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.

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.