I posted on Facebook how frustrating it is to compose something that is perfectly cromulent but which you know is not the solution to the problem, and after losing a whole week to grappling with Theseus’s first appearance, I was ready to slap down anything.

So I have.  It’s silly, silly stuff with a couple of good bits, but really, can you hear this being performed on a modern opera stage?  The faux-Baroque bit is too much to begin with, and now this lame bel canto?  I think it gets Theseus’s hucksterism right, but it’s just so unsophisticated.

But here it is.  Scoff in the comments.  I’ll be over in the corner working on a replacement.

Dream One, “Hark the sound of screaming fans” | score [pdf] | mp3

I’ve settled down to work on the remaining bit of Dream One, i.e., the section that follows Icarus’s “I am alone.”  In it, Theseus reveals himself as more of a showman than a hero; Daedalus is practically a monomaniacal technocrat; and Ariadne… well, Ariadne has issues.

Mostly today I’ve tried to parse the text and decide what it is that the music needs to be telling us.  I did some work on getting from the “machine music” scene change into Theseus’s opening lines, but now I’m doodling on the main theme of his number.  I think on the whole we need to hear some kind of lounge lizard or advertising jingle in his aria, but that’s going to take time, because after Daedalus interrupts whim with some priggish rebuttal, I want that theme to return for the bit of stichomythia between Theseus and Daedalus.

That in turn will be followed by the machine music (lightly), and then Ariadne, eternal feminist spoilsport, pipes up.  From there it’s just a short jump to “My mother, bored and pampered.”

Short version: I piddling around trying to invent an advertising jingle for the Event.

And I won’t have it done by the end of the week.

Don’t everybody get over-excited, but today we have two new sections of Dream One.

Lest you think that I was super industrious over the weekend, remember that I had worked on both of these all last week and only had the ending of each to hammer out.  Still, it is impressive, isn’t it?

The first is our old friend, Ariadne’s “My mother, bored and pampered.”  I had to work out her last phrase, “We map this fate forever,” in which I wanted Theseus to join her in a gentle lament.  I think it works.

Astute listeners will hear that I radically revamped the accompaniment to Ariadne’s climactic “I loved you—I love you!”  It’s very effective in a maudlin kind of way, and I’m wondering if it’s too Broadway.  Or am I forging new paths for La Scala?

The second new piece is the closing of our first Dream, “What of us?”  It starts with Daedalus reminding Ariadne that he too was trapped there, along with Icarus.  The music references “Fly and fall,” and then segues into the “machine music” motif as our trio retreat to their personal concerns.  (I am reminded of Sweeney Todd, where Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett often sing at cross-purposes, he of emotions and she of commerce.)  From there we reprise the opening chorus, “Let us joyfully gaze.”

On the whole, I’m quite pleased.  Next up: the beginning of this last segment of Dream One, transitioning from Icarus in the sky down to the control room.  It’s not a short piece of text, so this may take all week.  However, when I finish this, DREAM ONE WILL BE FINISHED, YOU GUYS!

Dream One, “My mother, bored and pampered” | score (pdf) | mp3

Dream One, “What of us?” | score (pdf) | mp3

Do not let me forget that I have to work out the “falling” motif.

Yesterday was pretty good, actually.  Having decided to skip the hard part of Ariadne’s bit and move on to the ending of Dream One, I found that it flowed very nicely and we have liftoff.  I still have some tweaking to do on it, but I think everyone will be pleased with the results.

Also, yesterday afternoon was the last session of the Newnan Theatre Company‘s KidsCamp Workshop that I taught.  As these things do, we ended up with a performance for the parental units, and I have to say that the kids acquitted themselves well.  Quick recap: the goal of the workshop was character development; the theme was “Villains.”  We spent the week in a wash of creative process—stealing David Seah‘s nifty mantra of EXPLORE | LEARN | BUILD | SHARE, we were able to defer judgment and decision-making until Thursday, really.  They generated multiple characters in their little notebooks, and we ended up with six monologs and three group presentations. (We had eighteen middle school students.)

They tended towards the sketch comedy end of the spectrum (with the concomitant maniacal cackling), but with only a week to produce, whattayagonnadoamirite?  I think that almost all of them were worth seeing and the fact that the kids developed every single bit it of themselves is worth something.  I regarded the whole workshop as an excuse to play with young minds and introduce them to the creative process.

The song was a hit.  I was quite pleased with the way the kids performed it and with the audience reaction.  It is a catchy, catchy song with multiple earworms.  I know, because I have trouble getting to sleep at night with it running through my head.

So here’s the next little section of “My mother, bored and pampered.”  I abandoned my interpolated text—although I reserve the right to come back and stick it in.

I’m posting this today even though I’m not sure I like any of it.  Some adventurous harmonies, but my compositional strategy of “listen to it over and over until it makes sense” may have failed me this time.  Will a conductor and cast take the time to understand it?  Does it in fact make sense musico-dramatically?

Oh well, unlike The Bridges of Madison County, this is not going to lose anyone millions of dollars, so I shall post it and then circle back to it later.

Dream One, “My mother,” 06/10/14 | score (pdf) | mp3  (The new stuff starts at about 1:10.)

Next, a little coda in which Ariadne and Theseus have a bittersweet duet, closing out that bit.  Then a bit of recitative from Daedalus, and then our “tinker-toy” theme kicks in to take us out to a reprise of “Let us joyfully gaze.”  Sounds simple enough.

So we’ve hit a stretch of 5-6 on the LSCA.  We will survive.

I should have something to show tomorrow.  But not today.  It’s gross.

When last we left Ariadne, she was explaining how

• her mother had sex with a bull
• the resulting Minotaur, her half-brother, was put into the labyrinth
• all of which is Daedalus’s fault

Today we get a little more: Theseus mentions his part in slaying the Minotaur, and Ariadne throws it in his face that he couldn’t have done it without her telling him the secret of getting in and back out again.

From here, I think we’re going to get a little interpolated text, just a little something for Ariadne and Theseus to sing before she launches into her I LOVE YOU DAMMIT bit.

I would like to state for the record that the piddling amount that is new in today’s selection represents days of my writing stuff that went absolutely nowhere, and you will notice that Ariadne’s last bit is still in the boogie-woogie style we started with.  Next section, pretty music.  I swear.

Dream One, “My mother, bored and pampered” | score (pdf) | mp3

Here in the fourth scene of “Dream One” of Seven Dreams of Falling, we have Ariadne leading the way in a rather expository passage, i.e., the background of the Minotaur myth.  As she and Theseus trade pointed viewpoints about their roles in the story, it seems to me that we might want some kind of operatic give-and-take, if not an outright duet.  And it might still be an outright duet.

I can’t tell at this point, given that I’m treading water with the passage.  I have put a few tentative notes up on the screen, but nothing is appealing to me or making sense yet.  (For those who don’t know, I work in files that are labeled ‘Abortive Attempts,’ i.e., “4. Hark, abortive attempts,” where I simply abandon stuff that doesn’t work, insert new measures, and keep going.  Often I will find later that some of the abandoned material fits right in with the stuff that works.)

So nothing to report today, music composition-speakingwise.

Yesterday I was sleep deprived from my torn rotator cuff bugging me all night, and I was so zombified that I didn’t really get any composing done.  I took a stab at it, but the results are more than likely not going to survive.  I’m piddling away at the text today, and my main struggle is deciding where Ariadne is heading in this section.

First instinct is to sustain her caustic bitch act.  Second instinct is to let her reveal how much she really loved Theseus and expected to live happily ever after with him.  I’d also like to show Theseus’s ambivalence about this history.

In other words, time for some pretty music.

More work is required.