The Ontology of Recapitulation

Once again facing the final days of the attempt at Capturing, of Recording that which was never intended to be so. For those of you following along, see to the right what has become the Realization of Music in its Quintessential Reified Embodiment as Object.

Here before, trying to decide what is OK and what is not OK in this transition from performance to recording to mastering to releasing. Unlike pop musicians, who are faced with the odd difficulties of reproducing onstage their meretricious fabrications, those consumable objects brought into being using the gizmos available to the modern recording assemblist, we in the world of scribbled and unlovable scores are faced with the inverse problem, attempting to create a series of numerals that is something akin to the excitement of the live event, a will of a wisp of an ephemeral evanescence, skin and voice and membrane and eye and string and movement. 

Even the most basic capture, even after a long hunt with horses and trumpets and hounds baying, is weak and fraught with error, and performers are weak and fraught with error, and what really does one want anyway in the prey beheaded and stuffed and glass eyes put in and nailed to the wall with all the others undusted for so long: the excitement, the errors, the feeling, the greasepaint, the score, the threesomes and intrigues, or none of the above? Well, the score, who gives a shit? And as those much greater than me have pointed out long ago, the recording studio is an instrument in itself, and recordings are not and should not be performances, but something quite different. So maybe it isn't a capture at all, but rather a creation of its own, plucked ab nihilo from the bits of heaven that have floated too low and into our modest grasp. 

When I was young and foolish and wrote electronic music, the recording was all there was, and I would tinker and meddle with each small event and each change of parameter, longing for perfection but at the same time fearing a disinfected and insipid and infertile pulp. And now that we find that acoustically captured music is subject to the same endless tweaking of pitch and time and sound and place, we find ourself at the same crossroads. Looking at the guideposts up ahead we see one in particular: Classical Music, which brooks no error, which allows only the subtlest variations from the received wisdom of performances past, which has been extreme in its annulment of reality, which is filled with edits and cleaned of noise until little is left. And I worry: because of that expectation of perfection, mustn't I do the same if I wish to be valid? And I reply meekly: isn't there some power in mistakes, isn't there something there which makes us undeniably human?  But that meek voice is shouted down by others who, having done so, lead me back to the the flashing lights of the plug-ins and the lasso cursor.

So I adjust here and there, a few milliseconds added to a late entrance, a few Hertz raised on the flattened pitch, and during this tedium my mind drifts. I think: hey, what was wrong with Joyce Hatto anyway? When everyone is creating something false, why not go all the way and create something sincerely and truly false?  It's clear why no one noticed her falsehoods for some time, since all expected the next recording of the Messiaen or the Godowsky to be more-or-less like the last anyway, taking one step further Rob Haskin's interpretation of Cage's statement that he had no personal use for recordings:

... the implications of the remark are unclear. He possibly meant that the false objectification of music through recorded sound discouraged difference: the ideal state of societies comprising many individuals. A recording foreclosed a multiplicity of performance interpretations, since it was itself a finite object, and it effectively turned the act of audition into an essentially private action. Cage saw performances of music as a metaphor for social action: the audience who attended to the music as it occurred in acoustic space was just as necessary for the metaphor as the musicians who actually brought the music into existence.

Gracenote's CDDB tipped the scales on Ms. Hatto, but we see the loss of variation everywhere at my day job, the tunes from far-flung orchestras that match ever-so-closely, the live pop / rock / hip-hop recordings from Milan and New York City and Tokyo, that, sequenced and lip-synced on stage, vary only in the time placement of the internationally varied audiences' varied whooings.

And each step in that direction takes us one step further away from the days when musical experiences were real musical experiences of sight and sound and smell and parlor pianos, when we fell in love helping another reach a difficult chord, and then, laughing and falling against each other, we tumbled to the floor where real creation took place, that of love and life and music infinitely sweet.

The glistening perdition

Lynne Rutter, a woman of such great pulchritude that she outshines her utterly splendrous works and inspires envy in those who behold her, seems  so very bewilderingly happy with her lot, as much as I try to convince her that she is simply incorrect.

I know with certainty that life is and is intended to be a struggle against forces that overwhelm, an unbending fatigue coupled with an insomnia bred of fear and agitation, a hunger for successes and joys that slip through one's net no matter how well deployed nor tight the weave, an uncountably infinite unspooling résumé of failures failing comprehension or categorization, of hopes unfulfilled, of plans and intentions washed out in the face of sputtering walls of deficiency that strike in wave after inordinate wave, a sullied haberdashery selling bent needles, buttons unthreadable and ties pre-stained, whose tutelary spirit is condemned to a perpetuity of vain efforts and ripping frustration in payment for her hubris, a dream of fame and triumph that awakens to a dimly lit room smelling of must, a race unwon, a frenzy of pathetic ruttings sparking little heat and ending not in promised refulgence but in pain, sorrow and regret ending only when the curtain falls and the audience leaves and, each finding her or his car, turn on the radio, the slight amusement dispelling the memories of what once was.

But somehow one fails to learn the simple desperation of an existence beyond repair.  One dresses in the morning while scrutinizing the status updates of others seeming somehow less pathetic and is snookered in.  Oh, one says, maybe I really could do better if I just worked harder, maybe I could have a brighter future like everyone else, maybe I don't have to play Mr. Lamentable Worm dressed in these ill-fitting and not-quite-matching clothes. And with that, one begins again the process, putting in one's oar or, more appropriately, applying the shoulder and rolling, rolling, rolling the enchanted stone to its place up at the top of the hill.

Sweet Encumbrance

To abjure

The first time I read the Koran as a child it was a Penguin edition - yes, in English, sorry. Oddly the only line that has stuck in my head is from the prologue: a brief timeline of the life of Mohammed, viz: the 627 raid on the Jewish tribe of Qurayza where, to paraphrase: 800 men were executed in a bloody process, beheaded in batches at the edge of a trench dug in the market place, which occupied the whole day and much of the night, and the woman and children sold as slaves.

However, and this is the piece of the story that has always fascinated me, namely, that one Jew did abjure his religion to save his life. What was the process, this abjuration? Did he recite Words of Rejection? Did Mohammed's followers require this man to actually change his belief? If one truly believes something one day, can that belief really be changed the next, or are we splitting the hairs of justified true belief and its cousins?

On the other hand, there are those on the other side, and is the part of the story quite incomprehensible to my suburban middle class upbringing: how can a belief be so important that one would die for it? Especially a religious belief, which these days blow with the wind. And in the case of Judaism, from which I know nothing really, but which is, I believe, a bit vague about life after death beyond some Classical-Shade-Type existence, except for the Sadducees, who I thought were pretty clear about their lack of belief in the whole deal, so dying for it is kind of a strong step anyway since what does one get or not get?  Couldn't one get away with just saying whatever and crossing one's fingers or whatever and then believing whatever one wanted? And hasn't it been shown that one can even maintain up to six impossible pre-breakfast beliefs, so what's difficult about throwing in a few more beliefs into the mix, contradictory or no, and letting whichever bubble up depending on who is asking?

An example from my own life: my music sits atop a bedrock of beliefs, which I hold dearly, but today as we were talking about the song cycle I told Sirje of the spleen worm who hides away until I am most vulnerable and who then finds his way to whisper words of success and failure. When he sleeps, I can enjoy life the way it is, plinking and plonking out my little tunes and writing in my little blog and going through my little life in a generally nonplotzing way. But in the wake of several recent rejections, he has lately stirred, and has found his sword and placed it to my neck and now demands of me an abjuration of all I hold dear, to become something I have never been for the sake of most evil Success. 

On writing for the voice; or maybe the setting of text

I'm in the process of writing a set of songs for Sirje Viise, the inspiring and intellectually nimble Estonian soprano and neo-plaything of UKSUS, on texts penned by her hand, to be performed and recorded by her and Davorin Mori, the very talented Slovenian-Austrian conductor and pianist. And it has been wonderful. She's a great writer and a fierce collaborator who has taught me many things, and I think the songs are coming out OK, although I would never say that publicly.

In this process, however, we've had some difficulties - or should I say friendly differences about the outcome - which is I suppose healthy and productive and expanding, but there have been those moments when I've tensed up and where I've gone running off at the mouth about My Singing Knowledge vs. Her Singing Knowledge, and what is the Nature and Goal of Singing as a medium. Of course she could be forgiven for her belief that an actual singer would know more about Singing than a composer of Things Sung, but in the name of Her Majesty and the Continental Congress, I have had over the years some opinions about what is Right and Wrong in Singing and since this has all been stirred up, I felt that I needed now to organize and express these Very Important Thoughts.

Thought #1: it is my belief that if one is writing a piece where the text needs to be understood, it's useful to actually make the text be understood. Let's say you go with me to see an opera in English and you notice that they seem to have the supertitling machinery set up and you say to me, "my that's strange, why would they need supertitles if the opera is in the language of the audience." "Well, ha ha, this is the thing," I will say, and continue with "the producers know full well that, even though the opera is in English, and one might think the text is so actually important that it really should be understood, and that this fact is agreed upon by all involved, from the composer to the librettist to the acousticians, the truth is that the text won't be understood by a majority of the audience a majority of the time." At this point you notice that I seem to be heating up and you wonder why, but you go ahead and ask the question "why is that, Erling?" At which point I will start raving about how everyone involved is an absolute incompetent, and how if a composer had one iota of ability she or he or it would make the text understandable by a series of mundane but simple steps:

• follow the prosody of the text in the setting of it, at least some of the time, or at least in the first repetition of the text, or in enough fragments of the text that one can accumulate the sense of it; 
• pay attention to vocal ranges and open and closed vowels and etc;
• write instrumental parts so they enhance the comprehension of the text and don't fight against it, possibly by orchestrating with some awareness of where the voice and its formants lie;

and then he may point out how many hundreds of years ago those building the hall itself should have taken into account his opinions to come and designed it to treat his words with some loving care.  Now, to be honest, even in the application of know-it-all Erling #1's dictates, it is simply harder to understand singing than speaking, and I get it, but supertitles seem like an awfully ham-handed way to deal with that. Better to have buff oiled men with cue cards.

Thought #2: This Erling who appears in thought #1 seems to be the oldest of the old fuddy-duddies, and what about the common modern notions of text, e.g. the deconstruction of text as sonic object and I say yes of course, I love it all, and actually the truth is that I don't even really give a shit whether I understand the text most of the time, and there are really few things I enjoy more than sitting in a comfortable opera house completely lost and half asleep and allowed to ignore the words because, and I say this with some awareness of how this might upset Erling #1, that following a text, to say nothing of an actual narrative, takes way more energy than just lying there and letting the sound wash over me, an undifferentiated sculptural mass of reverberant din.

Thought #3: Going back to the supertitles, I did use them once myself, in Sub Pontio Pilato, because the text was a polyglot monstrosity, and even then I couldn't stand it, and the supertitles wandered off at one point and found their own path to interesting textual commentary rather than be shackled to mere translation. And anyway, it's almost impossible to get supertitles right and to deliver them at exactly the right moment where they don't give away the joke by arriving early or falling flat by arriving late.

Thought #4: And what about coloratura, and by that I mean classical coloratura, not even the melismas so popular in the singing of the USA National Anthem at the USA sporting events of today? I hardly ever write it, in large part due to my text obsession. I admit I have a suspicion of virtuosity in general, virtuosity of the gymnastic or physical kind that is, although I do seem to love virtuosity of the cerebral kind, e.g. rhythmic balderdash and hard counting. But performers love to play things that are good and hard, and audiences, even those consisting of yours truly, love to hear them. Singers have spent countless hours honing their skills, shaping and placing their high notes and their runs and their trills and their skippings about, and of course they want to use those skills lest no one in the universe know they have them.  So I'm doing it, and I'm going to love it no matter what Erling #1 goes on about.

But in the end, I'm working with a glorious singer, whose collaboration is forcing me to do things that I wouldn't normally do, and that's always a good thing. And you know me anyway, right, my inclination toward kowtowing or even prostrating. Hand me a shovel and tell me to dig out the dirt, 6 feet down and just wide enough to lie down in and now, Erling, let me cover you with some clods and hey now, don't get up, just let us do this thing.

Uksus in Bregenz and beyond

The Uksus opera has been doing a slow tour along the Marchia Orientalis, from the initial amphibious assault on the beaches of Klagenfurt last December to the inevitable scorched earth twixt there and Bregenz last week, where the musical armada arrived as the opener of the Theaterallianz festival. I, like the Deadheads of yore, found myself following along their path in my battered Volkswagen Van, strident with rainbows and peace symbols, the site of many a conquest, and the centerpiece of many a drug-induced comatic experience.

My German, seemingly worse than ever, allows me to experience every performance like a child - a child whose parents don't mind it hearing some really naughty words in their Deutsch variants, which I then, like a child, repeat throughout the day, sing-songing the same tunes again and again. And again, because of my poor German, I tend to see the forest piece-gestalt rather than the wordlike trees, and I discern that the piece has matured as it travels, form coalescing from chaos. As it matures, I've begun to see what it is really all about, a recognition one would have hoped one would have known before one wrote the music but one is sure - without doubt - that God or her lesser angels and possibly their helper elves guided one's pen to the truth from the start.  Except possibly the ending, which may need some work.

My surprise visit did get on the Austrian TV, and there was a maestro-ish press conference where I was treated like I knew what I was talking about, and where I may not have sounded like an idiot, but one can never quite judge such things for oneself.  The piece itself was a delight to experience again, the performers wonderful, the society superb, the swimming pools and attendants and alcoholic overtaxing of my already overtaxed kidneys and liver and other internal organs which, when lightly sautéed, give a pleasant mouth feel and a pleasant tang of urine or bile or other bodily humors, as befits their function, a joyous cacophony.

I do hear whisperings from the ravens that the next performances may be in Wels, or Linz, or somewhere else in northern Austria, so I should check the oil cooling and the bed springs for further journeys - and further conquests - in the woods and valleys of the great Austrian nation.

The English-language version of Uksus, which will premiere somewhere here in San Francisco next year in one of the premier houses, is progressing through the usual tediousness of fundraising (we call it "development") but also along the exciting paths of translation and reworking and chances to fix the problems such as the aforementioned ending.

P.S.: Having now moved several operas of mine between the German and English languages, I should someday write a treatise on the differences between the two and the difficulties of moving something already composed in one to the other: way too many syllables in German, the high points of sentences coming in wildly different places, word order different in general, and again the problem of way too many syllables.

Scene 6: in which she kills her children

LaShaun undresses Trayshawn.

Dear Father,
dear Jesus,
lead these little ones
on their treacherous journey
fleshly, into your arms.
My little boy, Mr. Trayshawn Harris,
who cannot swim,
an angel in human vesture,
the water is so cold,
will chill him,
deep through his naked skin,
to his bones,
bone chilled.

But not his heart, not his soul,
with which your hand doth protect and shelter and warm,
and warm,

He runs, but she catches him and picks him up,

such a little boy, so easy to lift, yes, I hear you,
so easy to lift.

And Taronta Ray Greely Jr, take this plunge,
harsh and cold,
into the deep sea, back from where we came, each,
formed by mysteries beyond our comprehending
and swim, and founder,
and feel the chill of the water in your lungs,

tearing, searing pain,
and pass through death,
that which He has promised us,
He who, on Calvary's mount, defeated Death,
so that each of us can come into his arms,
waiting for you, my son,
my son, behold your mother, woman, behold,
my Joshoa Greely, my boy, only 16 months,
who still toddles so cannot swim,
and the water is so cold,

I send you through this passage,
like the Stargate with the lights all around.
Waiting for you,
a kindly old man and his son and the other,
less corporeal,
a bird,
halos like lights all around,

I see the light form about your brow, dear Joshoa.
Your mother is so happy for you,
my God is in you,
as I undress you.

and drops him into the water.

I feel the nubs of wings on your back,
they will lift you,
even though your body is sodden down with cold watery death.
A powerful strength will find you,
the wind from your wings drying the chill water from you,

and, swinging him by one foot and one hand, flings him over the railing.
She turns to the next child, undresses him, She holds out the baby

the hands of our Lord warming your heart,
his lungs breathing life into your young body,
the Resurrection and the Life,
he promised this to us all,
forever and ever, forever and ever, forever and ever.
Don't struggle my son.
I hear you,
cooing to your mother,
so easy to lift
and drop into the water,

My baby,
I can't see you,
I can't hear you, my son,
be strong,
the water is cold and you have such a long way to go.
I love you and I'm so proud of you,
strong enough to take this journey,
dangerous through the cold chill,
a bone chilling watery death,
ahead of your mother,
whose certitude,
feeling, joy, peace,
God of Abraham and Isaac,
Joy, Joy,
Tears of Joy,
Peace,
On this day the 19th of October,
the year of our Lord, 2005,
we must each take this journey alone,
so alone,

I feed each of you to the sharks,
the pain of their teeth tearing through your bodies,
in the cold chill dark water,
cold to draw the life from you,
through your naked skin,
taking the life that I gave you,
that your Father gave you,
that He gave all of us.
Hold, I hear him now,
I have a phone call from him,
He's calling me.
Sorry, can't talk now, busy,
can just listen.

She drops him in.

Thank you my God,
tell me again how right this is,
each of my boys,
the cold chill of death,
the dangerous journey,
through this Stargate.
From here on Earth to Heaven above.

To be with him today in paradise,
truly this is Eternal Life,
that they know you,
the one True God,
and the one that you sent,
Jesus Christ,
Jesus Christ,
Jesus Christ,
may I not forget your words.

It is finished.

What we worry about when we worry about Kitsch

Adorno, in a well known quote, said that Kitsch "is the beautiful minus its ugly counterpart," a kind of purified beauty without a vision of the other - what I suppose might be called the real world - with Hundescheiße and all. Now there is nothing innately wrong with this, and if I were able to somehow tap into a stream of pure beauty in my own meager compositions, I would gladly make use of it, as whatever small respite one can give an audience in this brief life is worth grasping.

However, Kitsch, when loved in its unadulterated and unironic form, has become negatively associated, and has become a word used to deny the validity of whatever the speaker doesn't care much for. The most obvious examples of the genre, for example the twee Hummel figurines that my friends' parents collected so avidly, and that made me vaguely queasy even as a child, are easy targets for those of us who aspire to the world of ultra-high art. But the point here is more subtle. The notion of Kitsch has something to do with its commodification, packaging up a subject in a manner which is easily digested, gratifying the desires of the viewer-to-be. It is this aspect which I find the most troubling personally.

Adorno is famous for another comment as well, made in an interview which touched on the anti-war songs of the 60s:

And I have to say that when somebody sets himself up, and for whatever reason (accompanies) maudlin music by singing something or other about Vietnam being unbearable...I find, in fact, this song unbearable, in that by taking the horrendous and making it somehow consumable, it ends up wringing something like consumer qualities out of it."

I think this strikes at the heart of art-making whenever it seeks to be a commentary on the horrors of the real world. In a review of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Manohla Dargis comes up with one of my favorite lines: "[Kitsch...] tries to make us feel good, even virtuous, simply about feeling." Now this is a cornerstone of the Hollywood palace of culture, well-evidenced by the immeasurable collection of movies profiteering on all tragedies past and present, from personal misfortunes to those unimaginably horrific. I've often wondered why there is no outcry, given the various institutions dedicated to the preservation of the real memory of the Jewish Holocaust, to the massively vampiric way Hollywood fills its pockets with sweetly sentimental and boffo-at-the-box-office stories concerning it. Stanley Kubrick, who worked for years on treatments of a film about the Holocaust, decided that it simply couldn't be contained in a movie, and made the point that Schindler's List and the others really weren't about the Holocaust at all.

But, fundamentally, I fail to see how any digestibly evening-length piece, created for purposes mercenary or self-aggrandizing or otherwise, can contain any tragedy. If my own Certitude and Joy attempts to do that, then in that regard it is a failure. At best, it's an essay, one more bit of ink spilled, one more personal comment on the fringes on the subject and subjects related to it. At worst, it is insidious, a piece that pretends to be real, that plays on the emotions, that allows an audience to believe that the artist has conveyed to them something of the truth, but that sets them outside an hour later on their way to buy another donut. Maybe the middle ground is somewhere in between, a show of light and spectacle and music that uses some tricks to make some points, some of which are interesting; and which is enjoyable sensorially, and which may, if it is lucky, make one think about one's own life.

The curious reality of Sister Hummel is that, even though the figures given her name are labeled as shining examples of Kitsch, they capture more of the truth of tragedy through their existence than any artwork looking back from our comfortable present is able to. The figurine pictured is based on her watercolor - The Volunteers - which enraged Hitler, who banned her art, an SA mouthpiece writing "There is no place in the ranks of German artists for the likes of her. No, the 'beloved Fatherland' cannot remain calm when Germany's youth are portrayed as brainless sissies." But even after this, and under Nazi persecution, she continued to produce her works under terrible conditions in an unheated cell with little food, covertly placing in them Stars of David, menorahs and other subversive imagery, dying of tuberculosis before the end of the war.

Toward a theory of the breakdown of the separation between audience and action

When in the presence of live sex, it is hard to keep an intellectual distance. Stephen Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, explains by way of Aquinas and Aristotle the aesthetic view that art is Art that holds one in awe, that does not move one to action. The esthetic emotion is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing. This state is that in which understanding and insight is achieved, the state of aesthetic arrest, and in this view, the polemical and the pornographic are therefore not Art.

But here we are interested in just this, the difficult boundary between awe and motion. When presented with sex at close range and with intimacy, lust is facilitated, and lust encourages motion to the object. I felt this first when I saw Shaffer's Equus as a boy, when I happened to have a seat on the stage, so close that I could smell the actors' sweat, and when the boy and the girl undressed and prepared for sex in the stable, I was overcome with a feeling of unease, although still I looked, and later, thinking on the image of the two together, I was impelled to action.

Equus is a play addressed much to the same topic as my own Certitude and Joy. The removal of the boy's religion by society is necessitated by his violence, as the removal in real life of LaShaun's intimate religion is necessitated by her violence. In both stories there is hesitation to do so, as both protagonists are in direct communication with their gods, gods both terrifying and powerful, and in the boy's case, sexually powerful as well. His sacrament is the religious ecstasy of riding the horse in an exultation of sexual bliss, and when his little death is experienced, the cum sprays - we imagine - across the sweaty frothing bare back of the horse. To achieve our purposes, we must see something of this directly on the stage: intercourse in all its varieties, raw and direct; orgasm.

For the last 10 years, I have worked with James Bisso off and on, and more off than on, on a picaresque and fictitiously autobiographical piece titled 24x7, initially our own version of My Secret Life, but now hard to pin down exactly as it has become a sprawling epic containing a series of internal sub-operas. But I feel like I need a text more interesting than My Secret Life, maybe a story of lusty adventure, possibly a new Moll Flanders set on a boy not unlike myself. Or maybe the text should be an attempt to unfluff Shortbus, a film which caught to some extent - strangely transporting it to Manhattan from San Francisco - a world I know too well, but a film which does not have the intellectual rigor of one of my own theatrical works, although it could be argued that I have missed the point that sex can be fun and simple and not necessarily dark and deep and complicated and dangerous.

If, in addition to being pornographic, I wished to commit the sin of being polemical as well, one argument I would like to make by way of this work is how closeted so many of us all still are, and a goal is to reveal those secrets that still exist in our lives, even post our modern culture's supposed sexual emancipation. And thus we attend: (1) the idea of transparency (2) how there is no sin in sex (3) and especially how Die Gedanken Sind Frei and how fantasies, of all one's thoughts, should be the most unfettered and free. The live sex should be free as well, and range from the mundane to the violent, from the passionate to the perfunctory.

Once there is an actual concept, say even a story, casting is an issue. Who would be in it? I suppose porn actors would, or sex workers of a broader variety, or sex worker advocates, or those that are old enough to not care anymore, or those that are already out in any of a variety of perversions and inversions which take them beyond this simple task. The actors cannot be individuals who are closed or closeted, like the actors in old stag film loops wearing masks as they grunt silently across the screen, as this would defeat the purpose, that of intimacy and connection and motion beyond the aesthetic. And can they sing?  Or, more to the point, can they sing while discussing said aesthetics and also attending to the more athletic demands of the role, where breath and hair and tongue and taste intermix?

The night before last

I went to see Opera Parallèle's production of Ainadamar the night before last and, as I was waiting for my lovely wife to freshen up, I ran into Joshua Kosman, who asked me what I was up to and as is often the case when asked that particular question, I fumbled unsuccessfully for an answer, mentioning something about having just come back from the production of Uksus in Austria.  He chided me for not keeping up with the blog, and thus not tipping my hand as to what was coming up in my compositional life, but after thinking about it for a day I realized that the problem is that in general, I really don't know what is going on until it happens. Projects and ideas of projects blink evanescently into being and then blink back out again, like those bigger bosons that appear in the collisions of synchrotron output and then disappear 3×10^-25 seconds later, but sometimes one or two projects will, to mix metaphors, snowball into something real. Some even make it to the master list of pieces-to-do, but it can be embarrassing to reveal those to the world or even to friends or lovers as they will invariably say, and I quote: "yes, you told me that list six months ago, and maybe you could just finish one so that I don't have to hear about them over and over." So, I hesitate.

But now, just for the sake of experiment, let me reveal to the world some of what I am working on. I'd like to produce Uksus here in San Francisco. That's a matter of money mostly, and maybe the fact that it is in German, and I like my pieces to be (1) in the language of the people or (2) in a big stew of ancient languages that no one understands. I've also been working on another long-term opera project with Jim Bisso but as it took us 10 years to do the last one, I assume this one will take 20, and that in the meantime I will write another opera or two of my own. I'm working on some songs with Sirje Viise, which may include some of her poems and maybe some of mine, and I've had a plan for ages to do some songs with Jolie Holland, and the other day Laura Bohn asked me to write something that she could perform in the Netherlands, and maybe there's a way to kill all these birds with a lot of stones, or maybe just a lot of songs. These I have actually been working on, and the last few days have been spent communing with the piano under the influence of hangovers and other other-than-normal mental states hoping to stumble across a lost chord or two. I have many processes for working on tunes, this being the most Stravinsky-esque, although I do know in my heart that there are wrong ways and right ways to write music, and the right way is to channel God through the pen on paper, so that I will try as well.

There is something aphoristic about a brief song vs. an large operatic piece. I'm sure that the popularity of the popular song has something to do with this. It is that the song leaves much out that the opera is obliged to fill in, and it is this evocation of the internal history and context of the listener that adds to a song's beauty. The more heartbreak, the more pain and joy and life one has lived, the more injustice one has seen in the world, the better the song can be.

I have a number of instrumentalist friends who have asked me for works and a few that haven't, and in that last category is the organist Michelle Jeanine Horsley, for whom I wrote a piece as I was leaving Vienna at the end of last year, and which I present here:


While you listen, I'll go back to the piano, just as soon as I've finished reading the myriad Wikipedia entries concerning the Filioque controversy.  Even though I have set and before this day spoken only the Roman version, I'm becoming partial to the Orthodox, no doubt due to my preference for the iconoclastic: τὸ ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον. 

Copyright

A week before last Wednesday I participated in a panel at the SPIE's conference on Electronic Imaging on Audio Identification and CopyFraud. Content identification is how I earn my living in general, and Audio Identification in specific, and although the panel veered more toward the technical and commercial questions surrounding Audio ID rather than the issues of hijacked revenue streams and false DMCA notices, even touching on the subject of Copyright in the Digital Age stirred up a thick dark muck which had been crusted over through the years, but which now threatens to break through and spill out over you, my dear reader, an assuredly idiotic act given that too much ink has already been spilt on the topic, but no matter.

My own attitudes toward copyright are idiosyncratic. So much of the discussion in the Slashdots and Boing-boings and EFFs deal with popular culture - songs and T-shirts and national tours - and I come from a distinctly non-popular culture and therein lies some of the difference. I've never cared much whether people copied what I did, and maybe that comes from the exposure at a young age to the endless Variations on a Theme by So-and-So, and maybe the Read/Write culture is the birthright of the Classical Composer. But even more so, almost everything good or bad is sitting on my website: scores and recordings and videos, and I suppose if someone took that as an indication that they could do whatever they wanted with what is there, I suppose it's possible that I wouldn't care, copyright notices or no.

Case in point: during one of the performances of Sub Pontio Pilato, I noticed the sound guy had hooked up a recorder to the sound board and when I asked him about it later he said he really liked that one chord progression - and yes, I liked that one chord progression too - so he decided to just record it so he could use it in his next electronica something-or-other. Although imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I suppose there is something just the slightest bit odd about someone absconding outright with a section of a work that took you 10 years to write and many years of fundraising to produce, walking off with it at the press of a button. But really, what can one do?  Once a bit of art is out in the world, it's really out in the world, no longer yours no matter how many F-16s are sold to unfriendly countries to convince them to prop up all the Dumbo and Bambi and Steamboat Willie protection treaties crafted by the Disney corporation.

But, on the other hand, why couldn't he have just taken the time to have written an equally good chord progression himself? Yes, I'm aware of the fact that I couldn't have conceived of that progression without standing on the shoulders of giants from Pythagorus on up, and we all borrow or steal from others at some fundamental linguistic level, but there is something uniquely mine about that bit of music, yes? Something special that caught his eye? I doubt he is going to give me attribution when he spins it in some after hours nightclub, looking good, while some sweet young cis or trans boy or girl on the latest designer sex-enhancing drug rubs him or herself against him in the dark. And didn't I work hard to give that bit some context, a context born of 10 years of sweat and toil, only to have it be cast alone and unprotected against the dangers of the world in which it now finds itself, its morality and its virtue unguarded? What if, in that moment of exposure, underpants stripped off while it attempts to cover itself with its hands it is laughed at, bullied, made fun of?  Or what if it is taken up at a political rally in a sweaty and fecund chant, a chant in support of someone who doesn't share my libertine sensibilities? What if a group of greatly evil corporate thugs steal it to sell more genetically modified soap, soap that contains compounds that don't register as date-rape drugs on the local police officer's field test kit?  As with all things, it takes years to create and minutes to destroy, and my little work, a feast for the ears, my child and my hope, can be so easily abused and raped and tossed onto the slag heap with all the rest churned through the great capitalist commercial music threshing machine.

I remember when one of my first LPs was mastered by Phil Brown and he told us the story of working just a few years before on Stairway to Gilligan's Island aka Gilligan's Island (Stairway), a tune consisting of the lyrics to the Gilligan's Island theme song over the instrumental bits of Stairway to Heaven. Even though quite clearly a parody and even though hard to imagine how it would negatively affect the sales of the Led Zeppelin composition, it seems the Led Zeppelin lawyers had no sense of humor whatsoever, and I remember reading later that, in the court documents, they referred to the original work as something akin to a national treasure, an untouchable aspect of our common heritage, a masterwork to be protected at all costs.

Dreaming

mission

I remember only fragments, entering a ruined building with an automatic weapon, putrid water pooling inside a room with stark lighting, a feeling of importance, shooting through the wall of the next room before entering, stumbling across another, smaller room where three children sit, again in harsh light, strange catatonic children staring ahead, feeling detached, just an observer. Entered the first room again, feeling like it was all starting again, the putrid pool, the stark light. 

++++

Thanks for posting your dream. I hope you don’t mind my interpreting it:

Your dream seems to revolve around healing past emotional issues, perhaps via comparing them to similar issues belonging to another person (two rooms). 

Something may have happened when you were three (3 children), or perhaps you are trying to save someone else who was three. Whoever it was, you think this thing that happened has rendered you/them unable even to feel or react (catatonic), and therefore locked here in this state (they don’t leave). 

There might be a sexual relationship involved (gun), and/or you are using sex to do the saving (shooting through the walls). Everything is clear to you about the situation (harsh light) but you are powerless to help it (detached observer) even though you feel vital to the process (feeling important). 

You think this situation- or your trying to intervene- is the ruin of a person or relationship (ruined building), a person or relationship which is presently suffering from extreme emotional and/or spiritual limitation and negativity (putrid water). This relationship or person is not necessarily the same as that represented by the three children to whom something happened, but it could be.

You wish to thoroughly obliterate your enemy (automatic weapon), but there does not seem to be one. You are trapped in this feeling of frustration for the moment, though you seem to understand its origins, which is positive. Overall, the dream, though perhaps reflecting a very frustrating situation, is in my opinion positive, because you take action (shooting walls) and are willing to destroy the barriers to love in a grand sense (walls). 

The YKCYC Experience

We are halfway through the run of the Daniil Kharms piece here in snow-kissed Klagenfurt, the Paris of Carinthia, gateway to Slovenia and the beyond.  The experience, I suppose like all, has been unique, and not without lessons learned, lessons that almost surely will not be remembered nor even applicable in the future, but still of possibly some small interest.  It is the first time I've worked on an operatic piece from such a distance, with so many people I didn't really know, and that has required a certain letting go of the typical iron-fisted control I wield over my own productions.  The librettists and directors, the young and talented VADA, were not so familiar with opera and music theater, and didn't understand many of the conventions of the process: e.g. the vocalists' need for a handsome répétiteur or in general the diplomacies required to nurse the singers' tortured instruments through the difficult act of singing. But they've come into their own, learning very quickly, and in the end producing a lovely and affecting rendition of their work.

I hesitate to call it an opera, more of a singspiel (a word which when I write it seems even more pretentious than the former), as there are some major textual moments entwined with no music whatsoever, a situation unknown of in any previous Erling Wold opus.  I had in fact written musical settings of much more of the text, but my ostensible collaborators cut this and that behind my back, I suppose to suit their own purposes and vanities and, after much pulling out of hair, here we are.

The actors are really fantastic. Adolfo Assor, who owns no telephone, could in fact read the telephone directory (if such a thing still actually exists in the modern world) and bring an audience to rapt attention, yearning for more. When he dies, I die with him.  Rüdiger has some amazing moments - the fotzenloch bit comes immediately to mind - and the two of them together are a great comic team, especially in the Boeuf Bub sections that mark the transitions between the four boxes.

The band - the Talltones extended - has been fantastic, better than I could have hoped for, throwing my piece to the wind, adding a jazz layer that I had poorly attempted but which they, in their wisdom, simply ignored, crafting their own.  Richie Klammer sings the Divan song just perfectly, but they are all good, Emil a fantastic drummer, best I've worked with since the old old days with Mark Crawford, Tonč's masterful fingers full of expression and delight, Stefan the St. Peter of the ensemble - so critical for the bass, Michael's fabulous solo in the same tune mentioned above, and Primus, bringing just the right collection of pedals to push it over the edge from my current uptight classical adulthood back to the rock pretensions of my youth, revealing how close all that is to my freshly painted surface. Working with jazz players is very familiar to me, and they have some great advantages, sometimes approaching the music more deeply than conservatory musicians who have not had the experience, who have no  issues around the sacredness of the score, and who make their imperfections - or what would be considered imperfections in the classical world - nothing like imperfections, but charming attributes of their playing, seemingly organic parts of the music. I do like it when players make my scribblings their own, and I, in my vanity, happily take ownership of all their contributions.

This is now Josef Oberauer's third opera of mine - more than any other singer - having been in the Austrian premieres of both Little Girl and Sub Pontio Pilato. He's just good, has a beautiful warm voice and has no, absolutely no, worries about his image, willing to do whatever needs to be done for the piece. Above is Sirje Viise, a master actress, a singing powerhouse, who submits to the will of the composer, but who, in her perfection, is willing to fight back, winning the day, conquering both the land and its inhabitants. Her singing of the aria Du hast den Gedächnisstrom is simply electrifying.

I love listening to them both, especially those pretty moments that I attempt to prettify when I write them but then become heartbreaking when filtered through the instrument of an extraordinary vocalist, humbling me, reducing me to my proper position as merely, on one hand, a scribe for the divine, and on the other, the messenger delivering it to the divine here on earth. For Josef, Aus übergroßer Neugierde and for Diva Viise, Du bist ein Gott auf neun Beinen - my breathing becomes ragged and my heart palpitates.

I've saved the very last for Davorin Mori - a conducting student of Alexei Kornienko - who was brought in to save the piece, and who did.  He's led the ensemble with a sure hand, unwilling to drop it when things were not perfect, who has continued to improve its architecture and connections.  I'm so grateful, and that's all I can say.  It would not have succeeded without him.

Besides the work, there's been an enormous amount of drinking, and of cold, and of breathing second-hand smoke, and walking, and practicing conducting, and going to Ljubljana with Gerhard, and more drinking, and mentoring Sirje in the ways of demanding diva-hood, careerism and the loneliness that ensues. Soon Lynne will arrive and there will no doubt be more drinking, but surely more expensive drinking, and that to cover the sadness of the project's end, a profound sadness and grief and pain.

Seen about town

photo by Sirje Viise

Science

Hearing the premiere of Paul Dresher's latest piece, a concerto of his Quadrachord long string instrument with the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, and especially his quick lecture beforehand on the details of the Just Intonation aspects of his piece (natural harmonics on his instrument, natural harmonics in the horns, and maybe in the trumpets, a subgroup of 15 strings tuned 40 cents lower to bring them into correspondence with some of the higher partials), I was reminded once again of the lazy connection between music theories and scientific theory. Even in my deepest and darkest days spent connected to the JI world, nothing I read - and I read a lot - ever explained, except in the most mystical terms, why Just Intonation was better than any other pitch-choosing mechanism. The purity of the intervals was mentioned, the transcendental perfection of small integers, the lack of beats, the sacredness of the harmonic series, and of course the music of the spheres. But does any of that say anything about badness or goodness or are such considerations irrelevant in the face of such revealed truth? The realities are mundane in comparison, e.g. that people like beats, that they tune pianos and 12 string guitars and mandolins and Balinese Gamelans to emphasize them, and why are small integers better than irrational number, since as Cantor found, there are more of the latter than the former? And I wouldn't be the first to point out that the JI-ness of the vibrating world exists only in some Platonic ideal, as real strings and real columns of air have harmonic series which diverge from that ideal, sometimes by a lot, and brake drums and bells and lots of other wonderful musical machines have harmonics that are decidedly inharmonic, a lovely and self-contradictory description of the partials whose frequency relationships one might otherwise think defined the word.

In music, I love such nonsense. I think it is important somehow, like reading a kōan, putting the mind in a place where mere truth is irrelevant, but I also do have a deep lasting long term relationship with science - and maybe even a love for it - which goes back to my youth, discovering one day a large cache of old Scientific Americans and reading through them all from cover to cover and cardboard box to cardboard box. It leads me to still spend days reading through scientific and mathematical articles, scribbling down my own calculations and pondering the deep search for truth. Although I sometimes dissemble when discussing it, my doctorate is not in music at all, but in Electrical Engineering, and I recall a story from those days. My research advisor was Al Despain, a wild-haired crazy man who was willing to skim off some money from his various defense grants to support me, a poor graduate student interested in the intersection of music and technology in those heady times, when one had to write one's own file system to get samples off a disk fast enough to achieve audio rates, when one had to build one's own D/A converter to listen to the audio in real time.  But Al's true love was all things military, and one day he told me to be at his house the next morning early, where we were met by a limo and, quickly chewing through several columns of Fig Newtons, headed to the airport and a quick flight to San Diego. Again, a limo, and bustled into a room, I found myself giving a talk on my thesis to a room full of JASONs, the notorious and/or acclaimed MITRE-related Defense Advisory Group, including the esteemed Freeman Dyson. I bumbled through, in awe, and wondered at the attendees most celebrated, not able to say what I really wanted to say: in fact some kind of gushing fanboy babble.

Last week, driving back from visiting my mother and my in-laws, I was reminded of this experience when listening to a Relatively Prime podcast on Paul Erdős. The subject is dear to my heart, and I glow with a very small respectability due to a paper I published with the mathematician Oscar S. Rothaus on Gaussian Residue Arithmetic, giving me an Erdős number of 5 to his 4. The podcast featured three mathematicians with Erdős numbers of 1, and one of them told how he was invited by Erdős to give a talk at a symposium where no one showed up except Erdős, the organizer of the symposium and Stanislaw Ulam, and how proud he was to give his talk to such a small but illustrious audience. In life and work, we love our icons and we hope that someday they may love us.

The Opera America Songbook!

I was in New York City recently. Now, some would simply say New York but that's like saying I'm going to The City when one is in Oakland, a perfectly fine city, but meaning I'm going to San Francisco, or Frisco as only the hippest of the ultimately hip would say.  But the reason I was in New York City was to visit some of my most Manhattanite friends and to hear Jennifer Check and William Hobbs record Home, with Illustrations for The Opera America Songbook, which is now out in book and record form, e.g. on Amazon or iTunes or Sheet Music Plus.  But shouldn't the title have an exclamation point?  I think titles are always better that end with an exclamation point.

Jennifer has some major vocal powah, but she holds all that power back so nicely at the change, like the jockey controlling War Admiral in the Whitney Handicap, where the POV changes from the song to the simpler song within the song - the chilling moment - a change she handles beautifully.

Comedy

Composing deep into the Vierte Kiste of the UKSUS OBERIUper, aka the Fourth Act, standing at the verge of the Freytagian dénouement, or whatever it might be, page 311 of the score and the last two pages of the libretto written by Felix Strasser (Chef-Plotmonteur) and Yulia Izmaylova (Plotmonteuse), the Vadaisten or, as I like to call them, the Vada-ettes, approaching my imposed deadline of the end of the month. The dates of the run are set and the opera is premiering the sixth of December of 2012. The casting is decided, and features two of my buddies: Josef Oberauer, who played all the patriarchs in the German language version of Little Girl shod in panties and platform shoes, as well as the lead role in Sub Pontio Pilato in its Austrian incarnation; and Sirje Viise, the endearing soprano and great wit who aided me in my Berlin Striptease last year.

During the process of the last few months, I've thought much about the nature of a comic opera, as this piece is in fact a comedy. It's been pointed out by many that there haven't been so many comic operas in the last 100 years, at least on the high art side of the aisle, and I've noticed a tendency to fall back on parody and pastiche and the easy joke, e.g. the Russian Basses and the Flexatone. Some composers transcend, but I've decided to give in to my baser desires, to avoid my rumored musical sophistication and to write something simple and possibly simplistic. Each day I thank the gods of Xerox PARC for the existence of copy and paste in the user interface, and for the minimalists of my youth for leading me to a style that made that a viable option, improving my chances of meeting the deadlines, and making it OK for one to lessen one's musical variation density.

Which reminds me: style in art is without a doubt part of the message. After reading Burgess's books on Joyce in high school, I became a believer in stylism as an expressive device in literature. Writing a paper on the topic earned me an A+ and a private moment with my English teacher, alone in the classroom, where she pressed upon me a paperback, saying that she couldn't assign this book to just anyone and I, pleased to have been chosen for my broadmindedness, took it home to read it that evening and found the main character, about my age, seduced by his English teacher by the end of the first chapter. But in the world of my chosen art form of high-minded art music, stylistic eclecticism seemed to be frowned on. From the high modernists to the minimalists was emphasized a uniformity of not only style but of texture - across a single work to be sure, but even across a body of work.  Style didn't seem to be a parameter of a work, a knob to be turned based on the desired affect, and the few examples: (1) the use of modernist musical gestures in scifi or horror films (kitschy) and (2) rock 'n' roll in Bernstein's Mass (embarrassing), were not encouraging. But in Kyle Gann's recent and beautiful eulogy to his friend William Duckworth, the following line struck me:

If the culture ever changes so that elegant design is once again as highly valued as macho eclecticism, I think it will be realized that Bill is a truly major composer; even as it is, there are many younger composers who think so.

So when did macho eclecticism become highly valued?  Here I am, with nagging doubts about not writing pieces or sets of pieces with stylistic uniformity like Glass or Feldman or Boulez or Messiaen or David Lang, and I find that I may have Missed Out on a cultural shift. Maybe I don't have to feel so bad about  having included some rock-like or jazz-like bits in the opera, whose rock-like-ness or jazz-like-ness may be emphasized by the fact that The Talltones are performing the music and that they will be several thousand miles away during the rehearsal process and I have given them my blessing to take certain small liberties with the score, even though my wife's disdainful reaction to the quasi-rock-like elements was more or less "Hardly rock at all, pfft."

My favorite bit of Charms is not in the piece, but comes from his story The Old Woman:

I can hear little boys screaming on the street - so unpleasant! I lie on the sofa and try to think up different ways I would like to execute them. The best one is infecting them with tetanus, imagining them suddenly incapable of movement. Their parents come and carry them home. They lie in their little beds and cannot eat, since their mouths won't move. They are fed artificially. After a week the tetanus cures, but the children are still weak and they have to stay in bed a further more month. They gradually recover, but I loose the tetanus on them one more time and all of them die.

the enjoyment of which is made all the better knowing he earned his living writing books for children and was loved as such for many years after he died.

One of the crowd

While searching on post minimalism in music, I quickly came across the seminal essay by Kyle Gann from '98. It's a good read, and I'm in the camp of believers - believers that it existed that is - mainly because of the disconcerting fact that his post describes me well. One likes to think that one arrived at one's place in life by one's own decisions, one's own will, one's own process, but the reality is that one is swept along by the currents of history. I too was raised a believer in modernity, a believer in the goodness of complexity, and I too had the Damascene conversion while listening to Einstein on the Beach in the late 70s. I too can't shake off the old feelings while embracing the new and I too was led to the same places: rhythm and accessibility and tonality-with-an-edge.

It reminds me of a story that I believe Jim Bisso told me about his Palestinian friend asking him what religion he was, to which Jim replied atheist or whatever and his friend then saying no no no, what religion are you?  I mean, what religion were you born into?  That's a caste you cannot change. We put on the coat of our place and time and culture and family. I am the composer I am because I am here now and that's a choice I cannot unmake.

The Opera Conference and its discontents

Finished the Opera Conference 2012 in beautiful Philadelphia, having gone in partial settlement of a debt to Opera America for all their help over the years. Grant awards that I assume were sized as moderate assistance to a major company have been to me lifesavers: major assistance to my micro-sized company.

It was a wonderful and eye-opening experience. Clearly the tides of opera have turned since I first joined in the late 90s. Back then, the Opera America Magazine's list of upcoming opera productions of the major companies would be the same every issue, changing only in which company was assigned to which opera. Which reminds one of the story of John Cage during the writing of the first Europera, being allowed into the basement library of the Metropolitan Opera, where he expected to find a vast array of scores covering the history of the art form but was surprised to find only a few handfuls, as really that was all that was necessary year by year. Now, however, companies are scrambling to present new works, either in main stage high-profile commissions, or second or third or Nth productions of smaller or exotic works that have picked up some press, e.g. the famous-for-its-humjob Powder Her Face, or the moving Nico Muhly opus Dark Sisters, the latter of which was presented at the conference, and is in the seemingly growing genre of operas about the complexities of faith.

To an extent, this sea change is due to a die-off of the Old Guard - a descriptive phrase used publicly during the conference - as well as a growing understand of the Death Spiral, to wit, cutting budgets and doing the same-old same-old and finding your ticket income dwindling and then cutting back more and round and round. As for the pilot of a small Beechcraft caught in a tailspin plummeting to earth, one needs to pull back on the stick as it were, and The Way that has been determined to accomplish this is the development of new pieces. Which might possibly be good for those of us who have been doing it. Possibly.

Some high points: the neon-overloaded Geno's vs the tradition-beloved Pat's Cheez Whiz® slathered steak competition, the Mütter museum, the call from Kent Devereaux to talk about coming up to Cornish to teach the young tykes only to find out that we were 50 feet from each other, the walking around the downtown, the kindness of the people of Philadelphia, the Philosophical Society, a bunch of interesting people from staff members of Opera America to producers to opera lovers and kooks and rich folk, the endless drinking, the Persichetti memorial, the follow-on trip to New York for the Bang on a Can Marathon and the visits with more friends, and a lovely meeting with the powerful, intimidating but also quite inviting Beth Morrison.

In the picture above, I am praying. My prayers may be answered. Time will tell.

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.