Recently I’ve been writing this music for piano, clarinet, and cello, with the intention of entering it into the composition contest held by the NYC Contemporary Music Symposium. Today I officially entered the competition. If I win, this music will be performed at a concert in New York, and I’ll get a professional recording too.
The first draft of this music came about in 2007, after reading the dark and mysterious novel The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox, which filled my head with strange colors. I sketched out the basic shape of the piece, but then discarded it as I got swept up in writing Jackdaw.
I revisited the music after returning from my honeymoon in 2012, and built it into a more sturdy shape. Because of the energy and emotion I was feeling during that incredible time in my life – when I had just returned from Europe newly married, when I was so obsessed with creating art and so hungry for life, and in many ways mixed up – this music (which was a by-product of that creative energy and emotion) will forever remind me of that time. To be specific, this music reminds me of the city of Prague, where I drank absinthe and played piano at a pub, and felt myself sink into the Great Human Experience. Read more about that here.
Even after all that, I still couldn’t be bothered to actually finish the music, so again it was discarded and left for dead. Then nine years later, in April 2021, when I decided to enter the NYC Symposium contest, I chose the Bowery Trio as the ensemble I would write for, and resurrected this music that has always meant so much to me. First I changed the instrumentation. The original instrumentation was piano, oboe, and bassoon, which certainly gave it a funky flavor (as I mentioned earlier, I was trying to express some strange color)! But once I switched over to the much more standard piano, clarinet, and cello, the music took on that rich and loving sound that it always wanted to have. While the original instrumentation was unique, it didn’t fit with the sections of the music that were more tender, the love themes. The new instrumentation brought those themes to life, and welcomed more diversity of color into the music as a whole. Oboe and bassoon can become a bit monochromatic after a time, but cello can sing forever.
This music bends genre a bit. It’s classical for sure, but also infused with blues. I also wanted certain rhythms to sound metal, but not metal in the sense of Metallica meets the symphony. I wanted the metal-esque pieces to be fully baked, or interwoven, into the framework and form of the classical music (as opposed to simply taking a metal song and performing it with a classical ensemble). Therefore this music doesn’t really sound like authentic metal in any sense, but certain sections were inspired by the genre, and these moments make an impact on the ear as they pass.
This music has followed me through multiple stages in my life. First as a student striving to expand my creative palate, trying to understand the world but falling far short; then as a young husband, traveling in a haze from country to country, stateless but full of love and optimism, bursting with creative energy; and lastly as I find myself today: a father, trying desperately to prioritize art creation during a very busy year of a very busy life, still nurturing that spark. This music somehow reflects all of that. Or at least that’s what it means to me.
I set myself a goal in January to enter two music competitions this year. One down, one to go.
I’m writing a road trip-themed partita for solo violin. Here are the first two movements, which portray leaving the city for a long trip into the country, and the sense of otherworldly tranquility that settles in once you hit the high desert and find yourself truly alone.
Many more movements to follow, each one a short vignette from my road trippin’ days. My goal for this project is to write music that will appeal to anyone who has ever enjoyed exploring one’s own country, and bring out the sense of wonder that comes from getting out into the wide open spaces.
I like to picture a violinist performing this second movement outside in the high desert, with the wind and the sun and the single violin voice singing a solitary song.
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.
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”).
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.
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.
Kafka’s father HermannFranz Kafka as a young man
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.
In late 2017 I picked up Quiquern again and resolved to finish it for the last time. How many times had I called this project complete, only to pick it up again a year later and tinker, tinker? Well those days are done. If I can’t finish a project, like really finish it, how can I call myself a composer, or an artist for that matter? By the New Year had I hammered out the first fragment (now equipped with a Village Dance section) and finally turned the second fragment into a real piece, rather than just a collection of unconnected ideas.
In early January, full of fresh energy and creative juice, I saw the music in a different light and dove headfirst into some new material. In two days I created an entirely original fragment: The Singing House.
Fragment 3: Quaggi – The Singing House
Come on a musical journey with me.
On the far side of the village is the Quaggi – The Singing House. Only men may enter; it is where they go to pray. In times of plenty, the men sing hearty songs of gratitude to the various gods of the Arctic. In times of desperation, they fall into a trance of smoke and dark and sweat and hunger. Arms linked, stomping the holy ground, repeating of the same syllables, the great hunters of the village reach for the gods with outstretched arms.
What does a 10 year old boy imagine of this place? Banned from entering, just like the women, but knowing in his heart, unlike the women, that one day he will be granted entry into the inner sanctum, a young boy of the village can only guess what goes on inside that large tent. He hears from a friend that the sorcerer sings his magic songs and calls upon the Spirit of the Reindeer, and his songs make the wind blow and the ice crack to reveal the seal below. Anxiety and yearning and fear wiggle through his body. One day he would take his place in the Quaggi and learn the secrets of the hunters.
But at fourteen an Inuit feels himself a man, and Kotuko was tired of making snares for wild-fowl and kit-foxes, and most tired of all of helping the women to chew seal-and deer-skins (that supples them as nothing else can) the long day through, while the men were out hunting. He wanted to go into the quaggi, the Singing–House, when the hunters gathered there for their mysteries, and the angekok, the sorcerer, frightened them into the most delightful fits after the lamps were put out, and you could hear the Spirit of the Reindeer stamping on the roof; and when a spear was thrust out into the open black night it came back covered with hot blood.
I should also note that I openly plagiarized the work of another composer in this piece: David Wise, who wrote all the music from Donkey Country (1 and 2). Here’s the tune I stole:
So good right?
The music from this game was the running soundtrack of my childhood. When I was in middle school, I used to pretend I was in a band (perhaps in some jazzy night club) performing this very song. This music shaped me and my compositional style. I feel honored to sample this man’s music.
The form of “Quaggi” is reminiscent of video game music. The first section is a long musical segment consisting of variations on a couple themes. It then repeats. In fact it could repeat on loop and just BE video game music.
I posted what I thought was a complete movement on a favorite forum of mine, the Young Composers Music Forum, (here’s the post). A young composer named Jarron Carlson posted a very thoughtful response:
“Thank you for sharing this (wonderfully poetic!!) music! I love your use of motifs and how creative you are with your harmonic language. Especially in the first movement, I really admire your use of more traditional harmonies how they slip into sonorities that are more modern-sounding. I do wish however, that you exposed us to more variety in texture in the first movement. I feel like most of the piece you stick to the feel of (for lack of a better word) intruding silences and pauses preceded by short melodic phrases. Maybe you were going for this feel throughout the whole movement, but I sort-of wish I got the chance to hear you develop your motivic ideas in a different kind of texture. Texture change can also be very effective for communicating different emotions to your audience (which I read was one of your goals in this piece and I feel like you’re already doing well already, with your writing as it is :)”
That critique really struck home. Quiquern has always been one of my children, and I love her dearly, but she has never been perfect. One persistent problem across the years has been a lack of diversity of sound. There are lots of lovely segments of Quiquern, but when taken together they tend to blend into something long and monochromatic (a touch of which I was going for, as I wrote the music picturing a frozen tundra, but too much can be too much). Throw in a new texture, mix in some beloved themes previously heard, and BOOM magic happens. A fire was lit! I mean shoot, I had enough material to work with!
I don’t often compose quickly, but this stretch was fast. Statistically now it has been proven that I almost always very musically productive in late December. My Song-Writing Club took place in December, as have many feverish bouts of creative activity. I started the new section the evening I received the critique (Dec. 13), and completed the new section New Year’s Eve (Dec. 31). Just under 20 days to complete about seven minutes of new music; for me that’s pretty dang quick.
I took the main Quiquern theme and wove it a kind of lively folk dance, the piano strumming like a guitar, a people dancing in the firelight. The woodwinds play all sorts of little games together, chase each other across the ice. There is something festive about this music, but still somber. Just beyond the warmth of that fire is an endless frozen wilderness. It is bitterly cold out there, so cold a man’s skin can freeze off his bones, so cold you go mad. Something is lurking out there, in the distant dark. It could be a god or it could be a monster, or perhaps the wind. Right here, safe by the fire, with my family all around me, I am safe and warm. I celebrate that warmth and cherish it, while I still have it. I pray that all those who don’t have it may find it soon.
How to express a people through music… How to express all the depth of the human experience, all the moments and understandings shared among a tribe… It feels like an impossible task. But at least I feel I added another layer. I wanted these people to celebrate who they are in this music, to have a little fun, to play and wrestle and love. At the edge of the world, surrounded by danger, I wanted them to dance.
The image on this page is my an artist named Milo Minock, who meticulously documented the goings-on of the Yup’ik tribe in the 1950s and 60s. Read about his work here.
