I’ve decided to be a badass composer and post my failures here as well as my successes. (Wait, he thinks he’s had successes?)
Today I thought I would whack out a grand baroque chorus to open the show with, and I did but it doesn’t really work. However, the best way to get good work is to crank out the bad work, at least for me. I can hear what doesn’t work and move on from there. (For those who are new to my whinging composer posts, I start a file called “abortive attempts” and futz around in that before committing to a real score.)
So what doesn’t work about this? It’s too rushed, not spacious enough. The text needs more breathing room. It needs to sound more like the opening to this opera, and that means more tension, even in the pure tonalities of unexamined myth.
When finished, the text and the music will move on to a B-section, with the piccolo trumpet diddling little triplet figures, before returning to the big theme. That will segue into the Zadok figures from yesterday, and Daedalus will have a quasi-recitative section before breaking into yesterday’s bit.
There are also some harmonic things that I thought might throw us off balance in a good way but don’t quite hit the mark.
In any case, it gives the flavor of what I’m going for.
In other news, I avoided working on John Tibbetts’ song another day.
update: already improved it; will start completely over tomorrow nonetheless