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On April 23, 2006, Rico Sego asked:

I was fascinated by the structure of your musical "The Last Five Years," and couldn't stop myself from analyzing the story arch when told both forwards and backwards. I noticed that the crux, or climax of the work comes when the two "see" each other onstage and are briefly "at the same time," which happens to be in the 8th number of 13. My question is: Are you familiar with the golden mean (golden proportion, section, ratio etc.)?

If not, a quick synopsis: it's the ratio or proportion that we, as humans, find beautiful or perfect. It's approximately 1.618 (or .618 depending on the comparison), and is often referred to in literature as the greek letter phi. It can be found by comparing one number of the Fibonnaci Sequence to the next (this is a summative sequence, whereby the next number is found by adding the previous two: 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55 etc.)

ANYWAY, there's been a ton of study done on all the different ways this relationship manifests itself in nature, art, architecture, etc. and how the man-made things that are most admired/found beautiful are the ones that mimic the harmony and perfection of nature in this way. We studied how composers used this concept in my music history classes during my master's, and found that many intentionally structured their works so that the climaxes came at "golden section" points. I couldn't help wondering if you had done so in your work, or if it was simply intuitively the "right" place. Any thoughts you'd care to share on this, and your process in general, would be appreciated!

To which Jason replied,

That question wins the prize for most esoteric so far. The fact is, I don't really honor the Fibonacci sequence, there are fourteen songs in the show, not thirteen. Furthermore, the fourteenth song actually comprises two songs, which I think of as #14 and #15. Therefore, the reason they sing together at #8 is simply because it is the mathematical center of the piece. (It also happens, strangely enough, to be the chronological center of the piece, but I didn't plan that, I was just pleasantly surprised to discover it during the run of the show.) So I actually violated the golden mean, but to answer your question directly: no, I really wasn't thinking of that stuff during the writing of the show. I feel like I'm letting you down by admitting that. Sorry, I AM a geek, I AM, I promise.

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