Books Archives - Page 3 of 4 - Art, family, learning, life.

November 20, 2020August 18, 2023

Jackdaw String Quartet (Complete)

1. Memories of the Ghetto – Read about this movement here.

2. The Metamorphosis – Read about this movement here.

3. A Letter to my Father – Read about this movement here.

4. Milena – Read about this movement here.

5. The Hunger Artist – Read about this movement here.

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.

November 9, 2020November 20, 2020

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.

September 24, 2020November 22, 2023

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.

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.

July 3, 2020June 2, 2023

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?”

June 22, 2020November 22, 2020

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

May 21, 2020November 22, 2020

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.

September 10, 2019June 8, 2021

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.

April 23, 2019December 9, 2020

Quiquern (Complete)

Quiquern is a five movement piece of music for piano, two flutes, and a clarinet, based on a short story by Rudyard Kipling.

Here is .

1. The People of the Elder Ice – Read about this movement here.

2. The Dog Sickness – Read about this movement here.

3. Quaggi (The Singing House) – Read about this movement here.

4. The Magic Songs – Read about this movement here.

5. Hunter’s Return – Read about this movement here.

April 16, 2019December 10, 2020

Quiquern: The Magic Songs and Hunter’s Return

“The Magic Songs” from Quiquern

This next fragment of Quiquern is called “The Magic Songs”. Famished and delirious, Young Kotuko and the girl set out alone into the blizzard to find food for the starving village. As the dark and the cold and hunger devour them, the two children rave and hallucinate, unhinging themselves from the realm of men and into the realm of gods. As they descend, they sing songs of magic, songs buried deep in their memories, in their blood. Their voices rise and fall with the frozen wind.

And through this silence and through this waste, where the sudden lights flapped and went out again, the sleigh and the two that pulled it crawled like things in a nightmare — a nightmare of the end of the world at the end of the world.

The girl was always very silent, but Kotuko muttered to himself and broke out into songs he had learned in the Singing–House — summer songs, and reindeer and salmon songs — all horribly out of place at that season. He would declare that he heard the tornaq growling to him, and would run wildly up a hummock, tossing his arms and speaking in loud, threatening tones. To tell the truth, Kotuko was very nearly crazy for the time being; but the girl was sure that he was being guided by his guardian spirit, and that everything would come right. She was not surprised, therefore, when at the end of the fourth march Kotuko, whose eyes were burning like fire-balls in his head, told her that his tornaq was following them across the snow in the shape of a two-headed dog. The girl looked where Kotuko pointed, and something seemed to slip into a ravine. It was certainly not human, but everybody knew that the tornait preferred to appear in the shape of bear and seal, and such like.

It might have been the Ten-legged White Spirit–Bear himself, or it might have been anything, for Kotuko and the girl were so starved that their eyes were untrustworthy. They had trapped nothing, and seen no trace of game since they had left the village; their food would not hold out for another week, and there was a gale coming. A Polar storm can blow for ten days without a break, and all that while it is certain death to be abroad. Kotuko laid up a snow-house large enough to take in the hand-sleigh (never be separated from your meat), and while he was shaping the last irregular block of ice that makes the key-stone of the roof, he saw a Thing looking at him from a little cliff of ice half a mile away. The air was hazy, and the Thing seemed to be forty feet long and ten feet high, with twenty feet of tail and a shape that quivered all along the outlines. The girl saw it too, but instead of crying aloud with terror, said quietly, “That is Quiquern. What comes after?”

“Hunter’s Return” from Quiquern

This is the final music of Quiquern. At the end of the story, the dogs lead the boy and girl to a crack in the ice where seals are coming up for air. They kill as many seals as they can carry, and hurry them back to the village. The people rejoice as famine is averted just in time. They sing and light candles made of seal fat.

Kotuko and the girl took hold of hands and smiled,
for the clear, full roar of the surge among the ice
reminded them of salmon and reindeer time
and the smell of blossoming ground-willows.

Even as they looked, the sea began to skim over
between the floating cakes of ice,
so intense was the cold;
but on the horizon there was a vast red glare,
and that was the light of the sunken sun.

It was more like hearing him yawn
in his sleep than seeing him rise,
and the glare lasted for only a few minutes,
but it marked the turn of the year.
Nothing, they felt, could alter that.

This ending seems to think of itself as a happy ending. But that’s not really what it is. It’s not a sad ending either. The village is well-fed for today, and their way of life continues the way it has for a thousand years. There is something truly magical about that. But what happened this winter will happen again. The village’s survival is always balanced precariously upon a precipice. As the camera pans out, we are reminded that all around the happy village is an endless frozen desert, cruel and dark, and so very cold. A single warm ember in a vast field of ice.

Perhaps that is a metaphor for all of humanity. Everything that we do and everything we care about and everything we’ve ever created and everything we remember and cherish is but a tiny ember in the blackness of space. How hard we all try to keep it lit; how vast and cold and uncaring is the universe.

Does that mean we shouldn’t live our lives to the fullest? Of course not! It’s even more reason to appreciate life. The feel of a baby’s skin on one’s cheek, the laughter of a life-long friend, the warm embrace of a lover, the taste of well-prepared food, the memories of good times, the hopes and dreams and aspirations we all nurture in our hearts; these things keep us warm and snug through the winters of life, even if deep down we know that the dark need not attack us directly to see us finally defeated, it need only wait.

February 4, 2019February 27, 2022

A Letter to My Father

This evening I added the finishing touches to a piece I composed back in 2008, “A Letter to My Father.”

“A Letter to my Father” from Jackdaw

This piece is actually the third movement from my string quartet “Jackdaw.” Therefore at its heart it is based on the life and writings of Franz Kafka, like all the other music in that quartet. However this music has special meaning for me as well (also like all the music in that quartet). It feels especially meaningful during this current time in my life, when my own interactions with my father have become so very strange.

Kafka’s Letter to his Dad

When Kafka was about 36, he wrote a nasty letter to his dad. Apparently his father Hermann was a pretty difficult guy, constantly ridiculing Kafka for being a weakling, while refusing to care one bit that his son was a genius. Kafka’s stories are real mind-benders. The realities they portray are just “off” enough that they feel like they could be real life. One can recognize the landscape, envision oneself living in that world, but something in the reality is very wrong. Sometimes it’s hard to put one’s finger on… but impossible to ignore. Like the work of H.P. Lovecraft, the stories have the power to make one doubt one’s own world, to make one doubt mankind as a whole. It’s delicious writing, and frankly still horrifying to this day. Despite young Franz’s clear talent, Poppa Kafka just didn’t respect his son, and he made that known at every opportunity.

By age 36, Franz was tired of Hermann’s crap. He busted out some paper and really let Dad have it, for 45 hand-written pages. In his own way, Kafka believed that this letter would help heal their relationship, but in reality the letter was full of complaints, accusations, and invective. He plumbed the depths of his own hurt, and wrung the emotions out onto the page. If the letter is to be believed, Hermann was a toxic and narcissistic hypocrite, an abusive tyrant who never gave his fragile son even a kindly word or friendly look in all his life. The writing is heart-breaking and so very relatable, ripe as it is with a certain timeless pain that has been felt by so many sons across so many generations.

In one episode, Kafka describes a traumatizing experience from his childhood: one evening at bedtime he was begging his father for some water (perhaps even being a bit bratty about it), when his father, always a large and intimidating man, burst into his bedroom without warning and, in a rage, grabbed the small boy and locked him outside on the balcony with nothing on but his thin cotton sleep shirt. Kafka writes:

I was quite obedient afterwards at that period, but it did me inner harm. What was for me a matter of course, that senseless asking for water, and the extraordinary terror of being carried outside were two things that I, my nature being what it was, could never properly connect with each other. Even years afterwards I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the balcony, and that meant I was a mere nothing for him.
Franz Kafka, from Letter to His Father

Not only is this a sad story of parental mismanagement and emotional scarring, but it is also such a great insight into why so much of Kafka’s writing features nameless, faceless authority figures who carry out irrational sentences with a total lack of empathy or emotional connection. Moments that feature characters like that are some of the more disturbing vignettes from his stories; they make it all too easy to picture oneself being dragged away by faceless agents of the state who have no sense of human morality or concern for life. Kafka was able to translate his tragic daddy issues into terrifying metaphors for what it’s like to live in modern society. Now THAT’S how to cope with a bad upbringing.

Let’s all write letters to our dads!

Funny story: I had to send a letter to my own father recently. Mine was not as nasty as Kafka’s, nor was my father anywhere near as abusive as Hermann. But father-son relationships can be all varieties of strange, and mine definitely falls on that spectrum. I won’t go into the details here, but suffice it to say that at pretty much the same age as Kafka when he wrote his letter, I felt compelled to write a letter to my dad that I wish I didn’t have to write. It delivered the message, though I’m not sure it did anything to heal our relationship.

When Kafka completed his letter, he hand delivered it to his mother, and asked her to bear the letter to his father. Her mother read it once and immediately decided to hide it forever. As much as Kafka might have hoped his manifesto would help heal old wounds, his mother felt differently, and refused to take any part in provoking the monumental explosion that would likely follow should Hermann ever read it. My own letter was delivered directly to my father, though I’m actually not sure he read it. One can never know these things when direct communication becomes impossible.

Long story short, this music ain’t just about Kafka. I hope someday someone writes about how I skillfully took my familial pain and transformed it into timeless art we can all relate to. Whether or not that ever happens, I will say this: writing the music always makes me feel better.