Gershwin treats his "Night time, day time" melody just as Berg did his tune, bringing it back as a plea for compassion at the end of the first scene and, later, as the lead-in to "Bess, You Is My Woman".
"And you've got to start from the beginning each time". Melody has eight years of training ahead of her - once she starts her chosen specialty of children's medicine next year - and that's if she doesn't choose to take time out along the way.
At the same time, Melody was preparing a set of songs by Kurt Weill to be included in San Francisco Ballet's premiere production of Nanna's Lied, choreographed by Helgi Tomasson.
The fact that Bolcom can knock out a Gershwinish tune like nobody's business has caused him to be underrated in the glum colloquia of contemporary music, where, for a long time, melodies had the status of radioactive rodents, and where seriousness is often measured by counting how many disparate pitches and rhythms pile up in any one bar.
I was in my little box just outside the northeastern border of Detroit, old enough to be aware of the slew of record stores we had like Record Time, Melodies & Memories, and Hot Hits, but not old enough to be able to physically go out and frequent the music scene.
What holds the album together is its play of opposites, not just between the horns but also in the music as a whole: sweetly played, take-your-time melodies over free rhythm, or free collective improvising over driving swing rhythm.
If the note is played at the right time, the melody plays and your score improves.
It was no surprise, then, that thousands of people who understood relatively little of what he was up to in his innovations with time and melody could derive such pleasure from his playing.
That was the time when melody, rhythm and harmony were taboo in contemporary classical music and I was warned by friends and colleagues alike that I would literally ruin my career by recording it.
Glancing over his shoulder at the guitarist John Fahey's Christmas album, "The New Possibility," Sean Smith offers spare solo-guitar versions of public-domain carols, often playing slowly and using just one or two strings at a time for melody and drone while his six-string guitar resonates.
The problem with repetition is that, over a period of time, the melody being repeated remains static, even when there is a surface level of rhythmic activity added to it.
