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The Metamorphosis

“The Metamorphosis” from Jackdaw

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:

What makes a piece a bagatelle? - Music: Practice & Theory Stack Exchange

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.

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Memories of the Ghetto

“Memories of the Ghetto” from Jackdaw

“This is not a city. It is a fissure in the ocean bed of time, covered with the stony rubble of burned-out dreams…”

Franz Kafka, writing about Prague

Franz Kafka grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Prague, one of the most ancient Jewish communities in Europe. My own Jewish ancestors also lived in the Jewish quarters of various European cities. The ghetto can mean so many things to the person who grows up there. It can mean a prison. It can mean the memory of one’s grandmother making soup on a Sunday afternoon. It can mean the cold, emotionless face of a police officer, or it can mean freshly baked bread, or a baby’s first breath. It can mean poverty. It can mean the language and hopes and stories and memories everyone shares there, and how those same hopes and memories have been shared by generation upon generation, leading backward into the endless abyss of time. The ghetto can house one’s cultural identity, one’s ancestors, one’s fondest and darkest memories. It can shape one’s sense of self and fears and hopes for the future. It can be detested and longed for all in the same moment.

I wanted this music to convey a sense of wistful nostalgia. The movement is a series of vignettes, or memories, that come and go as the music progresses. Memories of one’s own childhood, faces of people we’ve loved, a deep longing to return to a place and time that perhaps only ever existed in our memory. We smooth over the real details of our upbringing, of the culture that shaped us, until all that remains is a blurry recollection that is more feeling than memory.

Havelska Street Market circa 1900

I’m Jewish too, so of course the music is also about that. My own ancestors lived in the Jewish quarters of various European cities. For hundreds and hundreds of years they lived and worked and loved and laughed and built their communities. I stand on top of the rubble of those countless generations, and one day will become part of it. Yet despite that, I’ve never felt very connected to my ancestors, to their culture and memories and lives, to their religion and beliefs, to their struggle fleeing persecution, to what they left behind, to a way of life that is gone forever. I’ve always wanted to feel that connection, but it’s not something that can be forced. I grew up here in California in a secular family, far from the trials and rituals and religious teaching that my ancestors knew well.

This music is about longing: a longing to feel connected to something ancient, about a nostalgia for a world I’ve never seen, for a family I’ve never known, for a culture that isn’t my own. I can reach back in time and try to remember the Jewish quarter as it existed once, remember my ancestors as they lived and loved and prayed and raised children and died, remember my own heritage.

Freshly baked bread, a baby’s first breaths, a lover’s embrace, a tattered prayer book, my grandmother’s soup.

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Thoughts on writing about Marxism

Written after reading Understanding Marxism by Richard Wolff

I’d like to pose a series of questions that I believe any competent Marxist author must address in order to fully convince me that socialism is a workable solution to the intractable problems run-away capitalism is creating in our world:

Violence

  • What role does the author expect violence to play in the revolutionary transformation to (and maintaining of) a truly socialist society?
  • How is wealth to be redistributed without violence, or is violence the expectation?
  • Once achieved, can the classless society be maintained without resorting to government sanctioned violence and terror, as certain individuals invariably find ways to turn a profit, exploit weaknesses in the system, hoard wealth, etc?
  • If achieved through violence, is such a revolution worth the cost? If so, how much violence does the author find acceptable in order to achieve his desired ends?

Human Weakness

  • Is human nature inherently selfish, or is selfishness taught to us by our capitalist surroundings?
  • Are we truly capable, as a species, of accepting total economic equality? Can we suppress or even obliterate our innate desires – to compete, to profit from innovation, to improve the lives of our children, to hoard wealth – or are these too powerful and hard-wired?
  • How can a socialist society be governed responsibly and without class distinction, when the governors themselves face unending temptation to use the means of production to accumulate wealth for themselves?
  • Whoever we put in charge of the means of production and redistribution of wealth will face tremendous pressure to patronize friends and political allies, to maintain power at all costs, to prop up the system when times get hard (i.e. constant propaganda)… in other words, how do we prevent another totalitarian dictatorship from blossoming? Can any human leaders handle the temptation of managing the world’s wealth?

Freedom and Democracy

  • How much democracy will exist once socialism is achieved? Who will have a say in how the means of production are used?
  • How should the socialist government deal with freedom of speech (i.e. what should be done about those who criticize the system or advocate changes that might invite capitalism to spread?) – can this type of speech be allowed?
  • Will diverse political beliefs and policy proposals be tolerated, or will the state be forced to crack down on political discourse in order to maintain loyalty to the classless system?
  • What rights will be reserved to the people at all costs? Or is it too risky to give the people unimpeachable freedoms, when the people might be so inclined to pursue profit or criticize socialism?

Economic Diversity

  • In a socialist society, will all major economic drivers (prices, banking & finance, supply & diversity of goods, etc) be decided and controlled by the government?
  • Will the government decide which regions will produce which goods, and how they will be produced, and where the final products will be shipped? If so, how will the government deal with dissent?
  • If a Planned Economy is the model, how will the government maintain a vibrant and diverse economy, a resilient economy that can adapt to crises, an economy that can produce enough goods to keep the people in good health and a certain level of prosperity? How will they prevent stagnation and shortage and universal poverty?
  • Or will the economy run in a more democratic fashion, while still maintaining a classless society? If so, what are the details of this plan?
  • How is socialism to deal with types of jobs other than factory worker, farmer, or laborer? In other words, how will it deal with professionals, professors, artists, etc? What role will these types fill in society, and will socialism provide a place for those people to flourish?
  • If no person can ever profit from his labor, how will productivity be maintained? When there is no financial penalty for failing to complete work in a timely fashion, and no financial reward for producing good work, why work hard at all? What is the incentive to pour sweat and energy into a job, when the bare minimum produces the same outcome for the worker?

I feel that these are crucial questions that any intellectually honest Marxist, socialist, etc. must wrestle with in order to argue effectively that their worldview is superior to capitalism, that their plan will lead to wider prosperity, equality, and brotherhood than does our current economic system. If a Marxist author devotes a book (or even a career) to assassinating capitalism, but then leaves these questions perpetually unanswered, then he/she has left the “solutions” column blank. No matter how many ways one highlights the problems with capitalism, if there are no concrete, workable, non-violent proposals for how we create a more just world, then the whole critique of capitalism rings hollow. It may engender in the reader an acute disappointment that we live in such a tough world, but it doesn’t offer any maps to where we go next. The Marxist who only discusses the problem turns him/herself into an idealist raging against the dirty realities of human life.

(Of course there is something to be said for authors who hope their readers will be inspired to come up with new solutions themselves, but I digress.)

I’m not saying that there is no point in pointing out the problems with capitalism. I think that is entirely worthwhile, especially if speaking to an audience that has never considered those problems before. If one die-hard capitalist reads such a critique and realizes for the first time that poverty is all around him, that exploitation of the working class is how the wealthy build surplus wealth, that so many millions of working poor in America have no shot at prosperity or even stability – well that would be a victory in and of itself.

However if the author doesn’t immediately propose workable solutions to that reader, and address the questions above, then that newly “woke” capitalist will probably say, “Man it’s too bad that capitalism is such shit, but it’s the best we’ve got.” A reasonable person can look at capitalism and recognize on one hand that exploitation is a pillar holding up the system, but on the other hand note that profit motive and entrepreneurship and innovation are also pillars. Capitalism is not all evil; it in fact allows many people the chance to harness their own drive, creativity, and work ethic to build something new and exciting (if that individual is privileged enough to have the wealth/time to take advantage of such opportunities – which of course most Americans are not). If, after laying out a case against capitalism, the author proposes as the only “solution” some kind of far-off, vague ideal where all humans live in perpetual harmony, then the here and now will always win. We don’t get a better world than the one we’ve got if we don’t propose solutions, or at least baby steps, that can be (painlessly) implemented now. Marxism won’t win over new converts if it can’t offer up policy proposals that fit into the general public’s world view, a world view that seems to care much more about now than it does about later.

To reflect on my own motives for a moment, these questions stem from my own fears: the fear that humans aren’t capable of abolishing selfishness and accepting true economic equality; that any attempt at revolution will lead to wanton bloodshed, dictatorship, and corruption of the ideal; that trading capitalism for socialism will just create a new power structure where a minority (the government officials tasked with managing the means of production and distributing wealth) will rule over the majority (the workers); that stagnation and shortage will be the end result of any attempt to remove the profit motive from our economics. I want to see some concrete proposals that might bring us closer to socialism, without sinking into these pitfalls.

Just to be clear, I do not consider any kind of violent overthrow to be a suitable solution to capitalism’s woes. A mass act of violence, even against the “oppressors”, will only invite backlash, and these sorts of revolutions always bring with them unintended consequences (rioting, looting, public executions, dictatorship, civil war, etc). I do not personally believe that mass violence can create a better, more egalitarian world, so therefore I disqualify it as a solution.

So what solutions am I looking for?

Aristotle argued that a decent law is one that a majority of people would naturally want to follow because it aligns with their sense of morality and worldview. In other words, make something illegal if most people already don’t want to do it, make it legal if they do. Ideally the laws should help us build a sense of brotherhood with our fellow citizens, because (if they are well-conceived) they encourage the kind of decent behavior we all try to exhibit anyways. Conversely, a bad law is one that bans something we naturally want to do, thereby forcing us either to repress an innate desire or take that illegal activity underground.

In a similar vein, a workable solution to capitalism’s problems is one the majority of people can accept and are willing to implement, because it already fits with what they believe about the world. In other words, the proposals need to make sense to the person living today, and be painless enough we could put them into practice without disrupting everyone’s lives (or worse, triggering a wave of violence). This means small fixes, building over time toward an ultimate goal.

Tell someone you wish to ban profit motive, and they may look at you as if you are a crazy person (or more likely, an extremist). Tell them you wish to encourage more worker-owned businesses to flourish (perhaps with a tax credit), and they may say, “Wow that is a interesting idea, tell me more.” I would like to read a whole book full of small proposals that may ultimately lead to real, democratic, organic socialism, but in the here and now just sound like smart policy.

The book by Dr. Wolff was a concise and clear explanation of why capitalism is flawed, and how (like slavery and feudalism) it divides the world into exploiters and the exploited. The argument that we can do better was convincingly made.

Personally however, I already felt convinced of these flaws. I’m looking for solutions. When the book was done, and capitalism had been slayed (or at least pricked), I was left thinking, “that’s well and good, but where do we go from here?”

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Milena

“Milena” from Jackdaw

“I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting; even so, when I then want to raise my eyes to your face, in the middle of the letter… fire breaks out and I see nothing but fire.”

Franz Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenska

Franz Kafka began writing letters to Milena Jesenska when he was on holiday recovering from Tuberculosis in 1920. It began as a business correspondence; she was a translator of his short stories, and in addition to that, a married woman living in far away Vienna. However what began as a professional relationship soon warped into an obsessive kind of long-distance romance. The letters from Kafka are infused with desperate passion and lust, a sleepless, jagged, stream of consciousness urgency to every sentence he wrote. He wanted to worship her, to kiss her feet. He wanted to hold her from all sides, to steal her in the night and make love to her in the dark forests outside Vienna. He was guilt-ridden and embarrassed one moment, triumphantly confident of his love for her the next moment. He wanted her to take away his pain and disease, to see him for who he was and accept him, to want him. His love was insistent and oppressive and private.

Of course, this affair was doomed. She was a married woman living far away. Kafka was dying and desperate for love. Over the course of their entire affair, they only met in person twice. So really, the letters weren’t just a part of their relationship; the letters were their relationship. Kafka clearly obsessed over every word she wrote. He poured his very soul onto every page. He kindled the flame for as long as he could, but eventually he couldn’t stop Milena from breaking off the affair.

Milena preserved Kafka’s letters, and understood him as a genius. When Kafka died she wrote a loving obituary in the Vienna press, and promoted his works. Later, when the Nazis came, she joined the resistance and helped many Jews escape Austria, though the work was dangerous and she was not Jewish. Eventually the Nazis arrested Milena for consorting with Jews, and sent her to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp where she died in 1944.

“By the way, why am I a human being, with all the torments this extremely vague and horribly responsible condition entails? Why am I not, for example, the happy wardrobe in your room, which has you in full view whenever you’re sitting in your chair or at your desk or when you’re lying down or sleeping… Why am I not that?”

Franz Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenska

“Yesterday I dreamt about you. I hardly remember the de­tails, just that we kept on merging into one another, I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire; I remembered that fire can be smothered with cloth, took an old coat and beat you with it. But then the metamorphoses resumed and went so far that you were no longer even there; instead I was the one on fire and I was also the one who was beating the fire with the coat. The beating didn’t help, however, and only confirmed my old fear that things like that can’t hurt a fire. Meanwhile the firemen had arrived and you were somehow saved after all. But you were different than before, ghostlike, drawn against the dark with chalk, and you fell lifeless into my arms, or perhaps you merely fainted with joy at being saved. But here the transmutability came into play: maybe I was the one falling into someone’s arms.”

Franz Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenska

“I must confess I once envied someone very much because he was loved, well cared-for, guarded by reason and strength, and because he lay peacefully under flowers. I’m always quick to envy.”

Franz Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenska

“His knowledge of the world was extraordinary and deep; he was himself an extraordinary and deep world.”

Milena Jesenska writing about Kafka in his obituary
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The Hunger Artist

“The Hunger Artist” from Jackdaw

Franz Kafka’s final story is called “The Hunger Artist,” about a man who starves himself in a cage for weeks as a circus attraction (read the story here).  However, over time fewer and fewer spectators stop to watch his stunt. The few that even bother to notice him are mostly repulsed, and quickly skitter off to find more tasteful entertainment.  The people pass him by in his filthy cage, and eventually everyone forgets he even exists. 

Yet the hunger artist just continues to fast anyways, even with nobody watching. He knows he is an artist, but nobody else even knows he’s there. Eventually he finally dies a slow and painful death from starvation; unappreciated and misunderstood even in his final moments.  As soon as the man is dead, the circus owner disposes of the corpse with little ceremony. The cage is cleaned, and a young panther is put in the cage, wild and thrashing. A crowd gathers to watch the powerful animal throw itself around the cage, and they are reminded of freedom itself.

This is yet another of Kafka’s stories that appears to be autobiographical.  When Kafka himself contracted tuberculosis, his diseased throat became so painful in the end that he could no longer eat.  While he was writing this story, Kafka was wasting away as the disease consumed him. Like his famous character, he too died of starvation; unappreciated, misunderstood, and forgotten by a fickle world.  The crowds, Kafka believed, want to see passion for life, strength and power, a shining panther slamming against the bars. Nobody has the time or stomach for a sickly artist wasting away in his cage. Kafka was never strong, never a panther, and he fully expected the world to toss his emaciated corpse in a ditch and forget he ever existed. Luckily for us he was wrong (at least about the forgetting part). The artist is appreciated today. Whether Kafka would have found that idea comforting while he starved… it seems unlikely.

In the music, listen for melodies from the previous movements. For example, the violin melody the sister plays in Metamorphosis returns, slowed way down and full of longing and regret. Much of this music expresses longing and regret. Over and over throughout the entire string quartet, the music longs for love and warmth and acceptance. It calls out for them, reaches and reaches, but they always seem to slip away. The love, the warmth, the acceptance were all dreams or memories, or memories of dreams.

We’ve all felt this way, the way this music feels, at one time or another. We reach for a lover who is gone. We reach back in our minds for a father’s smile, for a long-lost friend, for the home we grew up in, for a time when things were simple, for something that welcomes us with open arms and loves us for who we are. But it all becomes blurry, as if viewed through a mist, because we are reaching for memories and dreams and figments of our imagination.

The world can be cold and uncaring. It loves strength and youth. We all must die, and eventually every one of us will be forgotten. In time, we all get swept out of our cages, to be replaced by young panthers. Best to live and love and feel and create art while we have the chance. Best to cherish the memories of everyone we’ve ever loved, of everyone who loved us back. Cherish where we’ve been, what we’ve seen, what we’ve felt, what we’ve achieved and didn’t achieved, what we strived for. Cherish it all, for it is life!

Listen the entire Jackdaw String Quartet here.

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Piano Sonata No. 2 (Complete)

1. Lovejail – Read about this movement here.
2. Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter – Read about this movement here.
3. Gavotte – Read about this movement here.
4. A Joyful Adventure – Read about this movement here.

Today I completed a new piano sonata. What a relief to be finished. I can’t believe it’s over. I feel that I’ve completed something epic. I’ve climbed a mountain.

I started this music in Spring of 2016, during a difficult time in my life, and continued working on it until today, February 20, 2020. In fact, a good chunk of the second movement was written back in 2008, as a completely different piece which has now been dismantled. So this music’s been with me a while.

This music guided me through many life experiences, and was in turn inspired by those life experiences. As a result the sonata takes the listener on a real journey through my wants and hopes and dreams and emotions. It’s a tour of my psyche.

As I’ve noted in other posts about this sonata, this music is riddled with hope. It’s everywhere you turn in this sonata. It’s the main theme of the whole damn piece. Turns out my psyche must have a lot of hope in it.

Oh there’s other themes too: love and healing and time and growth. They all wind around each other, they are all intertwined.

This sonata is also really dang long. I started to say something, then had more to say, then more and more and more. The story takes its time to unfold. If you listen to this whole piece, you will drink deeply from my well of creativity.

I hope this music inspires and touches you.

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Who Am I Stealing From Today? (Makoto Ozone)

Today’s big winner is….. Makoto Ozone!

Have a listen to some music I finished today:

“A Joyful Adventure” from Piano Sonata #2

It’s called “A Joyful Adventure.” I wrote it after listening to this enlightened set of variations by Makoto Ozone:

This is Yoshi, a Japanese pianist, performing Ozone’s funky arrangement of Chopin’s Waltz no.7. What Ozone did to this waltz was brilliant, such a lovely mix of jazz with romantic.

Ozone’s treatment of Chopin put me in a jazzy mood, and helped free my mind from the rut of writer’s block that creeps up on me from time to time. After listening to this a number of times, I felt very creative. I wanted to play around with these jazzy colors, so I wrote the music above as an homage to Ozone. And by homage, I mean I totally stole his mojo.

Play the video starting at 3:17, and you will hear the rhythm I lifted from Ozone. I wanted to take that exact soundscape and make it my own, to write something as tasty as possible.

Of course, once I started down that road my project quickly morphed into something new, something that doesn’t feel like stealing at all. The music packs its own flavor of punch. It’s got something new to say.

By the way, I was also listening to some Gershwin while writing this music, and wouldn’t you know it, some of his mojo got sponged up into my music as well.

Who will I steal from tomorrow?… Only time will tell.

By the way, this music is based very loosely on Mazurek Dobrowskiego, the Polish national anthem. It is also the final section of my 2nd piano sonata, which you can listen to in its entirety here.

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Lovejail

“Lovejail” from Piano Sonata No. 2

When life becomes intense, I tend to stop writing music for a time. This is usually due to a simple lack of time. When a child is newly born, or a business newly started, there is little free time to compose music. However these intense times also plant the seeds for the ripest artistic fruit. Momentous occasions, personal tragedies or triumphs, and major life changes generate emotions that (for me) can only fully be expressed through art. So usually during these crazy times, I am full of artistic energy but have no time to actually put it somewhere.

This music was written when life was crazy. Not sure how I found the time to compose this, but thank god I did. I remember composing a note here and there between teaching classes. In my life, everything was falling apart. I won’t go into the details other than to say that shit had hit the fan. The music I think is still optimistic in its own way. I am an optimist at heart myself. What am I supposed to do, write the saddest music you ever heard? I’m not some tortured Romantic weeping into the piano. I prefer music with a bit of a lift, what can I say?

Love themes pop up all over the place in this music. They poke their heads around corners and say hello, sometimes flirtatiously, sometimes with more serious undertones. Then after they say what they came to say, they flit away again. This whole sonata has that quality as well, and it’s something I really love about this music. I love love themes, especially when they aren’t overly gooey, but more sincere, more complex.

This music is in sonata form. It’s got a lot of Beethoven-inspired content in there, with some country-western overtones. I really like the return of the main theme (starting at 7:57) all the way to the end. This is some of my strongest writing in the more strictly classical vein. There is a touch of modern dissonance in there, but this is truly a classical work.

…at times a bit too classical-sounding? Hard to say. I expressed much that I wished to express with this music, but also something was holding me back I think. I clung tightly to the old forms and styles. My own voice emerges plenty of times throughout the piece, but I don’t feel like I am always my authentic self in every corner of the music. Even if the music sounds like it’s made of 100 different ideas, good old sonata form is right there through the whole piece. Beethoven hovers over my shoulder, raising an eyebrow at every jazzy dissonance.

Ok so the ghost of Beethoven has haunted me for years, and I still haven’t found a way to put him down, to unspool him from my music. But I would ask: how can a house be expected to unbolt itself from its very foundation and just walk away?

So Beethoven remains, and the music is more structured for it. I could go back and try to shoe horn more stylistic originality into the music, but I am going to cut my losses and write the next thing instead. This is still me trying to figure out how to write a sonata, and what I want MY sonatas to actually sound like. Everyone has to have student work. Or perhaps all work is student work, if we never stop learning.

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When it all clicks…

A while back, before Charlie was born, back when I first started this website, I was working on some variations on Poland’s national anthem. This started as a challenge from Polish pianist Joanna Różewska to do something with Polish folk music.

I worked diligently on it for a while, but got too in my own head about it. I couldn’t figure out what direction to take the music. Should it be variations? Also do I have any kind of connection to this music, to Poland? What am I trying to say with this?

I wrote the main body of the first variation, and never got further than that. After chasing my own tail for a while, I put this project down and walked away, thinking wrongly that what I had written so far wasn’t all that good. What also happened around that time was I quit teaching, went to Rome with Erica and Jack for a month, then came back and started a totally new career. I wasn’t writing much music during that crazy time…. When I finally came back to composing a few months later, I was rediscovering the magic of writing Quiquern, which became my musical obsession going forward. The Poland music was suspended indefinitely.

Over the next year or so I began to spin out the plan for my second sonata. I wanted the sonata to end with a redemptive quality, with a strong overtone of love and hope. As I’ve said before, so much of my music reaches for this same sentiment. Maybe I’ve just got love and hope on the brain.

What better way to express that sentiment than with the idea that something that once seemed lost may yet still be recoverable. The title “Not Yet Lost” stood out in my mind as the right way to express these feelings. Suddenly the Polish music had a meaning I could relate to, something I would enjoy exploring and playing around with. Though I am no Polish patriot, and the the nationalistic thrust behind the Polish anthem has no historical significance to me personally, the sentiment behind the music suddenly struck a chord inside me. It clicked! I dove back into the music and started sketching out ideas.

This is hard to describe in words: I wanted to take the hope contained in Mazurek Dąbrowskiego, and create variations on that. In other words, the variations are not so much variations on the musical theme (melody) itself, but instead on the theme of the music: the idea that something that seems lost is actually not yet lost, a hope for the future, a hope that we can build something worth building. That’s what Mazurek Dąbrowskiego expresses, and that’s why I chose it, not because of the melody. I took the melody in the theme and dismantled it, and sprinkled the component parts throughout my variations, but the variations don’t sound like the theme. But they do express love, hope, excitement, eagerness, etc. That’s the reason why, in the end, I call them “reinventions” instead of variations.

Here is the main theme:

From the get-go this music establishes a gentle, gliding, loving vibe. Though the original lyrics to Mazurek Dąbrowskiego are all about marching off to victory, I’ve dropped all of that militarism and allowed the simple clarity of the melody to linger in the air for a minute. I’ve also dropped the original 3/4 time. This meter switch has deprived it of any recognizable Mazurka sound, and instead given the tune a more spacious 4/4 runway.

The first reinvention goes like this:

This reinvention was largely already completed from my work on this piece over a year ago. I went back in and tightened up the form, took all the puzzle pieces I had struggled to connect and re-sculpted them so they fit together just fine. Turns out the puzzle pieces were all made of clay anyhow.

I originally thought that first reinvention sounded like Nordstrom’s piano noodling, but now I don’t think so anymore. Now I just hear a love theme. If the original theme is a reserved and sweet little love, this first variation is more of a gushy, open-armed love. This music is plush and at times unabashed in its amorous sentimentality. That suits me well for my current frame of mind.

The second reinvention goes like this:

This one was largely influenced by Bach, specifically this Gavotte from English Suite #3:

I heard that little nugget on the radio a few weeks ago and couldn’t get it out of my head. I wanted to create something of my own with that same snappy Gavotte feeling. I also wanted to make sure that this music had something to say about love. This love music is at times brooding and stormy, other times playful and jolly, and sometimes it’s reaching for something inspirational. It fits in with the other music, even if it sounds unique. I’d also like to note that the jolly bits have a certain dance-like quality, which stems from the Gavotte that originally inspired it.

Took me about two weeks to write that 2nd reinvention, though I should note that the only time I really get to work on any of this stuff is like 10pm to 11pm. So two weeks is pretty decent turn-around time for me.

As you listen, you’ll hear fragments of the Polish melody shining through, though it gets warped by the motion of the music around it. I do not take a vert strict view of Theme and Variations. I don’t want to write a set of ten perfect little variations, the way Mozart did for example:

That’s too clean for my taste. And dare I say it, maybe even a bit boring by the time the 5th or 6th variation rolls in. My variations are much more difficult to put into clean little boxes. Instead they wander and play and do pretty much whatever I want them to do. They do not conform to the original structure of the initial theme. Of course this means I have to be careful to make sure the source material still comes through to the listener and not just the musicologist. This is a tricky tightrope to walk.

That initial Polish theme, in my opinion, is too simple for straight variations. It has wonderful expressive potential, especially for writing inspirational, loving, or even glorious music, music that reaches for a higher ideal. But if I stick to that initial structure for 10 variations, I’d get bored….

I don’t think I’ll write 10 reinventions or variations or whatever any ways. Maybe I’ll just do 3 or 4, not sure yet. It’s not about coming up with as many variations as I can. It’s about crafting a larger piece of music, with a grander story arc that takes the listener where I want them to go. In other words, this form is a vehicle to express my overall point: that hope and love are not lost, that something which at one point might have seemed unreachable can in fact be reached. I think for that reason, each variation will reach for something. This music will be riddled with hope and grand gestures, bold statements.

That’s not to say the theme isn’t in there. This entire variation is built out of the theme. Just look at the first melody line:

Those notes are the same notes as the main melody of the Polish tune, though now woven into a quicker kind of Baroque-y thing that is also minor. But even if it is hard to pick out that original melody by ear, the structure is right there on paper. I like variations like this. I want to write a Bach-inspired romp with a few metal-esque riffs in there, music that makes you want to hear it again, makes you think. It can sound new but still have deep roots to the past. It’s a fun challenge. Above all else, I want this music to say what I need it to say, even if that means I have to cast aside any sort of intense loyalty to the original melody. This is my art, so I control the form.

When all is said and done, I’m writing far too much music to squeeze into one sonata. I’ll probably have to “cull the herd” a bit, and only keep the music that truly speaks the way I need it to speak. A lot of this other material will end up in the rubbish heap (“bonus tracks”).

Now onto the next reinvention!

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Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

This music was performed by Edward Cohen.

Today I finished writing the second movement of my second sonata.

I worked on this for some time, trying to express something I can’t quite put into words. About times that were hard, when I found my self searching fruitlessly for a summer bird during the dead of winter.

All the main melodies throughout this piece started as song. 

You know how it goes when you have a lot to say… too much to say. You try to squeeze too much meat into the sausage and it starts to look a bit unseemly. The feelings and hopes I wanted to express in the music could never fit into one song.

So I exploded the music and let it wander and quest for 20 minutes. It still feels like a song to me.. but now it spins and wrangles and waits and wants, and pulls you along and along like a river.

This is music about healing. Healing is not pleasant when it’s actually happening. Sure it feels great once it’s done, but the process itself is slow. It requires intense patience, and often comes with pain. So this music isn’t about being healed, but about healing.

This music is about waiting, about not giving up, about continuing to strive for optimism even when prospects remain dreary. The length of the music allows it to take on a new character: it stretches out before you, unabashedly long, extending into the distance, as if we are standing on a hill top on a cold, crisp day, looking out over endless miles of fields, trying to make out a little puff of smoke in the distance. Is it a cloud, or perhaps chimney smoke?

We start to get a sense of the power of time. Each little musical episode represents a day, a unique moment in one’s life. Day after day after day passes. There are beautiful moments and challenging ones, but they all pass eventually, and soon become part of a larger tapestry, where common themes emerge.

Life is like this as well. As we deal with each day’s unique challenges and surprises, it can be difficult to see the common threads that tie our lives together. However as the years stack up, those common themes become steel cables that tether us to our loved ones, and to our shared histories. The daily episodes fade in terms of importance in comparison to the mountainous weight of the passing years. In the end these main themes, these shared memories, these bonds become everything that matters to us. They become the vision we have created of ourselves and what we believe in: who we are, what we have stood for, what it means to be a family, what it means to love, what we feel we have accomplished, what we hope to pass on to our children, what we wish to be remembered for.

So in a way this is a song about life and about building a life with someone. It isn’t a clean story arc (neither is life). At times the music swells, other times it falls. But most times, like life, it just goes by, stacking up over time, adding on more and more experiences, until by the end you’ve lost track of some of it. The whole thing blurs together, with certain important moments standing out.

And there through it all are the main themes, the bonds that tie us all together, growing stronger with each passing moment.