Category: Growing up

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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.

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The Metamorphosis

“The Metamorphosis” from Jackdaw

When I was a young man of 22, I developed a bit of an obsession with Franz Kafka. In retrospect this feels like a natural thing to have happened, since Franz Kafka’s stories are basically angst incarnate, and I was certainly feeling a whole lot of angst at age 22. At the time, I was a recent college graduate working at Borders, resisting my parents’ urgings to go get a teaching credential and start my career. I was broke, uncertain whether I was a kid or a grown-up, terrified of the future, maladjusted to the world around me, and dissatisfied with who I was. So yeah, Kafka spoke to me.

In Kafka’s world, nameless police break into your home in the middle of the night and drag you to your trial, where none of the evidence makes any sense to you but the judge sentences you to death anyhow. Kafka’s characters react to things differently than we would expect normal humans to react, which creates a disorienting feeling that something is off, or that we just don’t understand the rules. These vibes made me feel right at home in my early 20s, when I felt the profound sensation that I did not understand the world, that I did not know all the rules, that something was a bit off.

The Metamorphosis is the ultimate story for this brand of angst. The main character (who is pretty much Kafka himself) awakes to find he has become an enormous insect, a disgusting vermin, a horror so hideous his family can’t even look upon him. Like his family, he doesn’t understand why this has happened to him, or why, or even what kind of food he is supposed to eat to stay alive. When his family leaves plates of food inside his door, the food just makes him sick. He can’t communicate with anyone. Nothing makes sense. He spends his time frantically scuttling up and down the walls trying to make sense of the world, staring out the window longingly, and listening to his sister play heartbreaking melodies on her violin from the other room. His family tries to live normal lives, but clearly everyone has been shattered by the transformation. In the end, the bug dies. The family sweeps the corpse out of the house, and go out together to buy new clothes. Now that the horrible freak is gone, they feel alive again.

I think this story is really about feeling misunderstood. For anyone who has ever felt directionless, or lacking in strong relationships, or “apart” from the world, this story creates a perfect little metaphor for how that feels. You feel like a disgusting bug that can’t communicate, doesn’t understand how the world works, and just weirds people out. For all the sci-fi/horror components of the story, it’s really about the author himself feeling hurt and alone. Kafka, though brilliant, was a pretty misunderstood guy in his time. His low self esteem was reinforced by his brutish father, who never gave a kind word or loving gesture to his only son. Young Franz, a sickly but gifted kid, seemed unable to relate to most of the people around him, as if he came from a different culture (or planet). Easy to imagine him picturing himself as that bug. I know I did the same back when I felt so lost.

The music itself is a rondo, which looks like this:

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

The curtain raises on the reflective and somber “A” theme, music that comes back again and again throughout the piece. It’s a theme song (if you will) for the giant hideous bug monster pondering his own fate. The “B” section is the bug coming to terms with his new reality. He grieves and questions and rages and hopes and longs for things to be different. But inevitably that “A” section returns, confirming that this horror show truly is his reality, and resignation sets in. In the “C” section, the bug realizes that, though he is a monster unloved by the world and locked forever in his room, when he sets his humanity aside and embraces his bug-ness, he can do some cool stuff. He scurries up and down the walls, forgetting himself in the joy of stretching his segmented, hairy bug legs. It isn’t so tragic, at least for the moment, that he is no longer a man. He explores his bug senses, listening and smelling and experiencing his new reality, feeling what could even be described as happiness. He isn’t trying to be human or trying to be loved, but just being whatever he is.

In this music, there is a moment in the middle, while the bug is happily scurrying all over the walls, when suddenly you can hear his sister’s violin ringing through, her gentle tune rising above everything else, nostalgic and sad as the memory of a lost love. He may be separated from her, unable to communicate, horrifying to look upon, but they both understand that melody for what it is: a love song. Even in the midst of pain and uncertainty and fear, there are still things that tie us all together. One of those is love. Another is music.

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Memories of the Ghetto

“Memories of the Ghetto” from Jackdaw

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

Franz Kafka, writing about Prague

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

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

Havelska Street Market circa 1900

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

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

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

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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.

Kafka’s father Hermann
Franz 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.

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One time I lost everything I’d ever written. This is what I wrote next.

“Allegro” from Violin Sonata No. 1

The date was September 24, 2006, my 22nd birthday. Erica and I decided to have a picnic in Meadow Park, share a bottle of wine, and take a nap. It was during this wine-induced nap that somebody walked into our house, in the middle of the day no less, while we slept peacefully in the bedroom, and stole my laptop.

This particular laptop happened to contain all the music I had ever written up to that time. Was it backed up somewhere? Of course not. After all, my laptop had never been stolen before, so why would I need to back up everything I’d ever created. Nope, it was all right there, and someone stole it right out of my house in broad daylight. I never saw it again.

The thief did not take our DVD player. He did not take our television. He did not take my car keys or the stereo either. He didn’t even take the laptop’s power cord. Just the laptop. And of course my very reason for living.

When I awoke from my cat nap, it took me a good half hour to realize the laptop was gone. I won’t try to put into words what went through my head except to say this: all of my art was destroyed that day. I had no website, no hard drive, no printed copies. I felt like a victim of fire. I was completely alone with my grief.

Ok I was able to salvage a couple things. While ravaging through my belongings looking for any sheet music I could find, I miraculously discovered some printed pages stuffed down into a drawer. The pages were the original versions of what would later become the 3rd and 4th movements of my first piano sonata. I was also able to copy down from memory the scraps that would later become the last movement of my first string quartet. Other than those tidbits, everything else was taken forever. My entire career as a composer up to that point was a blank page.

It took me a long while to get into the headspace of composing again. When I finally did, for some reason this jolly music is what came out. Maybe it was the sense of hope that even though I had lost all my previous work, I could still write something new, that my life as a composer was not actually over. As I continued to write this, my hope only continued to grow. By the time it was done, there was a part of me that was glad I had lost my old work, which is a weird thing. In a way, it was a freeing experience to lose my student work. It allowed me to try new things, and not feel weighed down by whatever direction I had chosen in the past. I think that’s what this music is trying to say.

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Music that reminds me of dog sitting

“Andante comodo” from Violin Sonata No. 1

I wrote this on a ranch. I wrote this at the radio station, late late at night. It’s a song of love. It’s a song about feeling alone.

On the day I finished it, I also finished On Chisel Beach by Ian McEwan. This music wrapped itself around that story, and both were planted deep into my brain. Both the music and that story complain and ache and worry, they both drag it out when it doesn’t need to be that complicated. Both improve with age, with patience, with repetition.

On the day I finished it, I drew this picture:

I also fretted about composing too slowly:

Writing words on sheet music is easier than writing music. Maybe I just need to write music as often as I write words.

This song reminds me of sitting up until all hours of the night, on a couch that wasn’t my own, in a strange house, watching WWII documentaries and checking to see if we’d accidentally let the coyote eat the cat.

It reminds me of the last grasping days of college. I was spending most of my time grasping, grasping at what?… grasping at something.

It reminds me of emerging from a dark cavern to greet the morning sun. It reminds me of waiting, waiting, waiting to grow up.

Years and years and years after I finished the music, I played it for someone. She said, “You’re really starting to get good at this.” I pretended that the music was truly new.