Why am I writing this music specifically?

I had sort of forgotten that MELISANDE was meant to be a student theater piece.

Over the past few months I've written two grants to assist with the funding of the project, including a potential workshop with students. The application I sent to Emergent Ventures got turned down; the other application is still outstanding, and decisions will be made in January.

The trouble is that I got so caught up in how to make the music the best it can be that I didn't necessarily ask myself how I can make it the best it can be for students, although it may turn out to be the same thing.

I did a lot of work on the King's song today, and at this point his portion is finished (there's a brief response from Fortuna which is half-written and may be finished tomorrow). It satisfies me both musically and dramaturgically in terms of everything the song needs to communicate, including:

• A sixteen-year time jump, as demonstrated by the expansion of the King's theme
• The King's willingness to fix anything he may have done wrong, paired against his unwillingness to change (he's happy to update his schemas and priors but hesitant to update his conception of self and its corresponding behaviors), as demonstrated by various rhythmic variations on the theme
• The introduction of a new idea, as demonstrated by invention; a three-part invention, during which the pianos play two of the parts and the King very nearly sings the third
• His attempt to dismiss the idea, as demonstrated by having one of the pianos play his theme on top of it as the King returns to his rhythmic spoken analysis of the problem
• His fear that he has failed his daughter hurriedly transformed into a list of everything he's taught her ("she's good at chess, she knows the rules of counterpoint and argument"), he does not even allow himself a break to process the idea that he almost articulated
• A cacophonous but harmonically organized combination of everything we've heard thus far as the King concludes that both he and Melisande are capable and rational, which is the only thing that matters, ending on a technically appropriate but deeply unsatisfying modulation from C Major to F Major

I guess the question is how do you teach a sixteen-year-old that this music means the King is ignoring the truth and focusing on the contents of his own mind?????

Do you say to the sixteen-year-old, "hey, look, notice how the King is singing the word truth on top of this brilliantly incorrect F Major chord?"

Do you explain to them why the F Major chord is incorrect, even though it's clear in the previous sixteen measures that the King adds flats to a C Major scale with every problem he addresses and erases them with every solution he provides until C is suddenly the dominant of F?

Even though every other phrase of the song has treated C as a flat-nine suspension that might actually be leading us towards B Major?

And that B plays a particularly interesting role in this musical, it is the note that is used to represent want, and we've already established that the overarching idea I'm trying to present in MELISANDE is "to want is to grow?"

I mean, I guess the question is –

Do you need to explain any of that to anyone?

You probably don't want to explain it to the audience, it would be one of those dreary Program Notes that always reads as "we didn't know how to make sure you understood this without having the director/conductor/composer write it out," as if there were already an admission of failure in the production.

But do you explain it to the students, or do you just let them play the material and think to themselves "huh, something sounds complex here, I had better figure out what it is," even though I bet most sixteen-year-olds aren't even aware of the flat-nine, they think the scale ends at the octave and why shouldn't they, it's one of those things we keep from them because it would be too complicated to introduce everything at once, just like we don't really explain math or physics.

And maybe one kid will figure out what it is, or maybe they'll do the musical when they're sixteen and when they're forty they'll see a book about the musical in the library and check it out for the sake of nostalgia and suddenly learn that there were all these layers they never understood but kinda-sorta sensed, at the time.

I'm rambling. I mean obviously if I get to do this musical with for-real students I want to sit them down and explain that every single note has a specific meaning, just like every single word has a meaning and every single action has a meaning, and their jobs as theater artists is to communicate that meaning in the most efficient way possible.

I wonder what would happen if I put that into a grant proposal.

What I don't want to do is turn this into a something-something about feelings, can you imagine what it would be like to be a forty-year-old man with a sixteen-year-old daughter who is unsure if he failed her as a father, can you remember a time when you were worried that you failed something, blah blah blah etc. etc. etc.

Because the music tells you exactly what the King is like.

So do the lyrics.

And if they don't, I'm the one who's failed.