All songs are born to man out in the great wastes. Sometimes they come to us like weeping, deep from the pangs of the heart, sometimes like a playful laughter which springs from the joy that life and the wonderful expanses of the world around us provide. We do not know how songs arrive with our breath—in the form of words and music, and not as ordinary speech.

—Kilimê, East Greenland Eskimo, recorded by Knud Rasmussen; Pharmako/Dynamis, p. 239

Where does music come from?

The question is not Why do humans make music?, but more like How do humans make music? and more specifically How do humans make new music? Where does it come from?

I get asked this question all the time about my music. How do I come up with it all? Where does those melodies come from? How do I decide what goes where? And how does someone without a lick of academic musical training create things like William Blake’s Inn and the Cello Sonata and Six Preludes (no fugues) and Seven Dreams of Falling and my super secret new project?

Hell if I know, is the short answer.

I just spent three days in the mountains on retreat with my fellow Lichtenbergians, and all I produced was about a dozen ways not to sing the phrase “Rip me from this darkness.” If I knew where music comes from, I’d have a lot more to show for my effort.

Here’s what I know about where my music comes from. The Minotaur opens Dream Three of Seven Dreams with a four line lament on his unhappiness. (At least he does in the original script; I’ve requested that the dialogue be retained for the libretto.) At the end of the scene, as he and Theseus are making love, those four lines return (amplified) with a completely different emotional impulse, so to speak.

I’m therefore working backwards: I know the end of the scene is an ecstatic duet, and so I start working on making that happen. Later, I’ll take the melodies associated with those four lines and scale them back into a lament, changing the key and orchestration, perhaps even the rhythms, so that the notes that ring in our ears as ecstatic love start out as unhappy loneliness.

I also know that one effective way for music to depict ecstasy is to have the orchestra whaling away in chromatic arpeggiation while the singer soars above it with a strong, simple melodic line. (See: “Liebestod,” Tristan und Isolde, Wagner.) So far, I’ve approached it by trying to come up with the strong, simple melodic line and seeing where that takes me, but alas—that strategy has failed me.

I could keep working away trying to come up with that line, but I think what I’m going to try for a while is the other approach: work on the orchestral whaling and then construct the melody to soar above it. If the accompaniment gives me what I need, then no one will ever know that the melody was an afterthought. Well, you will, but you’ll keep your mouth shut in interviews, won’t you?

So the answer to the question “Where does your music come from?” appears to be “from a cold, calculating brain, not from a deep well of inspiration what are you crazy?”

I’ll keep you posted on the results.

I’m in the mountains, on our annual Lichtenbergian Retreat, wherein we are each to bring some creative work on which we’ve been slacking.  Since my recent work on Seven Dreams is the very definition of “slacking,” i.e., “no work at all,” I’ve brought it with me to jumpstart the process again.

(To be fair: 1) I ran out of text; 2) I was getting ready for and attending Alchemy; 3) my son got married.  Still, I bet Wagner didn’t let things like that slow down his ego work.)

At any rate, I’m in the Blue Ridge in a great cabin with four other Lichtenbergians—none of whom, I’ve noticed, seem to have brought any work at all, but let that pass.  I’ve brought the snippets of text which I have demanded respectfully requested begin and end Dream Three.  Hey, they’re Scott’s actual text from the original play, so I figure it’s not a problem.

Even if it is a problem, even if he ends up sending me a completely different text, I figure I can play around with scene setting and thematic/harmonic bits that I can then use with the new text.  As I said last night, measures full of sixteenth notes can be very flexible.  Bring on the words!

Here’s the part you’ve been reading for: whining.

In Dream  Three, Theseus and the Minotaur have had enough chitchat about their respective ritual fates and are getting it on.  The four lines of the Minotaur’s opening aria return, this time with a partner.  So, ecstatic duet, right?

Since I haven’t written any real music since August, I’m just aiming to produce crap the entire weekend, just getting my crapping muscles back in shape.  I don’t expect to use anything that comes out of my head in the next 48 hours—though one never knows.

My problem is that many of the halfway decent bits I’ve scribbled down are more Broadway than La Scala.  Don’t ask me what the difference is, there is one and I know it when I hear it.  So do audiences, and so do critics.  So I keep scribbling, breaking up some of the Broadway tunes with odd harmonies or melodic intervals, and it sounds more La Scala, but then it’s not very soaring or ecstatic.

Yes, I am modifying my music to please unknown critics.  On a personal level I have no desire be known as the opera world’s Frank Wildhorn or Andrew Lloyd Webber: singable tunes, loved by unsophisticated audiences but scorned by all right-thinking persons.  As Noel Coward said, “It’s extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”

On an artistic level, opera voices are not show voices, and the same melodies that fit comfortably on Neil Patrick Harris’s voice or Patti LuPone’s sound weak under Erwin Schrott’s or Anna Netrebko’s.  You want to please the audience and please the singers, and so you have to move them through the notes differently, if that makes sense, and  there’s more than a little element of athletic showing-off in the opera world.  If you make it too easy, they’ll disdain it.

I’ll get it done.  I just have to get back in the groove of pushing it all out—instead of blogging about it—because if I can produce a big enough pile of crap, there should be a pony in there somewhere, right?