Creating something every day for 365 days: the music
Here’s the opening number. It’s been done for about a week now, but I haven’t felt like putting it up for review yet. Made a minor tweak this morning. Again, I fear I am over-orchestrating.
Dream One, 1. “Let us joyfully gaze” | piano score [pdf] | orchestral mp3
That’s all you’re getting today, because I am now setting out to work in the labyrinth all day.
And so our long national nightmare begins.
Having successfully copied the piano score parts from 1. “Let us joyfully gaze” into an orchestral score, I set about assigning instruments. You might think that this particular piece might be a lark, given that it’s just faux-Baroque excess, and to a certain extent you would be correct.
But it doesn’t sound right: too loud, too repetitive. I will have to let it sit for a day and annoy me.
Mercy, what’s it going to be like when I have to do something subtle?
I spent the morning attempting to discover a way to make Finale do a very simple thing: using the ScoreMerger option in the program, take the soloists/chorus/piano staves and append them to an orchestral template. In other words, take the music I’ve already written and copy it over to a file with all those extra instruments in it.
It would not. It would append, but then it also copied over the page setup, so that I’d have two pages of 11×17 orchestral score followed by x number of 8-1/2×11 pages of piano score, along with all the title page stuff of the piano score.
I could go in and tell it to forget all page formatting, but then the 11 staves of the piano score would end up in weird places: the sopranos above the soloists, or the piano staves distributed amongst the vocals.
And under no circumstances was it bringing over dynamics or tempos.
Blergh.
I posted on the Finale online forum, but so far no one’s answered, except one person who has had the same issues. Their solution was the same as mine: re-order the orchestral score so that the piano part is below the vocals (normally it’s above them), then copy and paste the piano staves into the orchestral score. Not difficult but hardly elegant.
That took all morning, so no actual orchestration got done. But the template is set up now, and I should be accomplishing something tomorrow.
And I finally got that little wall on the back end of the patio done:
When autumn ferns come back on the market, I’ll plant one there.
Soon, but not tomorrow, I will revisit the stone store and drag home some medium-thickness flagstone for the gate entrance, and for the area around the firepit.
So, Dream One is done.
Not really, of course, but for the moment let’s pretend that I have actually finished composing the first scene of the new opera, Seven Dreams of Falling.
It took me a moment to realize I was through. Honestly, it was like finishing a New York Times crossword puzzle that has resisted solution: you push and pull and step back and plunge in, and then finally you realize what the last few letters must be and you write them in, and then you’re done. No great “aha!” moment, no feeling of reaching a summit or crossing a finish line. You’re just done, almost unexpectedly.
Still, I’ll take what sense of accomplishment I can scrape up. Whatever its weaknesses, it’s done, and I think there are some very strong moments in it. Baritones will curse my name if they have to sing Theseus, whose opening aria takes them right to the top of their range and a little beyond, but everyone else should have a lot to please them.
What’s next? Scott is working on the text for Dreams Two, Three, and Four, and in the meantime I could begin orchestrating Dream One. I have a bit of a concern that I’ve not been thinking in orchestral terms, and that may be an issue when it comes time to get rid of the piano. However, the same was true of William Blake’s Inn, and it turned out just fine. The main thing will be deciding what orchestral forces we’ll need.
Side note: I just checked the instrumentation of Finale’s “full orchestra” template, and it seems a bit odd to me. No English horn, but an E-flat clarinet. Trumpet in C (2)?? I can understand not having saxophones, perhaps. No bass trombone. Percussion is timpani and “percussion.” None of this is a problem, of course. I just have to decide what I’m going to use and then create a new template from that.
For comparison, here is the orchestration for Anna Nicole:
That lineup is close to what I’ll end up with, other than not needing that many oboes or bangable items, or the jazz ensemble.
When I start orchestrating, you should expect changes in the piece, some of them quite significant. What happened with William Blake’s Inn is that when I started breaking up the piano accompaniment, I would hear opportunities for embellishments and counter-melodies that are not possible with ten fingers on a keyboard, and suddenly the piece would sound quite different. You can cover a multitude of joints with the spackling of strings.
So, onward!
We’re just going to let this sit here for a while and annoy us.
Dream One, 4a. “Hark, the sound of screaming fans” | score [pdf] | mp3
In other news, I watched the Royal Opera production of Anna Nicole, music by Mark-Anthony Turnage, libretto by Richard Thomas. You can find videos here, and the entire production via Amazon Instant Video. Oddly, the show has not been recorded.
It was quite entertaining—the music was likable and fun if not exactly hummable, and the production values were beyond excellent. Costumes were incredible, and hats off to director Richard Jones. And Eva-Marie Westbroek must be seen to be believed as the ill-fated Playboy bunny—she is simply amazing from beginning to end. The rest of the cast was right behind her, too—do you know how mind-blowing it is to see a perfect replica of Texas trailer trash on an opera stage? Great, great fun all round.
I did the sensible thing this morning: since I can’t make up my mind about Theseus’s little gigue bit, I just skipped ahead to where I was surer of what I wanted, mainly because I’d already written it.
After a little repartée between Theseus and Daedalus, Daedalus starts riffing on his machines again, so I knew we’d pick up the “machine music.” Oddly, Daedalus continues his lilting 3/4 time over it.
Finally Ariadne enters, we get a few cheap laughs at her expense, and when the boys try to exclude her by picking up the gigue theme again, she busts a nut, leading into her “My mother spoiled and pampered.”
From there to the end of the Dream, we’re good.
No samples today because it’s all just pretend notes right now. I’ll have to work on them some more before they become real.
Spoiler alert: the fact that T & D return to the gigue theme means that I probably am going to settle for that.
Tomorrow is Nancy Willard’s birthday. (It’s also my son’s birthday, and that of my first girlfriend. Anybody else?)
One of the greatest regrets of my life is that I have been unable so far to get William Blake’s Inn produced. Nancy is such a phenomenal writer and artist, but more than that she is such an unbelievably warm and supportive human being that she deserves to have this work staged and performed all over the country.
When I asked her for permission to set her Newbery Award-winning book to music in 2003, she did not hesitate. As a creative master, she was unafraid of what I might do to her “child”; indeed, she eagerly anticipated the completion of each song and has remained the work’s biggest fan.
In a perfect world, we would be able to workshop William Blake and then give it a full staging—soloists, chorus, adults, children, puppets, projections, orchestra—and present it along with an exhibit of her related artwork. (She actually built the Inn out of cardboard. It’s with all her papers at UMich/Ann Arbor.) And then we would take it on the road to share with the rest of the planet.
I may be exploring new territory with Seven Dreams of Falling, and my magnum opus of SUN TRUE FIRE may be my future towering work of genius, but William Blake’s Inn will always be my favorite child.
To our children we shall say
how we walked the Milky Way.
(If you haven’t before now, go listen to the Epilog. It is probably the best thing I will ever write.)
Now that my doctor has transitioned from suggesting I might benefit from moderate exercise to insisting that I walk two miles every day (within 30 minutes, YOU GUYS!), I have the opportunity to listen obsessively to my work on Seven Dreams of Falling.
Thus it was that as I slogged around the park this morning I found myself really enjoying “Hark, the sound of screaming fans” as an entirely fun piece of bravado.
Which is why I set myself the goal of ditching it and writing something else. I cannot shake the feeling that an audience of any sophistication would sneer at this snarky little tune.
side note: I’m having issues about melody. On the one hand, I despise modern opera’s avoidance of a good tune. There’s a reason why we keep scheduling the Top 40 years and years after their premieres and more modern pieces... not so much. (For the record, I would love to hear and learn from each and every piece mentioned in that article.)
On the other hand, maybe it’s because of my lack of talent, but I don’t think bits like “Hark” are very strong. It seems lazy to plop something in there just because it’s hummable.
Oh, who knows? My inadequacy, my fear of not being thought one of the “cool kids,” or is it all just fine? Discuss in comments.
So I wrote another version of “Hark, the sound of screaming fans.” Not the whole thing, just the first two lines. I’m not happy with it either. It’s definitely got Theseus’s smarminess down, but if anything it’s even weaker musically than yesterday’s version.
Maybe I’ll keep pushing, writing ever more strenuously for voice and ear until I have something at which the cognoscenti will nod knowingly. Or maybe I’ll just leave the gigue where it is.
Dream One, “Hark, the sound of screaming fans,” 2nd version | score [pdf] | mp3
I found a solution for the cheesiness of Theseus’s opening aria, and that is MOAR CHEEZEENESS YOU GUYS!
Seriously: I abandoned the lame attempt at polytonality in his first phrase and settled it into straight harmony, and then extended the first verse. So now we have a full-on huckster approach, a kind of in-your-face/dare-you-to-diss-this-throwback attitude.
I’ve moved on to Daedalus’s objections, which will be in a kind of waltz mode over Theseus’s 9/8 gigue.
Dream One, “Hark, the sound of screaming fans” (06/24/14) | score [pdf] | mp3
