Seeking balance in a chaotic world
“Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter” performed by Edward Cohen, November 2020.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
I just love Ed’s attention to articulation in this recording. He used the accents and dynamic changes to tell a story here, and that takes a tremendous amount of artistry and skill.
I have long been fascinated by the connection between music and literature. My favorite pieces are the ones that tell real stories, or convey a timeless message to which we can all relate. For example, in Schubert’s “Der Erlkonig” and Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz,” the listener hears the devil’s laughter and knows the human characters will not survive. These scenes are profoundly tragic in ways that all humans can understand and relate to, yet all we hear are the musical notes. This is the power of art.
When I began this string quartet, I was working at a book store. Everyday I would sneak into the stacks of literature and read as much as I could without getting caught. It was during this time that I was introduced to the works of Franz Kafka. Immediately upon reading his words, I knew I wanted to set them to music. The dream-like quality of his stories and the constant sense of anxiety in his prose put me on edge, and filled me with difficult emotions. I began researching his life, and found his real story to be almost as painful as his characters’ stories.
Born in a Prague ghetto in 1883 to an emotionally abusive father and bewildered mother, Kafka developed into a nervous, death-obsessed adolescent. He never married, and some of his most substantial female relationships were through innuendo-filled letters with married women. He eventually took a job at an insurance bureau, but began writing short stories on the side. Though rarely published, his stories were startling and unique. Dark, haunting, and non-sensical, each one feels more like a drug-induced nightmare than a short story. Kafka wrote hundreds of letters and diary entries as well, detailing his vague escape fantasies; possibly to Palestine where his Jewish brethren would welcome him, or to far-away America where he could reinvent himself, or anywhere that he could finally find a community that accepted him for who he was. Franz was brilliant, but neither his father nor turn-of-the-century Prague appear to have noticed. Regardless of his desires, he never left Prague, and died at the age of 40 from tuberculosis.
I related to Kafka in a number of ways, back when I was obsessed with him, back when I was writing this music. I was about 22, in between school and whatever future career I hoped to build. I was working a part-time job, delaying the inevitable. I drank too much, stayed up all night, slept til noon, accomplished very little. I felt isolated and scared and indecisive and twitchy… not a great time. I was obsessed with my own impending death, with time ticking by, with the ever-present fear that I was wasting my life. Upon reflection, I realize now that this was just a transitional time for me, when my childhood had ended but adulthood had not yet begun. I did not have a community, I wanted to be someone else, I wanted to be better than I was, to have more skills and experience, I wanted to flee. At that moment in my life, Kafka’s strange voice reached out to me across the expanse of time and made me feel like maybe I wasn’t so alone.
Like Kafka, I’m also Jewish. Kafka seemed to vacillate between indifference to the religion of his birth, and the intense interest of one who tries over and over (in vain perhaps) to feel connected to his culture, his ancestors, his local community. In Kafka’s entire written works, there is only one, single mention of Jews or Jewishness. Yet Judaism permeated the culture of Kafka’s upbringing, and most definitely influenced his style of story-telling: his gallows humor, his affinity toward demonstrating the absurd nature of human existence, and of course the sense of “otherness” that all his main characters share. I have always felt similarly conflicted about Judaism. I have never been a true believer, nor have I felt much in common with those who take the dogmatic parts of the religion seriously, which made it difficult for me to find a home in the Jewish community of my birth. However despite this lack of faith or religious devotion, I am absolutely a byproduct of Jewish culture and upbringing. Jewishness is in my blood, as well as my way of speaking, my sense of humor, my cynicism, who I am and how I see the world. I may read about the history of Judaism as a way to feel connected to my ancestors, to understand all the ways the religion and history and culture shaped me, but (like Kafka) I have no community in the temple.
Kafka took this sense of “otherness”, this cynicism and love for the absurd, this desperation and loneliness, and rolled it all together into an alternate universe that flowed endlessly from his pen. In his dream world, everything is almost exactly as it is in reality, except nobody seems to act the way a sane person would act. Social cues mean something altogether different, and we the reader are lost in what appears to be a culture both foreign to us and recognizable as our own. People are cruel and stupid, rules that make no sense are enforced without empathy, the world appears to be a labyrinth of faceless bureaucracy, and we the reader are lost in it without a guide or a map. So in other words, it’s pretty much like the real world.
This music is about Kafka’s life and my own. It’s about feeling lost and alone and desperate and scared. It’s about reaching for love and hope and joy in a world full to the brim with unthinking cruelty. It’s about striving for connections to our own culture, which though it’s our own can sometimes feel so foreign and nonsensical. It’s about making art in a cold and indifferent world, art that attempts to tell a story that is timeless and tragic and messy and uplifting all at the same time, a story about what it’s like to be human, a story we all know.
Fun fact: the keys of the five movements are C, A, F, C, A.
When I was a young man of 22, I developed a bit of an obsession with Franz Kafka. In retrospect this feels like a natural thing to have happened, since Franz Kafka’s stories are basically angst incarnate, and I was certainly feeling a whole lot of angst at age 22. At the time, I was a recent college graduate working at Borders, resisting my parents’ urgings to go get a teaching credential and start my career. I was broke, uncertain whether I was a kid or a grown-up, terrified of the future, maladjusted to the world around me, and dissatisfied with who I was. So yeah, Kafka spoke to me.
In Kafka’s world, nameless police break into your home in the middle of the night and drag you to your trial, where none of the evidence makes any sense to you but the judge sentences you to death anyhow. Kafka’s characters react to things differently than we would expect normal humans to react, which creates a disorienting feeling that something is off, or that we just don’t understand the rules. These vibes made me feel right at home in my early 20s, when I felt the profound sensation that I did not understand the world, that I did not know all the rules, that something was a bit off.
The Metamorphosis is the ultimate story for this brand of angst. The main character (who is pretty much Kafka himself) awakes to find he has become an enormous insect, a disgusting vermin, a horror so hideous his family can’t even look upon him. Like his family, he doesn’t understand why this has happened to him, or why, or even what kind of food he is supposed to eat to stay alive. When his family leaves plates of food inside his door, the food just makes him sick. He can’t communicate with anyone. Nothing makes sense. He spends his time frantically scuttling up and down the walls trying to make sense of the world, staring out the window longingly, and listening to his sister play heartbreaking melodies on her violin from the other room. His family tries to live normal lives, but clearly everyone has been shattered by the transformation. In the end, the bug dies. The family sweeps the corpse out of the house, and go out together to buy new clothes. Now that the horrible freak is gone, they feel alive again.
I think this story is really about feeling misunderstood. For anyone who has ever felt directionless, or lacking in strong relationships, or “apart” from the world, this story creates a perfect little metaphor for how that feels. You feel like a disgusting bug that can’t communicate, doesn’t understand how the world works, and just weirds people out. For all the sci-fi/horror components of the story, it’s really about the author himself feeling hurt and alone. Kafka, though brilliant, was a pretty misunderstood guy in his time. His low self esteem was reinforced by his brutish father, who never gave a kind word or loving gesture to his only son. Young Franz, a sickly but gifted kid, seemed unable to relate to most of the people around him, as if he came from a different culture (or planet). Easy to imagine him picturing himself as that bug. I know I did the same back when I felt so lost.
The music itself is a rondo, which looks like this:
The curtain raises on the reflective and somber “A” theme, music that comes back again and again throughout the piece. It’s a theme song (if you will) for the giant hideous bug monster pondering his own fate. The “B” section is the bug coming to terms with his new reality. He grieves and questions and rages and hopes and longs for things to be different. But inevitably that “A” section returns, confirming that this horror show truly is his reality, and resignation sets in. In the “C” section, the bug realizes that, though he is a monster unloved by the world and locked forever in his room, when he sets his humanity aside and embraces his bug-ness, he can do some cool stuff. He scurries up and down the walls, forgetting himself in the joy of stretching his segmented, hairy bug legs. It isn’t so tragic, at least for the moment, that he is no longer a man. He explores his bug senses, listening and smelling and experiencing his new reality, feeling what could even be described as happiness. He isn’t trying to be human or trying to be loved, but just being whatever he is.
In this music, there is a moment in the middle, while the bug is happily scurrying all over the walls, when suddenly you can hear his sister’s violin ringing through, her gentle tune rising above everything else, nostalgic and sad as the memory of a lost love. He may be separated from her, unable to communicate, horrifying to look upon, but they both understand that melody for what it is: a love song. Even in the midst of pain and uncertainty and fear, there are still things that tie us all together. One of those is love. Another is music.