Gabriel Kahane’s: The Right To Be Forgotten

IN November 2019, I logged on to Mark Zuckerberg’s not-to-be-named photo sharing app and saw a post by the composer Gabriel Kahane. The image was of a short, simple handwritten note reading “write me a postcard” with his P.O. Box address attached. This, from my distant perspective as a fan and internet follower, began what turned out to be his year long hiatus from the internet. No grandiose “farewell.” Just a year and change of radio silence.

Thanks in large part to Kahane himself, who functioned at the time for me equally as a songwriter and book recommender, I was in the middle of reading Shoshana Zuboff’s masterful The Age of Surveillance Capitalism when I saw the post. The book outlines in stunning detail how Google, Facebook, Amazon, and nearly every other Silicon Valley company harvests vast amounts of personal data and manipulates its users for profit. Zuboff brilliantly argues that our personal experiences are now as much a saleable commodity as land and labor were to earlier capitalists. When I bought the book (from Bloomington’s own Book Corner, not Amazon — had to practice what I preach), my partner and I tore threw the 700 plus pages. Highlighting. Underlining. Sticky notes galore! So around the time Kahane made his subdued departure, I too was trying to find a way to get off of these apps that were stealing my data and algorithmically enraging me.

What resulted for me was a series of pieces that dominated my doctoral degree. My “internet music,” should we call it that, mostly centers around the role of disinformation and how it has manipulated people into frightening and violent mass movements. Since around 2019, I have written at least two works directly inspired by Zuboff: a chamber orchestra piece for the Illinois Philharmonic called Make Them Dance, and a short, buzzy work for five players called The Economies of Action, with other works based in part on other writing concerning the dark side of the world wide web. My upcoming Concerto for Wind Ensemble, a big ol’ disinformation piece, is in a similar dystopian vein. Hard as I may try, I creatively keep coming back to this topic. I largely found what I think is my musical voice through programmatically looking at the way the internet has changed us, almost exclusively for the worst.

Kahane’s new “folk opera in one act,” The Right To Be Forgotten, which I got to listen to last night thanks to All Classical Portland, takes a dramatically different path than my own. Rather than an exploration of the dark, manipulative forces at play, Kahane creates an intimate, personal, humorous, and profoundly human piece concerning what has happened to us on the internet…and off. These two contrasting methods are present in Zuboff’s subtitle, “The Fight For A Human Future At The New Frontier Of Power.” As I obsess on the “new frontier of power,” Kahane’s opera focuses more on the “human future.”

The work opens with Kahane embodying the composer Nathaniel Levitan, who, like Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman, is Kahane’s parallel alter ego. Nathaniel is three months behind on a commission about his own year offline and after attempting nearly all possible ideas, Nathaniel gravitates towards artproject.ai, represented by a trio of singer/instrumentalists (Alex Sopp, Nathalie Joachim, and Holcombe Waller) who, guaranteed or your money back, will turn out that commission! Nathaniel gives in.

In a scene depicting the mindless, fathomless scroll of social media, referred to in the piece as “The Feed,” absurdist headlines pinball off one another with hyperactive nods to the music of Andrew Norman. The endless list keeps returning to a single phrase, “I Don’t Know Who Needs To Hear This?” Happily at home on politically left-of-center Twitter, the phrase has more than a bit of snark to it. It has come to be associated with telling people they are out of the loop rather than attempting in some way to include them in new information. But the meaning of “I Don’t Know Who Needs To Hear This?” is re-contextualized by its constant repetition, especially when surrounded by headlines about Pokemon Go and Governor Kardashian. Who exactly needs to hear any of this? All of this is merely content, a word so painfully void of any meaning to be rendered useless. A so-called content creator just makes, I guess, more things? More content? Who needs to hear this?

About halfway through The Right To Be Forgotten, Nathaniel reflects on his time off of The Feed. A notably longer scene than the earlier ones, Kahane begins to stretch time out; showing us that this feed-less existence is one that operates on a different timescale. He traces his year: the cross country trip that led him to Oregon, the pandemic, the protests of 2020, the experiences of fatherhood. To put my critic hat on, this extended soliloquy is simply one of Kahane’s most beautiful, clever bits of songwriting, not just in this piece, but ever. Like his “Empire Liquor Mart” from the album The Ambassador, he somehow manages to create a single, concise musical line that threads through a vast story. Both pieces shift perspective and (quite literally in the case of “Liquor Mart”), reflect and hover over the tale being told.

But the brilliance and complexity of the piece comes in the distance between the year offline and the completion of the commission (the real one, not Nathaniel’s, …or is it?) When Kahane eventually returned back to social media by way of a lengthy post in July of 2021, he noted that “going forward” he wanted to use social media “sparingly (if at all).” But, like all of us who take a hiatus, albeit not to the degree Kahane did, The Feed comes beckoning. We give in little by little. By design (see Zuboff), most of us are addicted in some capacity to the internet. The more time we spend on a given site, the more profits for the tech company. Rather than a Walden-like “get off the internet and into nature” diatribe, Kahane produces a nuanced confession: living with the internet is far more difficult than quitting cold turkey. The integration and mitigation of the internet into Gabriel’s life, as well as Nathaniel’s, becomes the main drama of the piece.

I eventually did take some time off of The Feed back in early 2020. I permanently deleted my Facebook and, at least for a few months, deleted all my unnecessary social media apps. The main reason for my eventual return, besides all the political Twitter drama I had missed, dealt with self-promotion. Not relentless by any means, but my, I would say, middle of the road presence on Facebook and Instagram did result in some commissions. People would send me direct messages asking for my rates or bouncing off ideas for possible new projects. I thought that without that presence, without a reminder that I am still out here making music, I would be forgotten, lost in the ocean of twenty-something composers. And indeed, not having much of a presence, especially on Facebook resulted in some sort of dry spell. Directly? I’m not so sure. “I began to travel again,” Nataniel Levitan speaks at the end of The Right To Be Forgotten, “and found the rooms where I was supposed to sing largely empty. There was, I had to admit, a consequence to my absence from these digital spaces…”

And at the same time, keeping up with appearances on these sites can be emotionally draining. Right there, in one single digital space, is everyone's daily accomplishments. Awards, commissions, grants. “And what have YOU accomplished, Nathaniel,” artproject.ai asks? There are a lot of “never before in human history” moments when it comes to discussing the internet, but the ability to see everything all at once, is overwhelming. My own solution has been to just not look, mute any music news, and distance myself, at least digitally, from the New Music Discourse™. But when social media is seemingly the only outlet to promote some version of yourself, how does one balance promotion without simultaneously being the post that sends someone else into a vicious cycle, questioning what they have accomplished?

The relief in The Right To Be Forgotten is that, like any good art, in the end there are no didactic answers. Kahane has an uncanny ability to end works with a sort of credo; a secular doxology to send the listener out into the world. His album Book of Travelers concludes with a hymn-like tune recounting the story of how he befriended a group of Amish men on his post-election train ride across the country. The simple refrain, “Singing with a stranger,” encapsulates the human empathy and need for communal connection which dominates the album as a whole. Similarly, in his 2018 emergency shelter intake form, a choir made up of locally un-housed vocalists plainly “thank” the listener for completing the form in the title, which makes up the structure of the piece. Thank you for the “scratchy blankets” and the “concrete church basement” which will be someone’s home for the night. In The Right To Be Forgotten, Kahane sings something more akin to an artistic credo…

I want to be seen,
But I want to do right
I want to believe,
I wanna collide with other bodies,
Breathing, sweating, crying, bleeding,
Light and alive.

In short, the right to a human future.

Gabriel Kahane (photo: Jason Quigley)

Beethoven Contemplates Nature

“Beethoven composing the Pastoral Symphony” (Franz Hegi, 1839)

IF you were to drive twenty-five minutes due north from central Vienna, you would eventually arrive at a small suburban park, cut in two by the Schreiberbach River. In all honesty, it would be kind to call the Schreiberbach a river, it’s really more of a glorified creek, that runs through paved nature paths, middle class homes, and a small community playground. The area is surrounded by thin trees and a steep, woodsy hill to the east. This river, which splits not only a park but two suburban municipalities, Nussdorf and Grinzing, is the setting in which Ludwig van Beethoven apparently wrote the second movement of his Sixth Symphony in 1808, among the trees and streams. In his 1839 biography of Beethoven, Anton Schindler penned a lengthy and likely overly romantic portrait of the composer at work:

“While crossing this valley, overhung here and there with tall elm trees, Beethoven would frequently pause and let his enraptured gaze wander over the spectacular scene before him. Once he sat down on the grass and, leaning against an elm, asked me if there was a yellow-hammer singing in the topmost branches of the trees. Then he said, ‘It was here that I composed the “Scene by the Brook,” and the yellow-hammers up there, the quails, the nightingales, and the cuckoos composed along with me.’”

This scene, captured in a painting by Franz Hegi entitled “Beethoven composing the Pastoral Symphony” adds to this lush account. The painting, which was suspiciously created in the same year as Schindler’s biography, can almost be viewed as a 19th century inspiration board in the way that pictorial depictions of the symphony surround Beethoven. A shepherd with his flock foreshadows the Hirtengesang (Shepherd’s Song) of the fifth movement, Beethoven rests near the babbling brook of the second, and the “merry country people” of the third movement reside in the distant village. The diverse, almost tropical flora that surrounds a deadpan Beethoven has little resemblance to the thin elms and birches that now live by the creek. But this gloriously romantic portrait by Schindler, and artistic realization by Hegi, is almost entirely made-up, like most of Schindler’s biography. Though Beethoven’s “Scene by the Brook” does end with a series of bird calls in the woodwinds, this almost Snow White image of birds and animals helping Beethoven write his symphony is kind of ridiculous. It further binds the mythical relationship between the composer and their inspiration. Beethoven needed to be out in the natural world to express such a thing. And the bird calls inevitably flew from on high to the pen of the man himself!

It is true, however, that Beethoven did have a deep, meaningful, and significant relationship with the natural world. Writing to his close friend, the Austrian pianist Therese Malfatti in the summer of 1810, he is practically dizzy with the thoughts of “rambling for a while through the bushes, woods, under trees, through grasses and around rocks. No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees and rocks produce the echo which man desires to hear.” Indeed, getting outside for a long walk through the parks around Vienna was a daily activity for the composer. Beethoven often used this time to sort out musical problems frustrating him back at the writer’s desk.

One could also say that nature, on more than one occasion, saved him from himself. Take for example the fall of 1802, still coming to grips with his ever failing ability to hear as well as other physical ailments, he fled to the small country town of Heiligenstadt, just south of Grinzing. In his so-called Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven writes how he truly believed that an escape to the country would heal him in some way. In one of his more distraught passages, one that is practically suicidal in tone, he writes “Thus I take my farewell of thee — and indeed sadly — yes, that fond hope which I entertained when I came here, of at any rate healed up to a certain point, must be entirely abandoned.” The letter, which makes countless allusions to the healing power of nature, is, in all intents and purposes, a suicide letter. It goes as far as to instruct his two brothers how to divide his “small fortune” in the case of his death. In the end, to at least some degree, the stay in Heiligenstadt eventually saw him through this dark period, one of many to come.

His Sixth Symphony, entitled Pastoral-Symphonie at it’s premiere in 1808, is in turn a deeply personal love letter to the countryside and to the natural world. Unlike the music of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, whose music seems to capture the raw spirit of the natural world untouched by man, the Pastoral Symphony is more concerned with mans place in it. The Sixth in many ways looks forward to the end of the 19th century with the music of Gustav Mahler, where distant polka bands and church bells from a nearby village intertwine with the stillness from a dense grove of trees. The symphony, as Beethoven noted in the program book for the 1808 concert, is “more the expression of feeling than painting,” the human experience of nature rather than a musical paint-by-numbers of things one would find on a long hike. It’s a reactionary response to one of the most important loves of Beethoven’s life.

Beethoven Portrait (J. W. Mähler, 1805)

THE Pastoral Symphony is a masterclass in musical restraint; a composer holding his cards close to his chest for just the right moment. Unlike the other eight symphonies of Beethoven, this work is not a journey from darkness to light, from minor keys to major keys. Even in symphonies which live in a major tonality, there is still a degree of tension in the large scale harmonies, dipping here and there into minor areas. The Pastoral frolics in the major mode for well over twenty minutes before the first minor tonality is ever introduced. Arnold Schoenberg noted this in his 1946 essay Criteria for the Evaluation of Music that not only are minor chords almost entirely absent, but that for the most part, the only chords used are the basic building blocks of tonal music, the tonic (I), the dominant (V), and the subdominant (IV). So not only is this, to put it simply, a piece that lives alongside Bob Ross in a happy natural space, but these bright harmonies progress slowly, easing any sort of tension in the music. The slow harmonic movement rests easy. It “lives in the moment, man.”

The Sixth is also atypical in the way in which it begins, quietly, and stays that way for, again, about twenty minutes. This would have been a bit of a surprise for an audience in 1808 who was used to an attention grabbing bang to begin a symphony. It’s similar in many ways to his G Major Piano Concerto which begins with a quietly introspective solo piano fragment. (Parenthetical Fun Fact: This piano concerto, as well as the Fifth Symphony, were both premiered on the same marathon concert as the Pastoral, all three pieces beginning with the same rhythm: a eighth note rest followed by three eighth notes).

The musical cards, so to speak, against Beethoven’s chest are smacked down on the table during the fourth movement, “Thunder and Storm.” What precedes the storm is a cheerful series of country dances which is suddenly interrupted with a quietly rumbling D-flat in the basses, one of the last notes expected in this F Major dance. The tension which has been all but absent thus far now appears with an ominous, buzzing intensity. To this point, Beethoven has not only restricted his loud dynamics and his minor harmonies, but also some of the instruments on stage. When the thunder finally breaks through a mist of distant rumblings, we have a blazing f minor chord now with timpani hammering away, and later, piccolo and trombones. The highest and lowest ends of the orchestra have been expanded and turned up a notch. The musical sky has been violently ripped open. There is a wonderfully dirty smudge in the low strings when the storm arrives, with the double basses playing sixteenth notes against cellos playing sixteenth note quintuplets. Beethoven’s remarkable ability to musically constrain himself for well over half of the symphony is what makes this monster of a movement so effectively terrifying.

Simon Rattle, the British conductor, has said that he views the storm and the placid thanksgiving movement which follows as having “nothing really to do with the weather.” Rather “it has to do with terror. Real terror, psychological terror.” The beauty of nature as Beethoven depicts it during the previous three movements is free of blemishes. Man communes with nature and both are at peace. But the storm that disturbs this tranquillity is as much a part of nature as the blissful brook and singing birds. When this movement was animated in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, the storm essentially kicks all the humans out of the fields and meadows they have been running around in all day. The storm, in some sense, is a warning. Rattle places the idea of the storm in a modern context: “…it seems like half the globe is traveling, trying to get to safety, what the storm means has changed for us. Part of what makes the piece so devastating and beautiful is the feeling of the fragility of human life.”

THE relationship we as humans have with the earth is now a very different story than it was at the beginning of the 19th century. Far from observing nature as a way to escape urban centers, our selfish encroachments into the natural world has led to a grim reversal, in which massive forest fires, droughts, floods, hurricanes, and all the downstream effects that accrue over time are a looming presence over our lives. There have been attempts to contextualize Beethoven’s Pastoral into the world of the climate crisis. As one of the myriad celebrations of Beethoven’s 250th birthday in 2020, the UN World Climate Conference created the Beethoven Pastoral Project, aiming to “draw attention to the theme of ‘mankind and nature’, …and to deal actively with today’s urgent questions of environmental protection and global sustainability.” Centered in Bonn, Beethoven’s hometown which, as it would happen, also houses the UN’s Climate Change Secretariat, the project invited artists from around the world to develop and create their own musical responses to the Sixth Symphony. The final products, deemed “their Pastorals” were performed virtually on Earth Day as well as the United Nations World Environment Day. Some of the creations were documented in a film “The Sound of Nature,” which spotlighted classical musicians in India, a composer from Australia, an indie band in Iceland, and a pop solo artist from Ethiopia. I’m always weary of these types of initiatives, though appreciative of the UN’s effort power-up the Artist Bat Symbol in the case of a global catastrophe. Hopefully this and similar projects can contextualize what can be at times mind numbing statistics and figures. But we would all rather see the UN make inroads towards pushing governments towards more regulatory action against oil and gas companies. I’d be happy to write whatever anthem you want after reeling in Exxon-Mobil.

As a composer who attends a fair amount of contemporary music concerts, the topic of climate change in new music is certainly well represented. But there have been notable and effective additions to the catalog of post-Pastoral Symphony tone poems. John Luther Adams’ 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning piece Become Ocean contemplates the rise in global sea levels and how, as the composer writes “we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean." The piece operates, like the Beethoven, on a long series of nearly immobile chords. Adams stretches time and timbre to an almost suffocating level, with three overlapping spacial ensembles cascading over the other.

The Australian composer Brett Dean’s aptly titled Pastoral Symphony is a fifteen minute depiction of man’s encroachment on nature. With the use of electronics, Dean turns a series of serene pre-recorded and orchestrated bird calls into a frenetic dash, as the sounds of bulldozers hover in the distance. This month, a new mammoth, fifty minute orchestral cantata by Dean and his frequent collaborator, the librettist Matthew Jocelyn, about evolution and the creation of the world will premiere in England. In This Brief Moment is “not a history lesson or manifesto” as the composer puts it, but rather, “our opportunity to marvel at what has been, what that has become, and what might well be lost.” A small snippet from the libretto reads “What is is, But once was not nor once no more shall be.”

THE middle class homes and small apartments that line the Schreiberbach River encircle a modest statue of Beethoven. The teal colored bust rests in this suburban park were Beethoven was, at the very least, inspired to write the Pastoral Symphony, if not the spot where he gracefully rested his head along the brook. To him, this area was “the country,” a place to escape the urban world. He would hardly recognize the parking lots and banks and bars and highways that now dot the area. The urban has overtaken over the world of shepherd songs and bird calls.

The balance that the symphony attempts to realize, that of man’s place in the natural world, has slipped over the past two centuries. Indeed, the “Thunder and Storm” is no longer a natural occurrence but one that is intentional, brought on in the name of human convenience and progress. I’m reminded of the German Jewish philosopher and essayist Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s mono-print Angelus Novus (New Angel), written during the height of the Second World War. “Where we perceive a chain of events,” the “Angel of History” which floats above time and space “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

The Beethovenpark along the Schreiberbach River

Unfinished Work

Oliver Knussen’s long awaited ‘Cleveland Pictures’

Oliver Knussen (photo: Betty Freeman)

WHEN an artist dies, in an instant, their oeuvre suddenly becomes complete and is forever frozen in amber. Their life and work is now seen from above as a long timeline, with recent works now deemed to be part of a newly created “late period.” Death casts a shadow over these last few works in retrospect. Micro eras and styles will then be categorized to form a cohesive creative narrative. Suddenly, pieces which were once seen as disparate works are now part of a “middle period.” But when the British composer and conductor Oliver Knussen died in the summer of 2018, his passing felt more like a cliffhanger rather than a clear finale. One reason was that he died relatively young, only 66 years old, though he did struggle for years with a series of health issues. Another was that so many of his pieces were left incomplete. One of Knussen’s compositional hallmarks was his ability to create intricate and richly detailed scores, mostly for large ensembles and orchestras. The flip side of being a detail obsessed artist is that the creation of a single work progresses slowly and methodically.

Major orchestras and solo artists knew that when you commissioned a work from Knussen, there was a good chance that the work would come in drips and drabs, in most cases over the course of years if not decades past the original due date. When he died, he left behind, in various stages of development, a piano concerto for Peter Serkin and the London Sinfonetta (slated for a premiere in 2001), a fourth symphony for the New York Philharmonic and conductor Lorin Maazel (2004), a cello concerto for Anssi Karttunen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic (2013), as well as other commissions from the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Ojai Festival.

Yet another work left on the drawing board was a nearly complete orchestral work commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra, an organization Knussen worked with extensively as a conductor for decades. The seven movement piece, Cleveland Pictures, was scheduled to be premiered by the orchestra and their music director Franz Welser-Most over a decade ago in March of 2009. Indeed, even that March 12, 2009 concert date was the third time the world premiere had been shifted around since the piece had been commissioned back in 1999. But now, at long last, Cleveland Pictures will receive its world premiere on June 24, 2022 at the Aldeburgh Festival with Ryan Wigglesworth leading the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Coming in at roughly 16 minutes, Cleveland Pictures will be one of Knussen’s most substantial pieces for orchestra. This is, after all, from a composer whose three symphonies average around 15 minutes in length. This will also be his first large scale, stand alone orchestra piece since his 1979 Symphony №3. Cleveland Pictures is a sort of modern day riff on Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, with Knussen musically responding to seven works of art from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Knussen’s inspiration’s for the piece range from a sculpture by Rodin, paintings by Turner and Goya, and two small Tiffany and Fabergé clocks. Of the seven planned movements, four are complete, two are in the form of fully-orchestrated fragments, and one, a response to Masson’s Don Quixote and the Chariot of Death, exists as a 10-bar sketch.

Unlike other composers whose works were premiered posthumously, Knussen was able to both hear large portions of Cleveland Pictures performed and tweak some of the movements over the years. He conducted a reading of the piece in January of 2008 with the New World Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra in Miami, a year prior to the scheduled world premeire in Cleveland. They played through four or five movements, each lasting roughly two to three minutes. Cleveland’s principal flutist Joshua Smith, who played through the excerpts, said at the time that it “was my feeling that we played was complete. But he [Knussen] told us he wasn’t sure about what direction he was going to take from there. It’s hard to get a read from him on how he’s feeling. He’s constantly self-deprecating.” Those at the workshop recall Knussen’s musical take on Turner’s The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons as “lush and dramatic,” and the “irregular twittering” of Faberg’s Kremlin Tower Clock.

The premiere performance of Cleveland Pictures will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 alongside Knussen’s Horn Concerto, a homage to Mahlerian night music, as well as Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Cleveland Pictures older sibling.

THE press release announcing this summer’s premiere of Cleveland Pictures stressed the point that the work will remain unfinished and be performed as is. Sam Wigglesworth, the Director of Performance Music at Faber Music, Knussen’s publisher, wrote “throughout the many painstaking discussions that have led to this point, Sonya Knussen and I have always been united in our belief that every note of these extraordinarily vivid orchestral pieces must be presented exactly as Knussen left them — with no interventions or attempts at completion. Knussen’s music, in all its meticulous artistry and dazzling invention, speaks for itself.”

The question of what to do with unfinished pieces has been a point of debate with musicologists, performers, and music lovers for as long as there has been unfinished pieces. There is a fascination with the idea of what might have been? When listening to Deryck Cooke’s 1964 configuration of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, one can hear early traces of the Second Viennese School, specifically his friend Alban Berg. What direction would Mahler’s music take if he lived to compose a fourteenth symphony? With his high profile stints as music director of major opera houses, what would a Mahler opera sound like?

These are engaging intellectual exercises, but ultimately, they are dead ends.

There are essentially two broad choices of what to do with unfinished work: leave it as is or attempt to complete it. Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus is centered around an incomplete work, Mozart’s Requiem, which was later completed by various composers in numerous editions. Puccini’s last opera Turandot was left unfinished, with radical choose-your-own-adventure completions, first, by the Italian composer Franco Alfano and later by, of all people, the modern and experimental composer Luciano Berio. In the “leave it as is” camp, Alban Berg’s widow lived out the remaining forty-one years of her life ensuring that no one complete her husband’s unfinished opera Lulu. Jacob Druckman worked for over a decade — I would argue as far back as the late 1970s — on his opera Medea which was left unfinished when he died in 1996, receiving only a one-act read through with a rehearsal pianist at Julliard. The piece exists only in the form of an unorchestrated first act and sketches of a second in his archive at the New York Public Library.

The choice to complete an unfinished work, needless to say, opens up some problems. To continue down the Mahler Tenth Symphony road, what Deryck Cooke did was assemble drafts and sketches into a cohesive symphonic form, relying heavily on Mahler’s past work to inform the creation of a new one. In many ways, what Cooke is doing is a highly informed guessing game, and a very conservative one at that. In relying too much on one composer’s past work, the assembling of a new work can fall into a paint by numbers approach, creating a piece which neatly emerges from the previous one. Mahler’s Tenth, as the sketches suggest, represent what would have been a new chapter, especially in terms of Mahler’s approach to harmony. Mahler saw his Ninth Symphony as the end of a symphonic cycle — and to that point, the end of his life, full stop — so it would make logical sense that the Tenth would almost be a rebirth. Leaving the task of completing a work like Mahler’s Tenth, one that would have radically broke with the past (or would it?) to anyone other than the composer himself, is a lost cause. It is one thing to present fragments of unfinished work, some of which has been assembled and completed by an expert or former student. But, in my opinion, it is quite another to “finish” a piece.

A fascinating case study in what to do with posthumous work, as well as work that was completed and still tampered with, would be the other composer sharing the bill on the Cleveland Pictures program this week, Mussorgsky. His progressive, innovative harmonies and approach to orchestration were seen by many, including his own colleagues and teachers, as faulty, amateurish, and in desperate need to tidying up. His teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote that his music contained “absurd, disconnected harmony, ugly part-writing, sometimes strikingly illogical modulation, sometimes a depressing lack of it, and an unsuccessful scoring of orchestral things.” These same qualities which frustrated his contemporaries made him a favorite of composers a generation or two ahead of him: Ravel, Debussy, and Stravinsky. The orchestration in his opera Boris Godunov, for instance, is still seen by some to be too thin and too nasally at times. It lacks the grand and robust scoring an epic Russian opera deserves. Thus, many of Mussorgsky’s pieces, both complete and incomplete, have been subjected to dramatic and substantial edits, re-orchestrations, and in the case of his operas, additions and substitutions of scenes and full acts.

Modest Mussorgsky

There are few works by Mussorgsky that haven't been changed either during his lifetime or after. Just to take his most famous works: Pictures at an Exhibition, originally a suite of pieces for solo piano, lives its life out now primarily as an orchestral work orchestrated by Maurice Ravel (with other versions by Leopold Stokowski, Henry Wood, and twenty other composers).

Night on Bald Mountain, made famous in popular culture by Disney’s Fantasia which gave all children nightmares of decades, is primarily known as an orchestral piece severely edited by Rimsky-Korsakov as well as another version by Stokowski (not to mention the true masterwork, Night on Disco Mountain, David Shire’s take on Mussorgsky from Saturday Night Fever).

And his masterpiece, Boris Godunov, lives on in three versions, with different scenes and orchestrations. The one edition of the three which is most rarely performed is the one exclusively by Mussorgsky. This is not to mention the works that were left truly unfinished like his opera Khovanshcina, which has several completed versions; first by Rimsky-Korsakov, then by Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky in 1913, and later by Dmitri Shostakovich in the late 1950s. Mussorgsky’s earlier unfinished opera, Marriage, was completed in a version by, of all people, Oliver Knussen.

This is all to say that in the last few decades, there has been a sort of Mussorgsky originalist movement. The argument is that in “correcting” all of these pieces, one is left with a Mussorsgky without the nuanced quirks. After all, these harmonic and orchestrational choices seen as wrong at the time directly influenced some of the most important composers of the 20th century. There are so many countless edits and revisions by composers not named Modest Mussorgsky, that it takes a fair amount of archeological digging to get to what is truly Mussorgsky’s own music. It is a strong argument to keep music as is; to keep weird music weird.

Though I would love, to the point of nearly seething to hear a complete performance Oliver Knussen’s piano concerto or his Fourth Symphony. But, even if that were to happen, I would not be hearing Knussen’s piano concerto or Fourth Symphony. I would be hearing a patchwork of sketches in an order unfamiliar to the composer and likely with orchestration alien to Knussen. To the contrary, when I hear his Cleveland Pictures, I will be hearing Knussen; his choices, his edits, his fragments which he never got around to orchestrating. I’ll know that this 10-bar Don Quixote sketch was a musical problem for him, something he either never got around to fleshing out or didn’t know what to do with it.

When we all have access to nearly every piece ever composed at the click of a button, death reminds us, that there are still some things that we will never be able to access. Hard as we try, we won’t know what Mahler would have done with his Tenth Symphony or what Mussorgsky would have done with Khovanshcina. The finality of these things is a kind of beauty in and of itself.

A delicious sneak peek at the first page of Knussen’s Cleveland Pictures (Faber Music Performances)

Reexamining Durham's Past Through Music

I wrote a somewhat lengthy(ish) essay about coming back to my piece ‘No Name In The Street’ after a two year delay due to the pandemic

The timeline from the completion of a new orchestra piece to its premiere is, in the scheme of life, a fairly quick one. In the case of most composers, the piece is done a few months or so before the first performance, though we all admit sometimes to cramming the night before a deadline like a term paper; the first rehearsal — the time in which the composer finally gets to hear the piece for the first time — usually occurs about a week before the premiere. The pandemic of course changed this traditional timeline, as it changed all aspects of time for many of us. During the pandemic, orchestras were in most cases the first to shutdown and the last to reopen. Needless to say, dozens of musicians cramped together on a stage in close proximity blowing and spitting and sweating next to one another didn’t transition well into the world of social distancing and face coverings. In the case of a recent piece of mine, No Name In The Street, the normal timeline of weeks or months, stretched out to nearly two years.

But with that expanded time between the completion of the piece and its upcoming premiere next month, a lot changed. According to what I jotted down on the final page of the score, No Name In The Street, a ten minute piece written for the Durham Symphony Orchestra about the near destruction of an all Black neighborhood near Durham, was finished on January 19th of 2020. Roughly a month later, on February 23rd, Ahmaud Arbery went for a jog in his hometown of Brunswick, Georgia and was murdered by three white men in what has now been officially ruled as a racially-motivated federal hate crime. Nineteen days later, in Louisville, Kentucky, Breonna Taylor was murdered by the Louisville Metro Police Department when serving a no knock warrant on the wrong apartment in the middle of the night. And then twelve days later, Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd for 9 minutes and 29 seconds until he died outside of a Minneapolis, Minnesota grocery store after being suspected of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. The ensuing two years would, at first, show one of the largest mass protests in American history, calling for racial equality and an end to systemic police brutality against black and brown Americans. Then, a reexamination of American history and its roots in white supremacy and systemic racism. After that, a cultural backlash from the conservative right, pushing forward, not dog whistles, but all out assaults on telling the ugly truth about American history and what aspects of that history are still smoldering in our current society.

When I wrote No Name In The Street, few if any school board members knew what “critical race theory” was. Few white Americans could understand why one would want to reallocate funds from police departments to other social programs. I would bargain that a good number of white Americans had little to no knowledge about redlining or other methods in which our government kept our society segregated. There has been a seismic shift in this country, much like after the 1968 murder of MLK and the 1991 beating of Rodney King, in regards to examining who are we as a country and how does race intersect with that idea of who we are collectively. 

I wrote No Name In The Street because of my own ignorance.

St. Joesph’s AME Church in 1911 and 2018

When I was asked by William Curry to write a new piece for the Durham Symphony, I had little to no clue where to start. Having a million ideas and no idea is virtually the same thing when beginning something new; it leaves one frozen and creatively immobile. So in desperation to find something to latch on to, I looked up the concert venue, the Hayti Heritage Center, on the internet. The Hayti Heritage Center was built as an extension to the former St. Joseph AME Church, a National Historical Landmark built in 1891. The church, the space in which the piece would be premiered, was what caught my eye initially. Beautifully frozen in time, the dark brown wood which frames the proscenium arch flows out into the pews and up towards the banisters of the balcony. The ornate stained glass illuminates the equally intricate patterns of the cream and turquoise ceiling. As a resident of the Raleigh-Durham area from birth until college, I had never heard of this church, never heard of the Hayti Heritage Center, never heard of the Hayti District of Durham period. 

And there was a reason why I hadn’t heard about Hayti.

The original NC Mutual Life Insurance Company Building on Parrish Street in Durham (RAL Today)

Shortly after the Civil War, Hayti was founded by formally enslaved African Americans on the southern edge of Durham. Named after Haiti, the first independent black republic on the Western Hemisphere, Hayti quickly grew into the first entirely self-sufficient black community in the U.S. after the Civil War, operating over 200 businesses as well as theaters, schools, hospitals, hotels, and notably the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest and richest African-American company at the time. After several visits to Hayti, Booker T. Washington, who in 1911 penned his Durham, North Carolina: A City of Negro Enterprises, wrote that “in addition to many prosperous doctors, lawyers, preachers and men of other professions, I found some of the most flourishing drug stores, grocery and dry goods stores I had seen anywhere among Negros.” After visiting St. Joesph’s, he noted that “never in all my travels have I seen a church as great as St. Joseph’s.” Washington was frankly astounded by “the information that the white people everywhere encouraged the new Negros to buy and own property.” Along side Tulsa, Oklahoma’s so-called “Black Wall Street,” Hayti was a successful example of what was possible for freedmen during Reconstruction; that there could be, at least in the eyes of Washington, successful racial integration in the south.

But in 1958, under the guise of “urban renewal,” North Carolina Highway 147, also known as the Durham Freeway, was constructed. The path of the new highway was designed to go straight through the business district of Hayti. By design, more than 200 acres of Hayti, which housed many of the businesses Booker T. Washington first saw as the future of a truly integrated America, were cleared for the Durham Freeway. In his 2017 book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein documents how cities across the country from Detroit to Miami to Camden systemically placed new highways through predominately black communities. The Chrysler Expressway or I-75 in Detroit, for example, displaced “4,000 families, 87 percent of whom where African American.” He goes on to note that “federal appeals courts concluded that HUD officials knew that the highway would disproportionately destroy African American homes and make no provisions for assisting them in finding new lodging.” Barbara Perry, on returning to Hayti during the construction of the Durham Freeway, referred to it as “a nightmare, worse than pictures of a war torn or burned out riot area. Who caused all this?” According to research done by Bull City 150, after the freeway’s construction, over 4,000 families and 500 businesses were displaced from the once prosperous district. Those who were renting, and even those who previously owned their own homes, were relocated to housing projects. 

Because the piece was going to be premiered at St. Joesph’s, I wanted to write something that was a sort of memorial to that space. No Name In The Street borrows its title from a collection of essays by James Baldwin and is, in essence, about the history of Hayti. The piece begins with a long melodic solo line in the strings (based upon spelling the word H-A-Y-T-I into musical pitches). This “Hayti theme” grows and fleshes out into a broad, sweeping orchestral statement. This moment is slowly taken over by the brass and winds which begin to distort and obscure the theme. The theme, now abstracted by the winds and brass, only occasionally can be heard. The piece reaches a great climax and is abruptly cut off. The “Hayti theme” is now heard in its most clear and intimate form played by a solo string quintet. Slowly, over time, the theme begins to get erased by the orchestra, note by note, until one solo viola is left trying to sing out.

Hayti during the construction of NC Highway 147

But how was it that I, as a student going to school about 20 minutes away, had never heard about this? Having whole years of public school, in my case fourth and eighth grades, devoted to North Carolina history, how was this never brought up? These were the questions I asked myself two years ago and now these questions are really at the core of this national conversation about how race is talked about in schools. Rather than discuss it, states like Texas, Florida, Georgia, and indeed North Carolina, are passing legislation that doesn’t simply say don’t mention these historical facts, but rather, don’t talk about race, period. In the eyes of these legislators, race was not and should not be a factor in teaching history. The goal is to make history race neutral which is to wildly distort history. And contrary to their talking points, there is no boogeyman lurking around public school corridors hellbent on making white children feel bad about themselves. That argument is the same thread which binds this current backlash to that of the Boston busing protests of the 1970s and to the backlash all over the south after Brown versus Board of Education. In this case history doesn’t just rhyme, it is in many cases saying the exact same thing. 

I’m still wrestling with another conversation which has come into focus after the murder of George Floyd, that being, is this piece a story that I even have the right to tell? Is it my piece to write? And I still don’t know. Is music so abstract an art form that it frees me from criticism unlike white novelists who write about marginalized populations or playwrights that write about urban renewal? And am I hiding behind that abstraction? I briefly thought about discarding this piece after the summer of 2020 in favor of writing something new. I had time on my hands being locked down and free from teaching responsibilities. But ultimately I kept the piece largely as is. My hope is that, first off, the piece is a worthwhile ten or so minutes for the listener. But secondly, I hope, if anything, this piece gives an artistic perspective to something that has sadly become more inflammatory over the intervening two years. The main question of the piece, as I see it, is what happens when a community fails to discuss their own history and erases it from memory. My lack of education on this topic is proof positive that as a student in NC public schools, I was shielded from this history. This piece was written out of that initial ignorance and because the history of the Hayti District was to some degree successfully erased. That in and of itself is the argument plaguing school boards right now. And it’s not just the race neutral teaching of history that has become inflammatory but Durham’s contemporary problems of housing affordability, single family zoning laws, and gentrification which were at the root of the “urban renewal” movement decades ago which led to the construction of the Durham Freeway.

In all likelihood, on the day of the premiere, I will drive on the Durham Freeway to get to the Hayti Heritage Center and will probably leave on that same road, as will most audience members. Maybe we all will, at the very least, look at it differently.

George Crumb (1929 - 2022)

The first thing one notices when approaching a score by the American composer George Crumb, who died Monday at 92, is the beauty of his calligraphy. In a bygone age before computers took over music notation, composition students and composers studied musical penmanship and took care in ensuring their handwritten scores were legible and hopefully aesthetically pleasing. But even during that analog age, George Crumb stood alone. The near perfect curvatures and swoops that bend and entangle staves into peace signs, zodiac symbols, or something out of a satanic cult could easily stand alone hanging on the walls of a contemporary art exhibition. Unlike most musical scores, Crumb’s have an uncanny ability to look like a physical manifestation of the sounds he created; heavy black boxes indicating a pianist use their forearm to depress a cluster of keys, canonic musical lines falling inward in concentric circles. His obituary in The New York Times quoted the flutist Tara Helen O’Connor who described his scores as “his way of expressing how music flows through time…[he] also leaves some of the magic and creativity up to the performer.”

But beyond the sheer aesthetic value of the score is of course the music itself. Crumb, like a handful his contemporary colleagues across the pond, was interested in the very stuff of sound itself. Rather than using musical color as window dressing for melodic lines or harmonies, Crumb lets color lift most of the weight in this works. As such, a great deal of his output was written for solo piano as well as a vast array of percussion. He had percussionists smack chains against large gongs, bow crystal wine glasses to create an ethereal hum, hit the inside of the piano with an open palm for a rich boom, and dip large cowbells into water for a sustained tone which bends and evaporates. These odd sounds Crumb congers up seem to emerge organically out of the primordial ooze of the earth, as though these deep rumblings, piercing shrieks, and distant bells have been going on for millennia.

And even though this almost prehistoric type of music making had followers on other continents, Crumb’s boyhood memories of growing up in the hills of Appalachia gave his pieces a uniquely American sound. Think as if we excavated the hundreds of layers behind the music of Aaron Copland or Stephen Foster to find what elements of the land inspired their tunes. During the last twenty years, for instance, Crumb focused almost entirely on cycles of songs scored for vocalist, percussion quartet, and piano which re-contextualized familiar American folk tunes in an eerie and haunting soundscape. His 2004 cycle, American Songbook IV (The Winds of Destiny), written shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, takes classic Civil War tunes like ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again’ and places it in a misty soundscape of distant, deep bass drum booms with the vocalist singing the folk tune ironically or with deep cynicism. The final song, ‘Shenandoah,’ sounds as though the tune is echoing against the southern mountains that Crumb knew so well in the far off distance.

George Crumb’s music has a spiritual, theatrical, bombastic, and often times ritualistic quality to it. His landmark 1970 work Black Angels for amplified string quartet has the players whisper, make noises with their tongues, and shout. The piece, written as a reaction to the Vietnam War, integrates these sounds into an utterly convincing nightmare of a piece. I remember distinctly first hearing this piece when I was back in high school and being completely blown over by the fact that the first violin in the movement ‘Sounds of Bones and Flutes’ sounded like a flute (accomplished by a technique in which the player bows the strings with the wood side of the bow rather than the hair).

In Ancient Voices of Children, also from 1970, Crumb sets text by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, a poet he was seemingly obsessed with for most of his career. The work feels like glancing in on some sort of cult like ceremony from an alien nation. When the work opens, a soprano sings, chants, and yells into an open piano creating a haunting resonant echo, as though someone is singing from deep inside a well. During the final movement, a boy soprano who has been heard but not seen comes onstage, singing with the soprano. The work ends with the text “… and I will go very far … to ask Christ The Lord to give me back my ancient soul of a child.” The premiere recording of the piece on the Nonesuch label sold more than 70,000 copies making it one of the best selling 20th century classical recordings ever.

For all of it’s eerie bombast and intellectual rigor, Crumb’s music has a great ability to communicate to an audience. There is a wonderful beauty that emerges from his works, albeit almost always shrouded in a dark veil.

About an hour before I wrote this, I was in a class at Indiana University in which there was a bit of snickering from the professor about the recent death of George Crumb. “I guess he’s a type of composer I have to appreciate but don’t like to listen to at all.” This was met with some sizable agreement from the class of graduate students. And who can really blame them? Crumb has been relegated to the slot in the music history textbook in which they point to how crazy his scores look and how loud the opening of Black Angels is. And with that ends most student’s relationship with Mr. Crumb. There is a bit of knowing what you are getting yourself into with Crumb’s music. You will be engaging with a composer who wants you to listen, carefully and deeply, and be, in the end, rejuvenated and maybe even a little disturbed. As there is room in the visual arts and film and television and novels to be uncomfortable and disturbed, so is there in music.

But if you are willing to go on a deeply cathartic, theatrical, and haunting journey through instrumental and vocal colors and sounds — and yes even harmony and melody — you have found the right composer.

Inferno

During the 'before times,' I was got an email from Joey Walker, an Indiana based singer-songwriter, to collaborate on a new album. His concept was to write a sort of modern take on the first part Dante's epic poem the Divine Comedy. Out of this came Inferno which will be released tomorrow, January 28th, and is currently available for pre-order! This is my first time orchestrating/arranging an album of what one could call pop songs and not "officially" composing anything. Joey would send over the piano/vocal versions of songs he wrote and I play around with it; turning chords on the piano into slowly glissing string parts, adding some odd instrumental sound effects, etc. It's the musical version of an interior designer; the house isn't mine but I picked out the couches and the pillows. The final product has a little bit of everything baked into three songs; a little big band influence, some hymn-like string orchestra sounds, a chirpy woodwind quintet. It's a liberating feeling to mess around with someone else's material than to write everything yourself. You are in some ways more willing to take certain risks that you wouldn't take in a piece that's entirely your own creation.

I hope you give the full album a listen, either by streaming it on all the platforms (Spotify, Apple Music) or, better yet, purchasing a copy!

Also, after being under a consortium contract for the better part of a year, my saxophone and percussion diatribe Deep State will be officially released and available for purchase starting February 1st! Any saxophone/percussion duos out there who were not part of the original commissioning group can now perform this, admittedly, very difficult piece.