The secret to learning 176 pages of music in five days

I finished the end-of-act number for MELISANDE, which is to say I drafted it to a point at which I stopped drafting it, there's something specific going on in every measure, and yet I am still somewhat unsatisfied with what happens during Florizel and Melisande's first musical exchange.

It feels unsatisfactory, I think, and I don't know if it's musically or dramaturgically or both. Not that they can "fall in love" at this point in the show, and that's one of the jokes the musical number is deliberately making; everyone's anticipating the resolution to all of their problems and – as I wrote in the script – "FLORIZEL did not know he was unprepared for this until it happened."

Plus Melisande has started her second phase of exponential growth, the one nobody was expecting, and because of this I have placed a constraint on the pianists (and, by extension, the singers) which may be too mathematical to be satisfying? People want resolution, not incessant modulation.

I don't know.

I need to listen to it again, now that I haven't heard it for a week.

And yet – now that I am thinking about it, this being the first time I've had to write down my thoughts in a while – incessant modulation is what we seem to get, if we are the kinds of people who want it (which is in fact what Melisande wants at this point in the story).

This is a metaphor, of course, for Larry and me and maybe for you, and it's a segue into my telling you that I just learned 176 pages of choral accompaniments in five days.