torture memos (a survivor from guantánamo) (2009) for nine instruments

Since June, I’ve been composing a piece for two female voices, flute, bass clarinet, marimba, electric bass, violin, cello and piano. The piece is titled torture memos (a survivor from guantánamo) and is one of three works I’ve written with a political/social action title (the others being darfur pogrommen and zichron (in memory of bisan, maye, aya and nur abu al-aish)). As mentioned in an earlier post, I had considered setting poetry by torture victims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo, but the source poems didn’t grab me. Besides, I’m not sure the music would have done the poems justice.

So tonight I managed to put the final edits into the piece, so it’s completed. A few comments:

• The piece is a bit of a departure from my recent music. At the same time, it’s also an evolution and natural progression. In other words, it still sounds like me, but it’s not a rehash of a lot of earlier works. So I suspect people will either love it or really hate it; there’s no middle ground. If you’re disappointed, no worries.
• Don’t expect doom and gloom despite the title. This isn’t “program music.” In most ways, the title has nothing to do with the music.
• While the wind and vocal parts are far easier than some I’ve written, in that there are rests and intentional spots to breathe, in some areas the performers are on their own; when they need to grab a breath, they can, since many of the parts are doubled.
• No matter what I did, Finale 2010’s playback put in some unwritten and unwanted accents in some of the repeated eighth note sections. I gave up trying to solve this problem, since it seems unsolvable. It might be related to the ambience plugin, but without adding in resonance the audio file sounds worse than with ambience + accents, so I’m learning to live with it. Same thing happened in the final measures of ushabti, and it still drives me crazy.
• The audio level is higher than it should be-the entire piece is actually p throughout, so feel free to listen at a low volume

The duration clocks in at just over 40 minutes. The audio file, such as it is, is here. The score (bass clarinet is written as it sounds) is here.

another piece is on its way

Looking back at the past year and a half, it’s actually been the most productive musical year I’ve ever had. By my count, I’ve composed six pieces, and another is on its way. That’s amazing, at least in my opinion. For the most part, I had tended to compose one piece of music per year. Maybe two on occasion, but usually just one. Sometimes it took me even longer to finish a piece; three years wasn’t uncommon. In terms of people actually hearing my music, I’ve had one piece premiered, only a few months after it was written. And a few weeks after that concert premiere, it was heard on the radio on WPRB-FM. That’s never happened to me before.

Similarly, Steve Layton released his beautifully crafted realization of my piano work textbook, and it was heard on the first Music from Other Minds broadcast of the 2009-2010 season, with the opening selected as the show’s theme music for this year.

So why have I been so productive composition-wise since April of 2008? Probably because I spend 1-2 weeks each month in the Bay Area for work, and when I’m in my hotel room at night can work on new pieces. Having the time to write has been extremely fleeting since I started composing music several decades ago. In order to compose, I had to compromise, and that usually meant giving up sleep, time with my family, etc. Since I’m home only half the time, I have no more time to give up for my music except when I’m out on the West Coast, so that’s worked pretty well. That doesn’t make the notes come any easier-if anything, it’s really hard to motivate oneself to write music when you’re sleep deprived, off by three time zones, and have to sit in a really uncomfortable position to get access to a portable keyboard and laptop because hotel rooms rarely have desks that can accommodate 88-keys.

So on to the new piece-it’s been a real slog, since it’s based largely on some improvisations I did over the past year and required me to notate them while scoring the output for a chamber ensemble. But this past week was the charm; I got past the drudgery and things started to come together. I was up until almost 1:30 AM last night getting a lot of the piece done. It’s not there yet, but it’s 21+ minutes and counting, not that that matters. If anything, that’s a pretty short work for me. The piece is scored for two female voices (soprano/mezzo), flute, bass clarinet, electric bass, marimba, violin, cello and piano. It’s an unusual ensemble, but was dictated by both my preference for some of the instruments along with the range requirements of the piece.

What’s it called? torture memos (a survivor from guantánamo). I wanted to write a piece that called attention to the crimes against humanity committed by the Bush/Cheney administration, and initially thought to set some poetry of US torture victims to music. However, the existing poetry by Guantánamo inmates that I found just wasn’t to my taste. So I thought that, rather than set words by the victims to music, it would be more fitting for the music to be the main focus. That doesn’t mean that the music is doom and gloom–I’m not Shostakovich, of course. To some extent, the music doesn’t seem to even have anything to do with the subject. And that’s the point; I don’t compose “program music.” But I do want the music to at least provoke some thought, even if only through a title.

I’m next out this way in late October, so hopefully I’ll have even more progress at that point to report. But in any case, this has been a very busy musical year, and with luck, it will continue. That’s great news if you like my music. If you hate it, then this has been the 18 months from hell. Sorry about that.

But if you aren’t freaked out by new music, here’s an eight-minute excerpt from the current draft of torture memos. Remember, it’s still a work in progress, but this is a good chunk of what I was working on last night. This part was a pleasure to write. Whether it’s a pleasure to listen to is beyond my pay grade.

forthcoming work

I’m planning a new piece for what probably will be an ensemble consisting of two women’s voices, violin, cello, marimba, bass clarinet, bass guitar and possibly piano. The work is tentatively going to be titled torture memos (a survivor from guantánamo). The music is already largely written, in that it will mostly be derived from several recent improvisations that were done as part of James Combs’ improvfriday sessions on various social media networks. Almost all of my works started off as improvisations, so this is pretty much standard operating procedure for me. I had thought of using the title Room 101 as that was the torture room in Orwell’s prophetic novel 1984 but I thought the significance might not be obvious to anyone who hasn’t recently read the book.

Why torture memos? Because I’m horrified by what this country has done, how it has taken a detour from its original ideals, and the fact that our last administration contained what amounts to war criminals who have yet to be brought to justice.

Another reason: I’m very much taken by the notion of music as a form of social action. The standard teaching has always been that “political music” tends to be very forgettable in the end (think some of the “Communist” works by Shostakovich or Prokofiev, or even Copland), so invoking political topics in music is a recipe for bad music. But I disagree; some of the best things out there have political or historic connotations, such as Reich’s Come Out, Rzewski’s Coming Together, Glass’ Satyagraha, etc. It’s not that political music is automatically bad. Rather, some political works that have been derided over the years just might happen to have been bad music. If you write decent music, the underlying social message doesn’t make the music bad. Similarly, a lofty social message doesn’t make bad music good. Two of my recent works already deal with social messages, such as darfur pogrommen and zichron

My original plan was to set actual words written by some of the torture survivors from Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantánamo, and possibly some of the rendition sites. But I haven’t been able to find such texts. Many of the victims remain incarcerated, some of whom undoubtedly are evil men, but many of whom are and remain innocent of wrongdoing. I’m sure at some point their words will be captured, but in some ways, the most meaningful takeaways remain the photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the full extent of which remain to be seen. Then there was the idea of setting the actual legal memos “justifying” torture by John Yoo and John Bybee, and indeed one of my friends recommended this approach as well. However, a fairly mundane list of approved torture techniques, however terrifying, cannot do as much justice to the abhorrence of the torture idea as can the actual words of the victims.

As of now, I’m thinking of letting the music speak for itself, to use a bad cliché. I might preface the score with some passages from the torture memos, but I have come to the belief that setting either the torture memos themselves or actual accounts from victims is not optimal, since both of these speak well for themselves.

The “a survivor from guantánamo” part of the title is an obvious reference to Schoenberg’s work A Survivor from Warsaw. I do not mean for this to suggest that the things that have gone on, and continue to go on, vis a vis torture are morally equivalent to the massive genocide of the Holocaust. However, I do want to imply that just as Schoenberg drew upon the words of a survivor to describe the unspeakable horrors he suffered through in the Warsaw Ghetto, I want to draw upon music to solicit thoughts about the multiple horrors committed in our name over the years since 9/11/01. That doesn’t mean the music is anything other than music, any more than darfur pogrommen depicts what goes on in Western Sudan. The music is just that; music. But if the subject matters stimulate more thought about their respective topics, then that’s all the better.

zichron (2009)—for saxophone quartet

I just spent the last hour writing a slightly lengthy blog post about my new piece for saxophone quartet called zichron, which means “in memory of” or “in remembrance of” in Hebrew and, I believe, Yiddish as well. For reasons I don’t understand, since WordPress saves incremental drafts every few minutes onto a Web server, once I hit Publish, the post disappeared. It’s almost 12:40 AM on the East Coast and I’m pretty tired, so I’m not going to attempt to recreate the entire post. So here is a quick synopsis:

• The piece was requested by the saxophonist Brian Kauth
• Disclaimer: I find it difficult to write for wind or brass instruments, since I feel constrained by having to worry about leaving space for performers to breathe, or else hope that they are capable of circular breathing (NB: I have yet to encounter anyone in person who can do circular breathing, although many musicians can do it). That’s why I write a lot of music for keyboards, strings, or else keep it indeterminate (as with my pieces written for open instrumentation). But since Brian was really nice enough to ask me for the piece, and is committed to getting it performed, how could I say no?
• The work was essentially without a title for most of its composition until I heard about the tragic death of Bisan, Maye, Aya and Nur Abu al-Aish, the three daughters and niece of Dr. Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish, who died as a result of IDF fire in Gaza shortly before a ceasefire agreement. Dr. Abu al-Aish is an Israeli-trained Palestinian gynecologist who has worked to foster understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. The tragedy  had an unexpectedly personal impact on me, both as a parent and as a fellow gynecologist.  I wanted to do something to reach out and react to Dr. al-Aish’s loss, and soon realized that this work was an appropriate response.
• I really tried to keep it playable, although there are a few spots where it requires really good breath control on the part of the performers, due to some long sustained tones. I think it’s doable, though. Then again, I also thought my earlier works for brass sextet and alto flute were doable too, so all bets are off.
• The first three-and-a-half minutes consist of a single tone. But it’s a nice tone.

The mp3 is here. The untransposed score (in C) is here. The transposed score is here.

I’m going to bed…

<10′ for open instrumentation

I managed to get together a short work over the past month that came out of an improvisation. The piece is called <10′ because it is just under 10 minutes (somewhere around 9 minutes, to be more precise) and I couldn’t come up with any other title. I kept it as an open instrumentation work, although I think of it to a large degree as a work for 2-3 violins (or 2 violins plus 1 viola) along with 1-2 contrabassi and an electric bass (in the audio file I did with Reason, the electric bass part starts at the last eighth note of measure 121). It could also be done with an electronic organ. Or if some wind/brass players can circular breathe, that would be feasible as well.

As an aside, I originally tried outputting an audio file using Finale 2009’s included Garritan Personal Orchestra instruments. That was a losing option—for reasons I can’t understand, Finale’s playback was inserting all sorts of audible accents on some repeated eighth notes. I could get rid of some of these by copying and pasting individual notes that weren’t being accented, but it was a losing battle. So I dumped it into Reason as a MIDI file, and no accents were present. Finale’s playback continues to drive me nuts, as I typically have to spend far more time dealing with playback than notation. I get it, it’s a notation program first and foremost. But why it continually inserts unexpected glitches into playback is something I have yet to understand. 

Anyway, this is a short piece for me, but in all honesty, some of my pieces are indeed not that long. I’ve written at least a few pieces that didn’t last an hour or more. Honest. The MP3 and score are all up on the music page. If there’s interest, I’d be happy to post the (final) MIDI file as well as an audio file of the original improvisation to compare the rough draft with the final.