On "Jade Rabbit (Mercy)"

    In my breakdown of "You Go", I talked about my approach to unusual metric schemes. Because I personally have such a strong physiological reaction to groove and rhythm, I tend to think of meters as, implicitly, tied to the circadian rhythms of the characters. I hear the underlying pulse as a heartbeat, or a gait, or a communicative flow. "Jade Rabbit (Mercy)" takes this idea to its most extreme. Though the core of the song is nominally an ABAC (I'm a sucker for traditional forms, even in unusual contexts!), once the beat kicks in, it takes 17 bars until the same meter occurs two measures in a row. You can see 4 different meters in 6 bars below:

    Why would I torment these poor performers with rhythms this dense? And, furthermore, with extreme and difficult-to-tune dissonances like parallel 9ths and 7ths? It's not simply because I think it sounds cool and kicks ass, which for the record I do. The Emperor has just lost 9 children in one day. I feel that his grief, and rage, are towering, so much so that if I brought him onstage, it would change the show's emotional center of gravity. That's part of why I mediate the interaction through the rabbit; it gives the Emperor some much-needed distance, ensuring he doesn't have the chance to steal the scene.

    Even so, I wanted to hold the audience in a sort of state of immediacy with the Emperor's emotional intensity. I'm paraphrasing here, but George C. Wolfe talks about the way a repetitive groove can cause an audience to skate over a dramatic moment. When the audience can't locate a downbeat, can't adjust to a tempo scheme, can't identify a tonality, they're confronting the music much more directly. That lets me load in all the musical anguish I can, knowing that an audience will take it straight to the jugular, so to speak.

    There's another way I set the audience up to best absorb this number. I start the scene out with a short, musically simple comic moment with Magpie "becoming" the rabbit, and the Archer reacting to her arrival. If that sequence weren't there, we'd transition straight from the somber ending of "It's Coming Down" into the rage of "Jade Rabbit (Mercy)". With the moment of contrast, however, the audience has a moment to relax again, so that the ferocity of the Emperor's emotion hits them fresh. I think a lot of operas in particular shoot themselves in the foot by neglecting this sense of relaxing tension. An audience acclimatizes to anything that's sustained, even if what's sustained is emotional and musical intensity. By taking away their sense of expectation and introducing contrast, whether within or between numbers, you engage them more completely.

    Doesn't it all kick so much ass, though? I love contemporary classical writing so much, y'all.

"One after one after one after one after one/and then show mercy..."