Yesterday and today I worked on one of the main phrases of Icarus’s first dream aria.

A little background: Scott’s text for this aria is nowhere metrical, but it does have three repeating elements:

1. “I am alone” bits
2. “I am flying in the sky” bits
3. “Aloft on pinions/ Of hope and magic” bits

Part of the puzzle for me as a composer, therefore, is to make sure that whatever I come up with for one of these bits will bear repeating in a meaningful (and hopefully increasingly meaningful) way.  For the past two days I’ve been churning out crap—that’s the technical term—seeing if I could come up with something for the “I am flying in the sky” theme.  I started using the moving bass line from “I am alone” as a basis, but none of those attempts really grabbed me.

So when an approach isn’t working, go for the opposite approach.  Just drop your baggage and head in the other direction.  One of two things will happen: you will find an answer, or something you’ve written already will make more sense.

This time, I think it worked.  I won’t post the results today; I want to crack the “Aloft on pinions” puzzle before I post the next version of this aria.  But I will say that the transition from the “I am alone” recitative into “I am flying in the sky” really works.

P.S. to Scott: We are not giving a tenor the line “In my singular solar solipsism.”  That’s just daring the audience not to giggle at his lisp.

update: Just to double-check some harmonies, I switched the voicing on the piano score to French horn and strings.  Oh my.  Y’all are in for a treat.

Here’s our first look at our hero, Icarus.

After the Baroque splendors of the adoring crowds and the glories of his father’s pride, Icarus finds himself alone in his trajectory.

As a side note, I keep thinking of that Red Bull stunt of a couple years back, where Felix Baumgartner dove from the edge of the stratosphere.  (Cool video here.)  Of course, Icarus is kind of like a reverse Baumgartner: lots of telemetry/assistance going up—only with no suit, of course—but not so much coming down.

Anyway, musically speakingwise, after five minutes of nearly solid sixteenth notes in the opening, it’s time for a break.  We get a still, quiet statement of the first five notes of the labyrinth tone row, and then Icarus begins the first of his seven arias in this opera.  The entire thing will be about five minutes long by my roughest estimation, and no, it’s not going to stay this quiet and slow.  In fact, in the very next section we’ll get more movement as Icarus meditates on his relationship to flying and his father.

Dream One, “I am alone” (05/15/14) | score (pdf) | mp3

Note: there are some staccato markings in Icarus’s part that are there just to separate the notes in the recording.  They will be omitted in the actual score.

I am a little concerned that work on Seven Dreams of Falling continues to be in the 2-3 range of the LSCA, but take it and run, I always say.

Today’s work is from the middle of the fourth section, “Hark, the sound of screaming fans,” in which we’re in the control center for the Event.  It’s a bit of exposition, filling us in on the background of the overall myth.

For those who don’t know the whole slutty story, Pasiphaë is the wife of Minos, king of Crete, and Ariadne’s mother.  (She is also the daughter of Helios, the sun, which is cool but not relevant to our story.)  She managed to offend Poseidon, who sent a fabulous bull to Minos and then cursed Pasiphaë so that she was consumed by lust for the animal.  She forced Daedalus to build her a sex sling that looked like a cow so that she could lure the beast to her.

The result was that she gave birth to Asterion (“starlike”), otherwise known as The Minotaur.  Daedalus was then coerced into designing and building the labyrinth to hide the Minotaur from the outside world.

So that is the exposition Ariadne sings for us in today’s work:

Dream One, “My mother” (05/14/14) | score (pdf) | mp3

Ariadne herself has issues, needless to say.  (So, mezzo it is.)

Another appearance of the labyrinth tone row at m. 13.

I would like to point out how not comfortably diatonic this passage is, thank you very much.  As a self-taught composer, I am sensitive to the charge that purely tonal music is a) too easy; and b) unsophisticated, so the fact that the first five minutes of the opera just wallows in “pretty” music had me worried that it was dismissible.  (Not to worry: I quite like my opening.)

I’ll be honest: this is the fifth version of this opening number that I have written, and I’m still not sure this is it.  However, as Frank Gehry always says, let’s let it sit there and annoy us for a while.

After whatever I work out for the plunging motif, we are presented with the chorus.  As it says in the libretto: The Event is on.  Observers attend the moment in amazement and delight.

A brassy Baroque anthem launches right out of the gate, and the chorus sings.  It’s all extremely standard harmony, except for their paean to Apollo, the bass line of which is the labyrinth 12-tone row.¹

At the very end, you can hear the Zadok-arpeggios beginning, and in performance we would head straight into Daedalus’s “Fly and fall.”

“Let us joyfully gaze” | score (pdf) | mp3

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¹ I promise it gets more “modern” with Icarus’s first dream aria, right after “Fly and fall.”