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Originally Posted by Daniel
Well that's just something about modern music - good ideas are not repeated as much.
That said, some ideas he uses a fair amount of times in this opera. A couple of the sea interludes provide a lot of the material of the first act. Plus there's motivic development going on all the time.
"Grimes is at his exercise" theme is used by Grimes when he hits Ellen for "Then God have mercy upon me". (it's almost like a cadence, in lydian). This line is also used as the bass of the passacaglia.
Anyway, fabulous work. It has tremendeous power to move one if one sits through a whole performance in the opera house. (A good performance, that is).
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I did notice that some of the theme kept coming back at least. There just seemed to be long periods of time in between when it seemed like he was trying out a lot of different ideas but not really fleshing them out.
Maybe it is just the modern music thing. There are a decent amount of composers that, to me, feel like they're in a constant state of experimentation but never really seeing each experiment through to the point where it becomes particularly expressive. I get the same sort of feeling when I listen to Shostakovich too.