home, with illustrations

I've been asked to write a song for the OPERA America songbook in commemoration of the new National Opera Center.  They originally wanted words that would "celebrate the opening of a new home." This subject, though sentimental, connected with my sentimental nature, and brought forward memories of moving back and forth between the Sun-soaked White Middle Class sections of Southern California and the Scandinavian-soaked Far Northern White Midwest in my youth. Even though the commissioners seemed to back off from the theme later, expanding it to include songs about the joy or singing or whatever, I pushed forward in the original key.

When I was seven, we moved to the house in Grand Forks shown in the photo - the parsonage - as my father was the minister of the major Lutheran church in town. It was a home perfect for a young imaginative child, a house laden with a servant's quarter in the attic that could be buzzed from anywhere in the house through an electric buzzer system, a secret back staircase from the library or the kitchen up to said quarter, a walk-through pantry with a screened potato and bread store naturally chilled, a vestibule for the removal of snowy clothes - always unlocked but leading to a locked door and doorbell inside, a grand staircase to a landing with a built in padded bench lit by the sun and ideal for reading pulp science fiction, a suite of rooms looking over a mini-atrium-esque entry hall.  And, in the basement, a room with large cartoon characters beautifully drawn. I hadn't been back since I left at the age of twelve, but I forced Lynne out on the road to visit it in the deep winter a year ago and, as the temperature dropped to frigid, I was invigorated. As Viking ancestral senses settled upon me, and the soft parts of me were left behind, the memories of the smells and sounds and sights of the way things used to be came back. I had written the current owners, who were gracious on our arrival, who took us in and toured us through their revisions. The woman of the household was curious to find what I knew of the house's history, which wasn't much, but she was fascinated to find that I made the drawings in the closet upstairs. 

So then, my poem - or the lyrics as we say in the song biz - imagine a young girl moving into the house in some distant future and experiencing all that has been left behind by those who came before. 

Home, with illustrations 

A young child comes home from school, lifts the latch, and steps inside, shaking off the snow. 

She dreamed of this house before she moved here.  In her dream, there was a special room, just for her, deep down a disguised staircase behind the stairs. When she and her family arrived, she couldn't find a way to it.  But still, she hopes that someday she will. 

Looking, she finds her father, sitting at his desk, reading to himself: Kafka, old sermons, documents with notary stamps. He smiles to hear her. He turns. 

When you live in a new place, you become a new person. It becomes part of who you are.  Watching, remembering each one who lived there, their lives, each life. 

An example: a boy who lived there long before drew pictures, like old cartoons, back when the Sunday comics were printed so large, two to a page; drew pictures on the wall in a part of the closet hard to reach. 

Sitting in the sun, she daydreams and remembers squeezing herself in, feeling the walls the way he felt them, head craned forward to see.

In her reverie, she composes a poem:

How old is he now?

Is he crying?

Perhaps he thinks of me

The way I think of him

The little girl who has followed him

Into this house

The house thinks of us

And wonders 

Listening in its slow way

To the sounds of the small city

Of the way we stay so close

Inside the warmth of each other

And the warmth of this home

She thinks back to the cold bright sunny day they moved in, the end of a long drive, the snow drifting so high that she could slide down it from the second story window. 

УКСУС (UKSUS), an OBERIUper in 4 boxes

I've been commissioned to write a new opera for the Klagenfurter Ensemble, who premiered the German version of A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil years ago. I love them. So far, all I know is that it will start on or about the 30th of November 2012 and will run for 10 performances through December, which means Xmas for me in Austria, where the little children are put into bags and the young girls are beaten with sticks by the teen boys in Krampus costume. The piece is based on the works and to a smaller extent the life of Daniil Kharms and his fellows in the Russian absurdist collective OBERIU (The Association for Real Art). The libretto and direction is by Felix Strasser & Yulia Izmaylova, music by me. A cast of 2 women and 2 men, a band of 5 instruments, something like a jazz ensemble. 

Many of Kharms's works are very short, for example:

A certain old woman fell out of a window because she was too curious. She fell and broke into pieces.
Another old woman leaned her head out the window and looked at the one that had broken into pieces, but because she was too curious, she too fell out of the window — fell and broke into pieces.
Then a third old woman fell out of the window, then a fourth, then a fifth.
When the sixth old woman fell out, I became fed up with watching them and went to Maltsevsky Market, where, they say, a certain blind man was presented with a knit shawl.

A number of these are included completely in the libretto and have the feeling dark children's stories.  In fact, after he died in a psychiatric institution during the siege of Leningrad and his avant-garde works were suppressed, he was known quite well as a children's book writer. Children, like me, are in love with nonsense, even dark and brutal nonsense. 

Annotations 2 (with Illustrations)

I've been reading Laura Wittman's The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body, and it has reminded me of my love of the accoutrements of academic writing: introductions, forewords, terminology ('bellicist'), the overuse of the inverted comma, and most especially, the notes. I love them. To read the notes - the many many pages of notes - is to see the strata of the study, cut across the page like layers of rock thrust up along a fault. And why are they there in such quantity? Merely to entertain readers like myself? Or only to protect one from the terrifying charge of plagiarism?

It's unfortunate that, in music, it is difficult to provide something analogous: a stream of musical and textual references that flow with the performance, guiding the ear and mind to the proper references. For example: "when I wrote this passage, I was stirring my tea, thinking of the phlogistonic diffusion of the heat, liquid-like, flowing combustibly through the metal of the spoon, from tea to thumb to painful pointing finger." Or: "I purloined this set of harmonies from such and such, except I added a few and used them in reverse fashion."

But, now that I read this, I think maybe it wouldn't be so interesting, or at least not interesting enough. But let us press on.

When I wanted to write of the young LaShaun/Erling, I wanted to put it in her voice. Two things came to mind: the baby tuckoo section of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and this passage from How We Write: Writing as Creative Design, which recounts a story written by an actual young person. Note the mixing of stories and that some important elements are missing:

My, that reads an awful lot like this unfootnoted and clearly plagiarized section of the libretto:

One day in the street, a man was talking about Jesus. The sun was so bright it hurt the little girl's eyes. She was going to school and her grandma said take this lunch money. The man was talking to everyone, telling them what to do. But she knew that it was too much and she spent some of it. She was afraid of the man. When she got to school the teacher said where have you been. The girl said nowhere sorry. The light was bright behind his eyes. At home she took the toy out of her pack. The man told her to buy it. Her mama said go to bed so she did.

Ahem. Cough. I can only say I am heartily sorry for these my offenses. And also for those to come.  When I came to write the music for the my chosen section, I had a thought, a thought of a structure reminiscent of the openings of these two works:









and that is what I used, again unfootnoted and unquoted:

Oh, and up top, the "layered representation of the Lorentz transformation" of my friend Logan. On his neck reads: Una salus victis nullam spearer salutem.

The binding of Isaac

One day, God decided to test Abraham. God spoke to him: “Abraham,” and Abraham replied “Yes, here I am.” God then commanded: “Take Isaac, your son, whom you love more than anything in the world, to the land of Moriah, to a place on a mountain that I will lead you, and sacrifice him, kill him with a knife and burn his body, the body of Isaac your own son, as an offering to me.” At this point, the author of Genesis relates not whether this command concerned Abraham, reporting only that the next morning Abraham rose early, cut some wood, loaded up his donkey and took Isaac and two servants out on the road.


One wonders what were the subjects of their conversations while sitting by the evening fire sharing a meal before sleep. Was Abraham jovial with his son, his favorite, the boy he dandled on his knee and raised to adulthood, his only son with Sarah his most belovèd wife, or was he more reserved, thinking of what was to come?
When asked how her day had begun, the day she was to sacrifice her children, LaShaun Harris related that, when she awoke, she received instructions to give her baby to Jesus, to give up her children as a living sacrifice. She was told to get dressed and to take her children to the pier, a pier she remembered from a trip long before.


After three days, they reached a place from where they could see the mountain in the distance, and Abraham told his servants to wait with the donkey while he and Isaac walked on, misleading them to believe that the father and the son were to pray and return. Unlike Abraham, LaShaun did not dissemble, and stopped by her cousin Twanda’s to tell her of her plan to throw her children into the water. Abraham gave Isaac the wood that Abraham was planning to use to burn his son’s body after he killed him, and Isaac carried it up the mountain. There is a similarity here, in the carrying of the wood, to the carrying of the cross by Christ, and there is something sinister here, the father placing such a load upon his son, while the father carries the knife and the fire.


Possibly sensing the strain in their relationship, Isaac turns to his father and asks: “Father?” – “Yes my son?” – “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” We see the rising confusion here: a three-day journey taken without explanation, taken with all the accoutrements of a ritual but without the object of said ritual. But once again Abraham prevaricates and says: “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.”


The appeals document in the Harris case is a curious read: an attempt to explain the unexplainable. Society wants to label her clearly, to isolate her so that we are to not to be infected by her malady. The legal terminology used throughout is quasi-scientific, and the text breaks down into a Linnaean taxonomy of argument: rebuttals and surrebuttals from experts all in the field of the human psyche, a field that we know deep in our hearts allows for no real expertise, not a science, not even an explanation, but merely a way to classify, to categorize, and by so doing hoping to hold the real issues at bay.


Finally they arrive at the mountain. We are told that this is the place that God had told Abraham about originally although, in the story, God has been absent since his original decree. And, in fact, without any further orders beyond those of three days before, Abraham builds an altar, arranges the wood on it, and then binds his son to the altar, on top of the wood with which his body is to be burned.

Was Isaac obedient? Did he keep silent?

From the testimony of Yashpal Singh: The defendant was chasing the oldest child and taking off his clothes; he was shouting, "No mommy, no mommy." Another child was sitting on a bench and a third child was either in the stroller or on the bench. Defendant caught up with the oldest child, Trayshawn, and brought him back to the bench where she removed all of his clothing. Standing one or two feet from the railing, defendant picked Trayshawn up by one arm and one leg and swung him three or four times before letting him go over the railing into the water. He was shouting "no mommy, no mommy," continuously as defendant was swinging him.


Genesis 22:10-12 NIV: Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the LORD called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied. “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” My Interpreters Bible explains that the angel of the Lord is redactional for God, and thus He does intercede to derail this tragedy.


After leaving Twanda's, LaShaun took her children to San Francisco on BART, arriving in the city about 9:00 a.m. They walked from BART to Pier 7. About 3:00 pm she took the children to Pier 39 and bought them hot dogs from a street vendor. They then returned to Pier 7, where they walked around and her children played and watched people fishing. 

große Oper in zwei Aufzügen!

I've come to the decision that my next production will be Die Zauberflöte von Mozart. This production will be identical to the original Die Zauberflöte, that is, the theatrical work written by Emanuel Schikaneder (see program to the left), the triumphant drama, and will be absolutely true to it in every respect, including all the words and instructions, characters and costumes, and will, as did the original, support the triumph of enlightened absolutism oner the evils of the obscurantists, most notably personified by the Q of the N, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. In sooth, in a quest for an absolute and a somewhat mercurial perfectionism, I have ordered my production assistant, the Rt. Hon. Mr. M___, to  clone a copy of the Empress Consort (Holy Roman Empire) and Queen Consort (Germany) from a bit of bone marrow, a bit that I surreptitiously secreted from the Kapuzinergruft below the Capuchin Church on my last visit to Vienna, a trip whose necessary cover story was the yearly celebration of the new wine – the Sturm – but whose true raison was assumed through my intimate knowledge of the intimate pressings of the Masonic Temple Prostitutes, and thus realized by acts of which I may not be proud but were necessary nevertheless, in the service of art and its bounties.

Well, OK, identical in all respects except for - I suppose it goes without saying - the replacement of the music, admittedly a hoary and bromidic element of the great work. I know that my adherence to the text and the meaning of the work may seem fetishistic, but truths are truths and thus must be given respect.

Tickets on sale

Concerns and Annotations

Aspects of the libretto for the upcoming opera have raised some concerns among some of those who have read it or who have some knowledge of it. Those concerns come from the real event that it references, namely the death of the three children by their mother's hand. Does it represent the people, especially those people still alive, fairly or accurately?  Might it hurt those people left behind, devastated by the tragedy?

I don't know. It's too great an event to capture in words or music. The reality is that I know nothing of the mother or her life, nothing of her inner world, nothing of her motivations or her communications with God, nothing of her relationship with her family or the events in their lives or the children or their father or anything. The libretto at most is just a fantasy, a concoction of my brain and its random associations of the few reported facts and some certainly misreported information with half-memories of my life and my prejudices and desires.

The writing was quick, a paroxysm of scribbling, multicolored, in a state, my breathing ragged and heavy, without editing. I can't really justify its point of view or claim it as my own, at least in a thoughtful sense. The writing of the libretto was the closest I have come in my artistic life to direct communication with the godhead, that divine stream that flows through us all. That direct link was a new experience for me, and I found it curious I could achieve this in writing words, when in writing music - my chosen art - it doesn't happen. For me, music has too much bookkeeping and too much intellect and too many details and decisions for it to flow freely out of my pen and spread itself across the page.

But, unthreading it all now, one can see where many of the words come from and, before one forgets, one should make note of these beginnings and directions and passes through one's neurological landscape. To follow along, one needs a copy of the libretto, which one can find here.

The opening line, as the footnote notes, is from Huxley, in particular the book pictured above. When I was a boy, I was believed to be gifted and I was placed in school programs designed for gifted and talented children. I basked in this appellation and believed in it or at least wanted it for myself. When I went to college, however, I discovered that there were people so far beyond me in intellect that I understood the reality of the quote. My geek friends said their clocks ran faster than ours, and I understood this to mean that there was no way to catch up to them, that their basic hardware was different than the rest of ours.

The second line is from Genesis 22. The Abraham and Isaac story looms large in the opera, a story that is bizarre and horrifying, as horrifying as the mother's tale, if one can get past one's Sunday School coloring book familiarity with it. There is no way to make sense of it, and even my 1950s copy of the 12 volume Interpreter's Bible begins its commentary pointing out that any man who thought of it, if his thoughts were detected, would be institutionalized, and any man who acted on it would be convicted and executed.

In reading the libretto, I see how much most of the story is me rather than the mother's: the tale of my sister's illness and the descriptions of my family, my take on Pascal and my high school friend's experiments, my reaction to hearing the story of the children, my reaction to reading the court documents, my thinking through it all while sitting at pier 7 as the day fades into evening. The libretto does not help the reader or the opera audience.  It does not clearly label the edges of my story and the mother's, and they do mix frantically and fluidly. The character LaShaun, unlike the actual mother, is oftentimes saying or thinking things that I might say or think. Also, regardless of our command of the language, our thoughts are often profound, and because of this the LaShaun/Erling character sometimes slips into a highfalutin voice when representing his or her thoughts to us.

Some of the words do come directly from witness testimony, e.g., the child pleading 'no mommy' as he was thrown into the bay. But most of the words, like most of the text of the letter, and her prayer while killing the children, are my invention, except for a few bits cribbed from the Pascal Memorial. The death of the cat is the story of my cat, and the feeling of falseness in the world when the reality of death invades is something that I have felt and that many greater writers than me have related. Some bits after the murder are from the court documents, but even those are mixed up with my words and thoughts as well.

I notice, rereading the text, that are many threes, and I remember the use of threes in the score, in groupings and repeats and word painting, relating the deaths of Jesus and the two criminals on Calvary to the deaths of the three boys. Other biblical analogies appear: Jesus carried his wooden cross and Isaac carried the wood for his burning, so it is important that the boy carry something as well, but that's just a literary importance with no basis in fact.

I didn't know anything of the life that the mother had with the father, so the sex scene in the libretto has no relation to them, but is mine alone. I have felt what is described, the desire to merge with my partner but being stymied by the gap between us, and how we are all fundamentally alone, in life and especially in death. And, just to make sure it is clear, when she speaks of being left alone, and asking how He could leave her alone, this is an existential loneliness, and the pronoun He refers to God, the heavenly father of herself and her children, not the earthly father.

Society in general seems to have decided that the mother is crazy, and I've always wondered if one were crazy whether one would know. Would one have an inkling that something was wrong in one's thoughts? Would one reflect in one's own thoughts society's prejudices about craziness? I've heard something of the pain of insanity and this leads me to answer these questions in the affirmative. Thus the mother/Erling character in the libretto finds herself navigating the prejudices of craziness in herself. When her boy is sick he enters a delirium that describes a delirium I experienced when feverish with the measles as a child, and her desire to cool him in the water is my story, something I wanted.

The man with the Lorentz transformation tattoo is a friend of mine, a burning man campmate. The description of migraines is a combination of my experience, as I encountered the aura and still do; and the experience of my first wife Lynn, who had severe nauseating migraines throughout our entire marriage, each lasting several days, except during the period when she was pregnant. When vomiting forth this section, I remembered my mother telling me that Mormons believe that Mormon women will be eternally pregnant after death - a fancy interpretation of a passage in the Doctrine and Covenants - and thus the reference to pregnancy as a heavenly state.

The end of the story is me alone. When my current wife Lynne heard about the murder of the children, her immediate comment was that she hoped no one would ever cure the mother of her insanity, that the mother's bright, clear and sane knowledge of her actions would be too horrible a punishment. Those thoughts stayed with me throughout the piece, and especially the end.