Cinderella's Bad Magic by Kyle Gann

This is an excerpt from the opera by Kyle Gann called Cinderella's Bad Magic. Today I will play the music of Scene 5: It Never Really Snows Between Scenes Performed Kimberly Kahan, Helen Donaldson, Michael Callas, Kate Sullivan, David Garry, Patricia Spencer, Carmine Aufiero, Nicole Reisnour, Kyle Gann, Bernard Gann, and conducted by James Bagwell.

Kyle's program notes say:

"The music is in a pure tuning of extended just intonation, with 30 pitches to the octave. The harmonic structure of the piece follows the journey and the awakening - minor keys are constantly transforming into major keys, only to fall back into minor again. The work opens in an idyllic E-flat major which begins to dissolve in Scene 2: the moment Rip Van Winkle sings "One day I went to sleep and woke up," the music opens up into C major. Cumulative modulations continue through A, C#, A#, contrasting ever more distant keys which come more and more to exhibit quarter-tone relationships, fractures in the musical texture. The anxious awakening in Scene 8 is prelude to a kind of recapitulation in E-flat, but now with a fluid ability to run through all nine major and minor keys. The appearance of C double-sharp minor in the final chords signals that the journey is not over, but has just begun."

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