Seeking balance in a chaotic world
“Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter” performed by Edward Cohen, November 2020.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
I just love Ed’s attention to articulation in this recording. He used the accents and dynamic changes to tell a story here, and that takes a tremendous amount of artistry and skill.
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.
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:
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.
“This is not a city. It is a fissure in the ocean bed of time, covered with the stony rubble of burned-out dreams…”
Franz Kafka, writing about Prague
Franz Kafka grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Prague, one of the most ancient Jewish communities in Europe. My own Jewish ancestors also lived in the Jewish quarters of various European cities. The ghetto can mean so many things to the person who grows up there. It can mean a prison. It can mean the memory of one’s grandmother making soup on a Sunday afternoon. It can mean the cold, emotionless face of a police officer, or it can mean freshly baked bread, or a baby’s first breath. It can mean poverty. It can mean the language and hopes and stories and memories everyone shares there, and how those same hopes and memories have been shared by generation upon generation, leading backward into the endless abyss of time. The ghetto can house one’s cultural identity, one’s ancestors, one’s fondest and darkest memories. It can shape one’s sense of self and fears and hopes for the future. It can be detested and longed for all in the same moment.
I wanted this music to convey a sense of wistful nostalgia. The movement is a series of vignettes, or memories, that come and go as the music progresses. Memories of one’s own childhood, faces of people we’ve loved, a deep longing to return to a place and time that perhaps only ever existed in our memory. We smooth over the real details of our upbringing, of the culture that shaped us, until all that remains is a blurry recollection that is more feeling than memory.
I’m Jewish too, so of course the music is also about that. My own ancestors lived in the Jewish quarters of various European cities. For hundreds and hundreds of years they lived and worked and loved and laughed and built their communities. I stand on top of the rubble of those countless generations, and one day will become part of it. Yet despite that, I’ve never felt very connected to my ancestors, to their culture and memories and lives, to their religion and beliefs, to their struggle fleeing persecution, to what they left behind, to a way of life that is gone forever. I’ve always wanted to feel that connection, but it’s not something that can be forced. I grew up here in California in a secular family, far from the trials and rituals and religious teaching that my ancestors knew well.
This music is about longing: a longing to feel connected to something ancient, about a nostalgia for a world I’ve never seen, for a family I’ve never known, for a culture that isn’t my own. I can reach back in time and try to remember the Jewish quarter as it existed once, remember my ancestors as they lived and loved and prayed and raised children and died, remember my own heritage.
Freshly baked bread, a baby’s first breaths, a lover’s embrace, a tattered prayer book, my grandmother’s soup.
“I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting; even so, when I then want to raise my eyes to your face, in the middle of the letter… fire breaks out and I see nothing but fire.”
Franz Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenska
Franz Kafka began writing letters to Milena Jesenska when he was on holiday recovering from Tuberculosis in 1920. It began as a business correspondence; she was a translator of his short stories, and in addition to that, a married woman living in far away Vienna. However what began as a professional relationship soon warped into an obsessive kind of long-distance romance. The letters from Kafka are infused with desperate passion and lust, a sleepless, jagged, stream of consciousness urgency to every sentence he wrote. He wanted to worship her, to kiss her feet. He wanted to hold her from all sides, to steal her in the night and make love to her in the dark forests outside Vienna. He was guilt-ridden and embarrassed one moment, triumphantly confident of his love for her the next moment. He wanted her to take away his pain and disease, to see him for who he was and accept him, to want him. His love was insistent and oppressive and private.
Of course, this affair was doomed. She was a married woman living far away. Kafka was dying and desperate for love. Over the course of their entire affair, they only met in person twice. So really, the letters weren’t just a part of their relationship; the letters were their relationship. Kafka clearly obsessed over every word she wrote. He poured his very soul onto every page. He kindled the flame for as long as he could, but eventually he couldn’t stop Milena from breaking off the affair.
Milena preserved Kafka’s letters, and understood him as a genius. When Kafka died she wrote a loving obituary in the Vienna press, and promoted his works. Later, when the Nazis came, she joined the resistance and helped many Jews escape Austria, though the work was dangerous and she was not Jewish. Eventually the Nazis arrested Milena for consorting with Jews, and sent her to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp where she died in 1944.
“By the way, why am I a human being, with all the torments this extremely vague and horribly responsible condition entails? Why am I not, for example, the happy wardrobe in your room, which has you in full view whenever you’re sitting in your chair or at your desk or when you’re lying down or sleeping… Why am I not that?”
Franz Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenska
“Yesterday I dreamt about you. I hardly remember the details, just that we kept on merging into one another, I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire; I remembered that fire can be smothered with cloth, took an old coat and beat you with it. But then the metamorphoses resumed and went so far that you were no longer even there; instead I was the one on fire and I was also the one who was beating the fire with the coat. The beating didn’t help, however, and only confirmed my old fear that things like that can’t hurt a fire. Meanwhile the firemen had arrived and you were somehow saved after all. But you were different than before, ghostlike, drawn against the dark with chalk, and you fell lifeless into my arms, or perhaps you merely fainted with joy at being saved. But here the transmutability came into play: maybe I was the one falling into someone’s arms.”
Franz Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenska
“I must confess I once envied someone very much because he was loved, well cared-for, guarded by reason and strength, and because he lay peacefully under flowers. I’m always quick to envy.”
Franz Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenska
“His knowledge of the world was extraordinary and deep; he was himself an extraordinary and deep world.”
Milena Jesenska writing about Kafka in his obituary
Franz Kafka’s final story is called “The Hunger Artist,” about a man who starves himself in a cage for weeks as a circus attraction (read the story here). However, over time fewer and fewer spectators stop to watch his stunt. The few that even bother to notice him are mostly repulsed, and quickly skitter off to find more tasteful entertainment. The people pass him by in his filthy cage, and eventually everyone forgets he even exists.
Yet the hunger artist just continues to fast anyways, even with nobody watching. He knows he is an artist, but nobody else even knows he’s there. Eventually he finally dies a slow and painful death from starvation; unappreciated and misunderstood even in his final moments. As soon as the man is dead, the circus owner disposes of the corpse with little ceremony. The cage is cleaned, and a young panther is put in the cage, wild and thrashing. A crowd gathers to watch the powerful animal throw itself around the cage, and they are reminded of freedom itself.
This is yet another of Kafka’s stories that appears to be autobiographical. When Kafka himself contracted tuberculosis, his diseased throat became so painful in the end that he could no longer eat. While he was writing this story, Kafka was wasting away as the disease consumed him. Like his famous character, he too died of starvation; unappreciated, misunderstood, and forgotten by a fickle world. The crowds, Kafka believed, want to see passion for life, strength and power, a shining panther slamming against the bars. Nobody has the time or stomach for a sickly artist wasting away in his cage. Kafka was never strong, never a panther, and he fully expected the world to toss his emaciated corpse in a ditch and forget he ever existed. Luckily for us he was wrong (at least about the forgetting part). The artist is appreciated today. Whether Kafka would have found that idea comforting while he starved… it seems unlikely.
In the music, listen for melodies from the previous movements. For example, the violin melody the sister plays in Metamorphosis returns, slowed way down and full of longing and regret. Much of this music expresses longing and regret. Over and over throughout the entire string quartet, the music longs for love and warmth and acceptance. It calls out for them, reaches and reaches, but they always seem to slip away. The love, the warmth, the acceptance were all dreams or memories, or memories of dreams.
We’ve all felt this way, the way this music feels, at one time or another. We reach for a lover who is gone. We reach back in our minds for a father’s smile, for a long-lost friend, for the home we grew up in, for a time when things were simple, for something that welcomes us with open arms and loves us for who we are. But it all becomes blurry, as if viewed through a mist, because we are reaching for memories and dreams and figments of our imagination.
The world can be cold and uncaring. It loves strength and youth. We all must die, and eventually every one of us will be forgotten. In time, we all get swept out of our cages, to be replaced by young panthers. Best to live and love and feel and create art while we have the chance. Best to cherish the memories of everyone we’ve ever loved, of everyone who loved us back. Cherish where we’ve been, what we’ve seen, what we’ve felt, what we’ve achieved and didn’t achieved, what we strived for. Cherish it all, for it is life!
Listen the entire Jackdaw String Quartet here.
Today I completed a new piano sonata. What a relief to be finished. I can’t believe it’s over. I feel that I’ve completed something epic. I’ve climbed a mountain.
I started this music in Spring of 2016, during a difficult time in my life, and continued working on it until today, February 20, 2020. In fact, a good chunk of the second movement was written back in 2008, as a completely different piece which has now been dismantled. So this music’s been with me a while.
This music guided me through many life experiences, and was in turn inspired by those life experiences. As a result the sonata takes the listener on a real journey through my wants and hopes and dreams and emotions. It’s a tour of my psyche.
As I’ve noted in other posts about this sonata, this music is riddled with hope. It’s everywhere you turn in this sonata. It’s the main theme of the whole damn piece. Turns out my psyche must have a lot of hope in it.
Oh there’s other themes too: love and healing and time and growth. They all wind around each other, they are all intertwined.
This sonata is also really dang long. I started to say something, then had more to say, then more and more and more. The story takes its time to unfold. If you listen to this whole piece, you will drink deeply from my well of creativity.
I hope this music inspires and touches you.
When life becomes intense, I tend to stop writing music for a time. This is usually due to a simple lack of time. When a child is newly born, or a business newly started, there is little free time to compose music. However these intense times also plant the seeds for the ripest artistic fruit. Momentous occasions, personal tragedies or triumphs, and major life changes generate emotions that (for me) can only fully be expressed through art. So usually during these crazy times, I am full of artistic energy but have no time to actually put it somewhere.
This music was written when life was crazy. Not sure how I found the time to compose this, but thank god I did. I remember composing a note here and there between teaching classes. In my life, everything was falling apart. I won’t go into the details other than to say that shit had hit the fan. The music I think is still optimistic in its own way. I am an optimist at heart myself. What am I supposed to do, write the saddest music you ever heard? I’m not some tortured Romantic weeping into the piano. I prefer music with a bit of a lift, what can I say?
Love themes pop up all over the place in this music. They poke their heads around corners and say hello, sometimes flirtatiously, sometimes with more serious undertones. Then after they say what they came to say, they flit away again. This whole sonata has that quality as well, and it’s something I really love about this music. I love love themes, especially when they aren’t overly gooey, but more sincere, more complex.
This music is in sonata form. It’s got a lot of Beethoven-inspired content in there, with some country-western overtones. I really like the return of the main theme (starting at 7:57) all the way to the end. This is some of my strongest writing in the more strictly classical vein. There is a touch of modern dissonance in there, but this is truly a classical work.
…at times a bit too classical-sounding? Hard to say. I expressed much that I wished to express with this music, but also something was holding me back I think. I clung tightly to the old forms and styles. My own voice emerges plenty of times throughout the piece, but I don’t feel like I am always my authentic self in every corner of the music. Even if the music sounds like it’s made of 100 different ideas, good old sonata form is right there through the whole piece. Beethoven hovers over my shoulder, raising an eyebrow at every jazzy dissonance.
Ok so the ghost of Beethoven has haunted me for years, and I still haven’t found a way to put him down, to unspool him from my music. But I would ask: how can a house be expected to unbolt itself from its very foundation and just walk away?
So Beethoven remains, and the music is more structured for it. I could go back and try to shoe horn more stylistic originality into the music, but I am going to cut my losses and write the next thing instead. This is still me trying to figure out how to write a sonata, and what I want MY sonatas to actually sound like. Everyone has to have student work. Or perhaps all work is student work, if we never stop learning.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
This music was performed by Edward Cohen.
Today I finished writing the second movement of my second sonata.
I worked on this for some time, trying to express something I can’t quite put into words. About times that were hard, when I found my self searching fruitlessly for a summer bird during the dead of winter.
All the main melodies throughout this piece started as song.
You know how it goes when you have a lot to say… too much to say. You try to squeeze too much meat into the sausage and it starts to look a bit unseemly. The feelings and hopes I wanted to express in the music could never fit into one song.
So I exploded the music and let it wander and quest for 20 minutes. It still feels like a song to me.. but now it spins and wrangles and waits and wants, and pulls you along and along like a river.
This is music about healing. Healing is not pleasant when it’s actually happening. Sure it feels great once it’s done, but the process itself is slow. It requires intense patience, and often comes with pain. So this music isn’t about being healed, but about healing.
This music is about waiting, about not giving up, about continuing to strive for optimism even when prospects remain dreary. The length of the music allows it to take on a new character: it stretches out before you, unabashedly long, extending into the distance, as if we are standing on a hill top on a cold, crisp day, looking out over endless miles of fields, trying to make out a little puff of smoke in the distance. Is it a cloud, or perhaps chimney smoke?
We start to get a sense of the power of time. Each little musical episode represents a day, a unique moment in one’s life. Day after day after day passes. There are beautiful moments and challenging ones, but they all pass eventually, and soon become part of a larger tapestry, where common themes emerge.
Life is like this as well. As we deal with each day’s unique challenges and surprises, it can be difficult to see the common threads that tie our lives together. However as the years stack up, those common themes become steel cables that tether us to our loved ones, and to our shared histories. The daily episodes fade in terms of importance in comparison to the mountainous weight of the passing years. In the end these main themes, these shared memories, these bonds become everything that matters to us. They become the vision we have created of ourselves and what we believe in: who we are, what we have stood for, what it means to be a family, what it means to love, what we feel we have accomplished, what we hope to pass on to our children, what we wish to be remembered for.
So in a way this is a song about life and about building a life with someone. It isn’t a clean story arc (neither is life). At times the music swells, other times it falls. But most times, like life, it just goes by, stacking up over time, adding on more and more experiences, until by the end you’ve lost track of some of it. The whole thing blurs together, with certain important moments standing out.
And there through it all are the main themes, the bonds that tie us all together, growing stronger with each passing moment.
What can I say about love? It never turns out quite the way we expect. Then again neither does life. The years stack up, and the weight of all that time compacts our experiences, until we are forged into something new, like metamorphic rock. A good marriage has the same effect. As the years pile up, any cracks that once existed between us are compressed, our minds and outlooks are reformed, until after a while we have been reshaped, remade together.
This music chases love, chases life. It races ahead, keeps the fire lit. It’s hunting, sniffing something out, hungrily searching through the night. The years fly by, but the fire stays lit. It’s a dance, a celebration, though a frenetic one.
While you listen, stomp your foot! How about one loud clap! Why the hell not!
I have a limited vocabulary for describing how it feels to experience love, real love, so I have to compose instead, to try and capture the uncapturable. This music gives just a taste of that. Love has many flavors, and this is one flavor I’ve tasted, and I want to share the feeling with the world. It may not always be pretty, but it tries hard to live passionately, to expresses itself freely, to communicate something meaningful. It doesn’t give up, even when challenges arise. It reaches out to feel a connection. It aches for it.
I have experienced this love. In fact, I experienced it today, while watching my wife walk across the room. Sometimes my heart starts pounding for no reason, and this music appears inside my brain. Makes me want to spin around and around, until everything is blurry. The life we have built, the family we created, the years and shared experiences and adventures are all stacking up before me, until all I can do is marvel at the structure.
Keep living! Keep love in your heart, and share it with someone whenever possible. Stomp and dance and spin. And also, lay silently on your bed in the afternoon with the person you love, and watch the sun’s rays poke through the blinds. Compare the sizes of your feet, tell a silly story, share what’s in your heart. Grow together, always growing.