Dream One, “My mother, bored and pampered”: some progress

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Dale

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

An odd memory

Posted on June 3, 2014May 13, 2025 by Dale

I don’t know why I thought of this last night, but I was meditating out by the fire in the labyrinth, and for some reason Summer Reading Clubs came to mind.

You might think that my childhood bedroom was plastered with Summer Reading Club certificates, but you would be wrong. I rarely earned one.

That is not to say, of course, that I didn’t read in the summer. Au contraire, I read voraciously, hitting the Carnegie Public Library on the Court Square regularly all summer. We would even walk or ride our bikes to downtown to get new books.

I read all the time, devouring science fiction series and nonfiction books about science and theatre. Lots of art books, tons of “how-to” project books. I even haunted the reference section which had art history books with actual tipped-in illustrations, and even at a young age I was put out that someone (I’m looking at you, Mrs. Wood) had cut out the Rubens nudes with scissors. Seriously—just rip the entire tipped-in reproduction out if that’s your inclination; why go in and cut around the naked ladies? (It occurs to me that it might not have been censorship, but porno-vandalism. Simpler times.^[1])

So what was the problem? I dutifully got my little Reading Club flyer at the beginning of each summer, and I dutifully noted which books I had read, often filling up the form.

But I didn’t read the right kinds of books.

That’s right, my sweetlings, our Summer Reading Clubs were severely prescriptive in what you were “encouraged” to read. You had to do so many nonfiction books, and so many fiction, and of those you had to read certain kinds, and if you didn’t, you didn’t earn the certificate.

As I sat by the fire last night, I just marveled and chortled at how stupid that was—but that’s the way education used to be (AND LARGELY STILL IS) through and through: the Way It Spozed to Be, as it were. (The linked title was published in 1969. Nothing much has changed. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE??)

Why not provide alternative forms or checklists for different kinds of readers? Given that boys gravitate towards nonfiction, why not tilt their requirements in that direction? Why not let girls read nothing but Nancy Drew or Sweet Valley High? Why not just say, “Hey, kid, read 25 books in these eight weeks, and you’re golden!”?

But no: a well-read young person reads broadly, not necessarily deeply. Boys like nonfiction? Girls like romances? That is a deficiency which we must correct through our Summer Reading Program. The whole thing was prescriptive: Thou shalt… and Thou shalt not…, with no thought to the inner life of the reader.

Ludicrous bullshit, of course, and I would like to think that summer reading programs are a little better set up here in the 21^st century. However, I don’t want to go find out. I’m going to pretend that fifty years later, we’re doing it right.

—————
^[1] Actually, not simpler at all. If you wanted to gaze upon naked ladies, you had to jump through some serious hoops and cover some serious tracks. Titian and Rubens might be your best bet to see a booby, and who am I to judge those who managed to excise their very own Sleeping Angelica for their prurient delights? And God help you if you preferred naked men instead. These modern times are much simpler, and better, and so say we all.

Treading water

Posted on June 2, 2014 by Dale

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.

Well, this was unexpected… and ADORABLE!

Posted on May 30, 2014May 30, 2014 by Dale

So I’ve been roped into teach a weeklong workshop down at Newnan Theatre Company—thanks, Robbie Kirkland—for middle schoolers. The ostensible topic is “character development,” and the theme is “Villains.” Bwahaha, and all that.

Actually, not bwahaha at all. It’s “character development,” and I’m not spending a week teaching kids how to twirl their mustaches. Just the opposite in fact. We’re going to develop two villains each, one Disney-esque/cartoony, the other “real life,” e.g., the mean girl at school, the snotty boy down the street, etc.

Mainly we’re going to learn that none of these people think they’re evil. They just want certain things and they have their own ways to go about getting them.

Anyway, we spend Monday through Thursday working on material, and then on Friday is the obligatory show for the parents. It will be interesting to see what we come up with. (Panel discussion about public misperceptions? The Dating Game? The mind boggles.)

I got home from our meeting at the theatre, and for some reason the idea of an opening number just seized me.

Presenting, “Not Really Bad: a song for villains,” words and music by Dale Lyles | score (pdf) | mp3

It is totally adorable, you guys. (And yes, 3 hours start to finish—how kind of you to ask.)

One of those days

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Dale

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.

Cocktail: variation on a margarita

Posted on May 28, 2014February 22, 2020 by Dale

I thought I had blogged about this, but searching the blog turns up nothing.

Back in April, I came across a fancy schmancy version of the margarita. It involved such twee efforts as a vodka/saline spray instead of rimming one’s glass with salt, and an arból chile tincture.

Apparently I’ve spared you the details of tracking down the arból chiles and soaking them in Everclear™ for two weeks, then creating the spritz, but let me just say that the final results were… lackluster. Perhaps the essential ingredient is fresh key lime juice rather than the bottled, but I am so not going there.

In any case, I was now possessed of a pint of arból chile tincture. It will keep indefinitely, so I expect to spend the summer playing with it.

This afternoon, I revisited the question of the margarita. I used mezcal instead of the tequila blanco in the chichi recipe, and my saline solution was made from smoked sea salt. It is tasty. Very very tasty.

A Margarita

splash blood orange bitters
smoked sea salt solution
1.5 oz tequila or mezcal
1.5 oz Roses™ lime juice
1 oz Grand Marnier
1/2 tsp arból chile tincture¹
orange juice

Rim your glass with salt. Splash the blood orange bitters into the bottom of the glass; spritz with your sea salt solution. Add ice.

Add the rest of the ingredients except for the orange juice to the glass. Splash with orange juice, stir slightly.

It’s not for weaklings. Adjust ingredients to your tastes and your cabinet.

(I had to make a second one—had to, I tell you—in order to take a photograph.)

—————

¹ Put 20 arból chiles in a clean glass container. Add 1-3/4 cups of grain alcohol (such as Everclear™) to the container. Cap. Shake daily for two weeks. Enjoy.

Dream One, “Hark, the sound of screaming fans” – a fragment

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Dale

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.

An artifact

Posted on May 28, 2014November 14, 2024 by Dale

My lovely first wife returned from Virginia recently with another box of old stuff from ancestral sources, and one of the items was an ancient music notebook.

It’s 12″ wide x 9″ tall, and everything in it is completely handwritten. It seems to be two notebooks bound together.

Here’s what is written on the cover:

“Gesänge für R. A. Bxxx.” “Songs for R. A. someone…”

There is no date anywhere in, and it’s all in German. There are two pages which seem to be lyrics, written in the same beautiful hand, and one of those is in French. The lyrics page in German is almost completely illegible.

There are two songs and around twenty piano pieces, all dances like galops, waltzes, ländler, and polkas. There is a set of five contradanses near the end.

There are many blank pages.

Titles, if present, are written in either the florid script you see above or some neatly penned fraktur script.

I have not yet played through the book yet, but a cursory glance reveals no overtly famous pieces. None of the pieces are attributed to a composer. There are more than a few corrections in pencil and in ink.

So is this a copybook that someone was making for a friend or loved one, or is it like Bach’s Notebook for Anna Magdalena, original compositions?

I’ll report back if I find anything interesting.

update:

One of the pieces was titled “Schwarzenbacher-Galopp,” and I was able to track that down to The Universal Handbook of Musical Literature, published in 1907. It’s listed under the works of one Wenzel Schwarz, born in 1830, and that’s all I can find about the man. [To give you the full nerdgasm, I actually found the piece in this version of the Handbook; otherwise, I might have missed Wenzel’s entry. Both are scanned; neither are edited.]

So it seems that at least some of the works are copied, although one of the pieces I played through had some blatant harmonic missteps, given the simplistic nature of dance music of the time. Could have been a copying error.

And here’s another one: “C. M. von Webers lezter [sic] Gedanke,” found here. It’s the exact piece in the notebook. So this is a copybook.

One more: “Lied aus Czaar und Zimmermann,” by one Albert Lortzing.

All in all, I’m dating this thing to the late 19th century, when individuals would still be interested in these dances. This easily could have been someone’s g0-to book for impromptu dances at home or with friends.

So that was fun. I suppose I should get back to analyzing the libretto for the last scene in “Dream One.” Or something.

Dream One, “I am alone”

Posted on May 27, 2014May 27, 2014 by Dale

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

“I am alone,” blargh!

Posted on May 26, 2014February 9, 2022 by Dale

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.