Sublime and ridiculous

We spent the day working on Britten's Sacred and Profane. Boy, they were hard: after five or six hours' work, we'd got three out of the eight to the stage where we could risk singing them in public. What I find with Britten is that it just doesn't stick, and I don't know whether it's him or me. I think it's mostly that my taste is for a melodic line, and I'm not very harmonically sophisticated, so all that dissonance that you're supposed to understand and turn into consonance just doesn't quite work for me.

At least all five of us seemed to be in the same boat. But it was a frustrating day. If terribly character building.