"deliberate attempts to understand, capture, and replicate information through observation and the application of tools"
I've started scoring the end-of-act number, and I've got this feeling like it's going to take forever, by which I mean, like, four weeks.
We start with the delightful reworking of all of the themes you've heard thus far, the what-you'd-been-anticipating with one specific joke that you should be able to anticipate right before you hear it, not the tedious wife/life kind of thing but a rhyme that places itself in your mind right before it places itself into your ear (or at least I hope it works out that way), and then Melisande starts growing and Florizel starts singing and the entire musical structure of the piece changes.
More specifically it evolves.
Even more specifically it evolves just as it would have in 1901, which is to say that we go from Rachmaninoff to Ravel.
Even more more specifically we go from Rachmaninoff's Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos to Ravel's Jeux d'Eau, which is to say that I am attempting to reflect what each composer was doing, respectively, at the turn of the twentieth century.
Rachmaninoff was perfecting romanticism, which can be described as the (heroic) balance between rationalism and emotionalism.
Ravel was creating something new.
It was mistakenly called impressionism, in part because Monet couldn't think of what else to call his painting of a sunrise (true story); Ravel rejected the term because he (and Monet) was (were) objectively (obviously) responding to reality.
Jeux d'Eau is meant to recreate the sound of water through piano, just as Impression, Soleil Levant is meant to recreate the appearance of sunrise through oil paint on canvas. They are deliberate attempts to understand, capture, and replicate information through observation and the application of tools.
People called this symbolic and Ravel said no, it's not symbolic, it is the literal opposite of symbolic, why do you not understand this, and then at some point people said paying attention to what water sounds like and translating it into music using the tools available is way too much work, let's create post-impressionism where we can go back to a more general representation of things and then let's create modernism where we don't have to represent anything and serialism where we just pick notes out of a hat.
So yeah, Florizel is figuring all of this out, and I have to figure out how to communicate it musically.
Maybe it'll take six weeks, ha ha.