I’m taking my time with this scene, so don’t expect a lot of results right away.  Of the fourteen pages of the libretto for “Dream One,” six and a half of them are the control room scene.  So it’s long and it’s complicated, and it’s going to take a while to nail down.  (I’ve already tackled part of it, in Ariadne’s bit about her mother.)

Today I just began throwing notes around to see if I could develop anything that might be useful later on, and actually I think I have something.

I’m thinking of it as my “machine” fragment.  There are two segments of the scene where the characters offer competing views of what their machines are for, one of which leads into a reprise of “Let us joyfully gaze” with the chorus.  Besides those two segments, I could use the motif to transition from Icarus’s aria into the control room, i.e., scene change music.

At any rate, I succeeded in whacking out nearly 30 seconds of music, which is not bad for a shortened work session this morning.  It’s something to play with.

“Machine fragment” | mp3

It occurs to me that I have yet to let loose with a waltz of any sort.  Hm.

Well, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

I’m posting this, although I am under no illusion that it’s finished.  There are passages that I know are going to get changed; I just feel it.

However, for the time being, Icarus’s first dream aria, “I am alone,” is complete.

After the confident glories of the first two numbers, Icarus cannot stay out of tonal ambiguity.  He is happy to be where he is, and he believes that.  However, his accompaniment is not so sure; it confronts him with doubts and forces him to contemplate that perhaps this gig is not all it’s cracked up to be.

I look forward to the projection designer’s solutions to Icarus’s flight.

Note: I changed the vocal line to a French horn in order to check a couple of notes, and I left it that way.  It’s actually clearer and keeps me hearing an operatic tenor rather than that fuzzy little synth voice thing.

Dream One, 3. “I am alone” | score (pdf) | mp3

Here’s the thing: I’m really stuck on the “bridge” portion of the text of Icarus’s first dream aria.

Since one cannot just write climax after climax—well, one could, but that would make one Andrew Lloyd Webber—there must be therefore passages in the piece where the tenor gets to back off a bit.  Remember, he’s suspended 20-30 feet above the stage doing God only knows/what the budget will allow.  And shirtless, I’m sure.^[1]  Give the man a break.

Since Scott’s text is not regularly metrical, although fairly iambic in the main, that means it will  need to “float” above the accompaniment, quasi-recitative, and that’s where I’m having problems.  The main feel of the aria is whole and half notes in the accompaniment and quarter notes in the vocal line—all drawn out and soaring.  I can keep that going, as I’ve mentioned before, by using the cello line from the opening “I am alone” part, but when I try to put the text in above that using anything but quarter notes (for variety), it sounds wrong.  Also, it starts to turn into that plague of modern opera, pointillism.  I know, I know, sometimes you just gotta churn through the words to get to the pretty part, but I would love for my stuff to make sense.

The real problem, I think, is that I haven’t gotten that cello line to lie down and behave.  It keeps wanting to turn itself into a heroic climax, and it doesn’t need to.  It shouldn’t.  It should just burble along underneath Icarus until we get back to the next recognizable motif.  WHAT IS IT ABOUT “BRIDGE PASSAGE” THAT YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, CELLO LINE??  HENGH???

As you can probably tell by now, I’m procrastinating.

—————

^[1] This tendency to strip our tenors and baritones is an interesting trend in modern opera; there’s even a website about it.  People who discuss the objectification of the female body (viz, Deborah Voigt) in opera don’t give a lot of thought to the fact that as far as I can tell Nathan Gunn has never done a show fully clothed.

So yesterday I figured out multiple accompaniments to the “bridge section” of Icarus’s first dream aria, none of which worked.  My gut feeling is that it needs to be some kind of melodic adaptation of that bass line at the beginning of the aria, with Icarus just kind of doing that opera singer skating above it all thing, but working that out is bothersome.  I may skip to the next scene, which is going to be even more of an issue, and get started being stymied there.

Or I may skip to the end of this aria and write that, then connect the dots.

Decisions, decisions…

update:

I skipped to the end.  It was cheating, because I planned to use the “Flying in the sky” motive as the basis for Icarus’s ecstatic cries of “My father! My flying! […] My wings!” anyway.  So all I had to was copy and paste the accompaniment, add in some notes to suggest the final orchestration of Icarus’s melodic line from the first passage, then give Icky—no, really, that’s what Scott has Daedalus nicknaming his son—new notes for his new words.  Probably hackneyed.  We’ll see.  I’m not posting it yet.

Still stuck on the middle.

I’m making real headway on this, but I’m at a point where it’s now just grinding out what I know has to be on the page for the bridge bits, so I’m going to go ahead and post what I’ve got so far.

You will hear the basic building blocks for the rest of the aria: the plaintive “I am alone” motif; the accompanying cello line for that; the sincere “Flying in the sky” motif; the wistful “Aloft on pinions” motif.  Expect them to return as signposts.  (At the end of this version, you can hear the cello line making its entrance for a sustained run, over which Icarus will sing what I’m calling the “bridge” text.)

Something I didn’t talk about yesterday was the issue of sixteenth notes.  We’ve been slammed with them from the opening, nearly six minutes of them, and so it was really critical to back off for a while.  But an aria about flying without whirling sixteenths or sextuplets?  What to do, what to do…  I think you will be pleased with the solution.

Dream One, “I am alone” | score (pdf) | mp3

Yesterday and today I worked on one of the main phrases of Icarus’s first dream aria.

A little background: Scott’s text for this aria is nowhere metrical, but it does have three repeating elements:

1. “I am alone” bits
2. “I am flying in the sky” bits
3. “Aloft on pinions/ Of hope and magic” bits

Part of the puzzle for me as a composer, therefore, is to make sure that whatever I come up with for one of these bits will bear repeating in a meaningful (and hopefully increasingly meaningful) way.  For the past two days I’ve been churning out crap—that’s the technical term—seeing if I could come up with something for the “I am flying in the sky” theme.  I started using the moving bass line from “I am alone” as a basis, but none of those attempts really grabbed me.

So when an approach isn’t working, go for the opposite approach.  Just drop your baggage and head in the other direction.  One of two things will happen: you will find an answer, or something you’ve written already will make more sense.

This time, I think it worked.  I won’t post the results today; I want to crack the “Aloft on pinions” puzzle before I post the next version of this aria.  But I will say that the transition from the “I am alone” recitative into “I am flying in the sky” really works.

P.S. to Scott: We are not giving a tenor the line “In my singular solar solipsism.”  That’s just daring the audience not to giggle at his lisp.

update: Just to double-check some harmonies, I switched the voicing on the piano score to French horn and strings.  Oh my.  Y’all are in for a treat.

Here’s our first look at our hero, Icarus.

After the Baroque splendors of the adoring crowds and the glories of his father’s pride, Icarus finds himself alone in his trajectory.

As a side note, I keep thinking of that Red Bull stunt of a couple years back, where Felix Baumgartner dove from the edge of the stratosphere.  (Cool video here.)  Of course, Icarus is kind of like a reverse Baumgartner: lots of telemetry/assistance going up—only with no suit, of course—but not so much coming down.

Anyway, musically speakingwise, after five minutes of nearly solid sixteenth notes in the opening, it’s time for a break.  We get a still, quiet statement of the first five notes of the labyrinth tone row, and then Icarus begins the first of his seven arias in this opera.  The entire thing will be about five minutes long by my roughest estimation, and no, it’s not going to stay this quiet and slow.  In fact, in the very next section we’ll get more movement as Icarus meditates on his relationship to flying and his father.

Dream One, “I am alone” (05/15/14) | score (pdf) | mp3

Note: there are some staccato markings in Icarus’s part that are there just to separate the notes in the recording.  They will be omitted in the actual score.