falling continues to be in the 2-3 range of the LSCA, but take it and run, I always say.

Today’s work is from the middle of the fourth section, “Hark, the sound of screaming fans,” in which we’re in the control center for the Event.  It’s a bit of exposition, filling us in on the background of the overall myth.

For those who don’t know the whole slutty story, Pasiphaë is the wife of Minos, king of Crete, and Ariadne’s mother.  (She is also the daughter of Helios, the sun, which is cool but not relevant to our story.)  She managed to offend Poseidon, who sent a fabulous bull to Minos and then cursed Pasiphaë so that she was consumed by lust for the animal.  She forced Daedalus to build her a sex sling that looked like a cow so that she could lure the beast to her.

The result was that she gave birth to Asterion (“starlike”), otherwise known as The Minotaur.  Daedalus was then coerced into designing and building the labyrinth to hide the Minotaur from the outside world.

So that is the exposition Ariadne sings for us in today’s work:

Dream One, “My mother” (05/14/14) | score (pdf) | mp3

Ariadne herself has issues, needless to say.  (So, mezzo it is.)

Another appearance of the labyrinth tone row at m. 13.

I would like to point out how not comfortably diatonic this passage is, thank you very much.  As a self-taught composer, I am sensitive to the charge that purely tonal music is a) too easy; and b) unsophisticated, so the fact that the first five minutes of the opera just wallows in “pretty” music had me worried that it was dismissible.  (Not to worry: I quite like my opening.)