"I Want"

I started scoring the "I Want" song this week. Originally I had meant it as a fairly straightforward musical theater number, with exactly what you might expect in terms of harmonies and flourishes, the dramatic arpeggio that begins at one end of the piano and ends at the other and so on.

(There's probably a name for that arpeggio, right? The one that introduces a big solo? Google is extremely useless for those kinds of searches these days, so I suppose I'll have to find out in a book or something.)

But as soon as I started scoring it I began picking notes that emphasized the subtext of the piece. This isn't "That's Rich" from NEWSIES, although it could easily have been structurally similar. This is a sixteen-year-old girl telling her parents that she doesn't want anything because that is what they have taught her to say.

Remember – the theme of MELISANDE is and has always been "to want is to grow."

So what I have to communicate in the "I Want" song is that Melisande is willing to test the idea that she wants nothing but not quite willing to believe it. Her life is static, which she has been told is a good thing, equilibrium and so on, and so she begins showing off, which is the only thing you can do if you don't have anything real to offer, and so I am giving her modulations and melismas and clever turns of phrase, and meanwhile the two pianists (who are the two fairies in the story, Malelvola and Fortuna) continue to enter discordances into the record.

The discordances themselves are not yet specific, which is why it may take me longer to write this song than I had thought.

I mean, the discordances in the first section of the song are very specific, and then I thought I would transpose those ideas (literally) into the second section, and of course that never works, Melisande is communicating new-but-contradictory information and so I need a new-but-contradictory accompaniment.

Which shouldn't be as hard as it seems to be, since it was very easy for me to write the lyric and the vocal line that function as X and X' (not to get all logical about it), so it should be just as easy to take the accompaniment X and make it an accompaniment X', and of course when you look at it that way it becomes obvious that it has to be a different accompaniment, since no X can be X' and vice versa.

And then I went back to the notes I had taken on this song when I first started writing it, and I had written, in that spot, "deceptive cadence."

Well, now I know what to do next.