"the symphony series" (dissonant grids marathon #1)

hello!!

this blog was always meant to mirror music. [editor's note: if you are a music nerd, be warned that i am about to make a lot of mistakes about music. i don't really care. this is my blog and it's ultimately a puzzles thing, i have only a bare-bones understanding of music theory] i had the idea for it in music class, and it was fleshed out in conversation with my music teacher, who is a pretty based composer. he talked a lot about using and abusing musical techniques to toy with the listener's emotions. how could i do that with crosswords? became was the central question of what has become my odyssey. 

today, i embark on a new leg of my journey. all of my blog puzzles until now have had one obvious theme. the emotions they want you to feel are pretty obvious, and sometimes forced. they're often right there in the title. but something struck me recently. symphonies are pretty emotion-inducing, but they don't often have witty titles. they're just called like "symphony #2" or some shit. they often have many movements, and the emotional motifs or contrapuntal motives or whatever are left to you to figure out. i don't know how a composer writes a symphony, but i imagine it often has a lot to do with what they're feeling. 

so starting tomorrow, i am creating my own symphony. every day in july, i will post a puzzle to the blog- one "movement" of the symphony. i will make each puzzle the day it is published. it will use whatever techniques i can dream up to make you, the solver, feel what i'm feeling that day. they will be untitled. figure it out for yourself. WELCOME TO THE SYMPHONY SERIES. i hope you'll solve along.

the puzzles:

JULY 1  (12x15 grid)