Overture
A Demo a Day: Day 21.
It is accomplished. Starting in early May I posted daily with demos of the 20 songs in Judgment Day. Now it’s time to wrap this series up with the overture.
Though the majority of the opera was composed between 2003 and 2007, I hadn’t written an overture until the fall of 2020. Contemplating finishing the demos and preparing to release a record, it was finally time; no self-respecting opera is complete without an overture. Eventually there will be a stage production that would force the issue anyway… the audience needs something to listen to while they’re filing in to the theater.
Give it a listen while I offer a few details on how I went about writing it:
As I came to learn on the job, you have to think about a lot when composing an overture. Obviously, it should supply a representative sampling of the songs to come. It should have dynamic range— some calm to help the audience settle into their seats, and some drama to rev them up for the opening number. It should be alternately beautiful and ominous. It should work as an instrumental primarily with symphonic orchestration. It should have a really strong finish to set up the opener. And, finally, it should be of a reasonable length. That last part was the hardest for me, because I was finding so many items that I wanted to include snippets from. My first pass would have clocked in at over twelve minutes. I was ultimately able to cull the overture to eight minutes, with passages from four representative songs that run the gamut of moods and styles.
The overture is composed of four parts, spanning four tonics.
It’s the dawn of a new day. The overture begins, as I had always envisioned, with a significant excerpt from THE ONE, which is the centerpiece of the opera. This number features the first appearance of the antichrist and ends Act One. The opening bass line is played on piano instead of bass, but otherwise it’s got the signature french horn and timpani. The glam rock annunciation section is performed by a more straightforward rock combo with the vocal part on guitar. This moves into the Poor Little Planet instrumental, switching from the key of C to E Phrygian dominant.
Such trouble in the world… after the doleful Phrygian movement, we continue in the key of E Mixolydian, jumping into the broadcast newsroom orchestra section of News of the World and picking up the pace. We switch to G for the bridge with a horn section blaring out the vocal part and back to E.
Hard segue to G minor: the ominous opening of The Eye in the Sky. Big brother is watching, what you gonna do? It’s time to take the mark… For the overture version, I added pounding timpani, blaring trombones and growling strings to drive the point home.
But not all is lost. In an natural segue from G minor to B flat, a horn section begins the last movement with the outtro to If the World Should End. The orchestra then joins to perform a significant portion of the song. It’s beautiful, hopeful and dramatic, just like Maggie’s torch song. We end on the last chord of the chorus, Gb, the flat sixth of the key, setting up perfectly for the blowing of Gabriel’s trumpet and moving straight into the opening number, If This Goes On.
As an added bonus, through some magic that I was completely unaware of while constructing the piece, the overture also perfectly recapitulates certain musical foundations of the opera. First off, the overture moves through the keys C-E-G-Bb, the original keys of the four tunes, spelling out the C dominant seventh chord. This is the main key for THE ONE, and Mixolydian mode is also prevalent throughout the opera. The other nifty thing is the ending on the Gb (F#) chord: Judgment Day is rife with use of the tritone, or devil’s interval, the western musical embodiment of dualism and good versus evil. So it’s fitting that the overture begins in the key of C and ends in F#.
There it is… a few thoughts as I unpack an over fifteen-year journey and get ready to unleash this on the world. So, have that last pre-show cocktail, settle into your seat, open your playbook, and enjoy. Thanks for listening!