Synthetic scales

That's the main underpinning of The Perfumed Garden; although some of them line up with both conventional jazz and Eastern modes, they're designed differently. For example, A Tent Placed Firmly is technically Lydian Augmented, but the construction is two separate tetrachords: whole-tone and harmonic minor. Most of the synthetic scales capture gestures that sounded right, and as I said it's really four-note patterns rather than octaves, using octaves as a dividing line. In terms of what makes the orchestration good, it's the fact that I'm treating them as two or three lines, rather than the top-down or bottom-up approach of SATB Bach chorales. The lines weave between each other, supported by the orchestra (Seven Steps etc.). The thing that makes them distinctively right for the show is different spellings of the same note, and those subtle differences will become the real ones if we're able to nail the various cultural dialogues between imams, tohunga and opera experts. - As you can see, I still wrote in the lush cluster chords. That's a novelty to Eastern ears, as they haven't cottoned to the way I guide pitch via clusters, like The Timing of Things from These Words Are Meant For Someone. Māori people picked that up. Harmonic planing + pedal clusters allows the singer to actually pitch those fine intervals off a piano. The song cycle was a fluke, but it led me to Music and the Power of Sound, which is why the Perfumed Garden isn't a fluke. The dance music and the interstitial music is the place for lush harmony, but the fundamental vocal drama is about that ground-note intervallic relationship. This is what makes it opera rather than a musical.