On "The Sun Shines on You"

(I almost skipped over this one by accident. Can you believe it?)

    The difference, to me, between an opera (a through-composed form) and a musical (a song-structured form) is a rhythm of expectation. In an opera, at least post-Wagner, you don't have a sense of what musical material is going to come back when. If a motif, or a melody, recurs, it's always a pleasant surprise. On the other hand, when you're working within the context of song form, you can deliver on or subvert an audience's intuitions of what comes next. It's another way of playing them, almost physiologically.

    I'm always looking, then, for new song forms- if you get trapped in AABA/ABABCB for a whole score, it takes on a homogeneity, but without a backbone, the audience loses its sense of gravity, as often happens late in megamusical-style through-sung pieces. Here's an incomplete list of alternative possibilities, some of which I've looked into and some of which I haven't:

• ABAC (As in "The Sun Shines On You", but also "Jade Rabbit (Mercy)", at least subcutaneously.)
• AAAA
• Sonata form: exposition, development, recapitulation (Resembles AABA, until you factor in that you're expositing two contrasting melodies.)
• ABA
• ABAB
• Rhapsody: no/very limited repetition
• Half-choruses
• Symphonic structure, mass structure, etc. (See Heather Christian's work.)

    The point is to understand, at root, that you're playing with expectations- if you're not in the business of setting up pins, you can't be surprised when you don't get the payoff of knocking them down. Song form is a hyper-powerful way to do it, and it's one of the reasons I call myself a songwriter more often than I call myself a composer. And that's why I'm campaigning to bring back ABAC*, one song at a time.

"And if I want to write that wrong/I'll have to take what I deserve..."

*Look, I know that if I want to do it really right, I repeat the hook at the end of the C. That didn't happen in this show, womp womp. I'll keep working on it.