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Sept. 2023 Interview with Daniel Kepl
Back in the fall of 2023, right after the release of my second solo album with Navona, I got the opportunity to sit down with longtime American conductor, arts administrator, and music/theater/dance critic, Daniel Kepl, and talk with him about my album, SHARDS.
Unfortunately, the audio in that video interview was extremely unbalanced and distorted, so I took some time to try and clean it up, to make it as listenable as possible. So… that edited video is now here, below, ready for your viewing pleasure (complete with chapter breaks, if you’d prefer to jump around)!
While the pops and crackles and background noises are mostly gone, sometimes the words are still a little garbly, so I’ve embedded captions in the video and am providing a full transcript, for those who would prefer to read the discussion. If you would like to see the original unedited video, you can do that here.
Dan Kepl’s Review Highlights
The high points of Dan Kepl’s praise, as stated in the video below.
About the Album:
[SHARDS is] a wonderful album, very interesting and very accessible, if I may say. It’s absolutely a magnificent recording of simply superb music… This music is just simply gorgeous. You use instruments in the most magical way.
This is music that should be heard a lot more…it’s just good, solid, wonderful music-making. It’s…a very important CD you’ve got.
About “Ayre of Grievances”:
It’s absolutely gorgeous. Tense, beautifully crafted, thoroughly contemporarily classical. tonalities are altogether satisfying throughout the piece. The balancing and everything is wonderful in terms of your compositional skills.
About “DodecaFunky”:
I want to tell everybody out there that’s looking for a repertoire, this is a beauty. This is a recital beauty. I think I can say it’s fun. It’s wonderful. It’s just a delicious piece, it’s aggressive in its funky way. It’s wonderful to the max. Should be on programming all over the place. This is irresistible. Audiences would love it, I think.
About “Of Roses and Lilies”:
It’s a beauty; a rich tapestry of sound and a highly romantic tonal aesthetic. …this should go off the shelf and into performance and rehearsal. A flowing, lovely, entirely tonal journey. The soprano recorder is charming. Your writing is absolutely first-class. You handle transitions of mood with smooth aplomb. The piece soars with beauty. Your compositional savvy and skill are beyond question.
About “The Oracle”:
Once in a while, I really want to play [a track of] an album, uh, for other people…you know, over a dinner or something. This is one of them. What an amazing chamber piece. Wonderful transitional writing; compositional savvy is top notch. The piece is a wonderful narrative. It’s complex. This piece is quite a journey.
About “Wabi-Sabi”:
The construct is fascinating and sensible to the intellect…quite a narrative…wonderful quartet writing.
About “Nevermore”:
An absolutely gorgeous, wonderful, magnificent Sonata for viola and piano…so American. …a fascinating piano introduction that really nails the interest immediately because it hints at mysteries, then it’s followed by the viola’s intensely Poe-ish colors and temperament. It’s a beauty, again, of narrative imagination, a wonderful piece of writing for viola. It is virtuosic, everything a violist looks for in a recital piece. There are romantic bits in here, some hair-raising twilight zone intervals between notes, if that makes any sense, thrilling, kooky, mysterious, as was the man. It has a tremendous connection to America and American history and American literature. It is a beautiful sonata and it sounds so beautiful. The writing is so gorgeous.
[For Annabelle Lee] I call it magical writing. It’s exceptionally sensitive.
The Tell-Tale Heart: the intro, sufficiently terrifying. Very imaginative character development. It’s exactly creepy enough to fit the narrative, because it is that narrative, the pulsing, the clicking…the floorboards…Then the beginning of real paranoia. Shades of the shower scene in Psycho – Brava! Disturbingly deliberate ending.
About “The Dark Glass Sinfonia”:
…wonderful piece for orchestra, “The Dark Glass Sinfonia,” gives me shivers, but it’s wonderful.
Lovely wind section work…nicely orchestrated. It’s brilliant and wonderful and very accessible…a beautiful, beautiful orchestral piece. Definitely descriptive, martial, perfectly accessible.
Sept. 2023 Interview with Daniel Kepl (Edited, with Captions)Full [Edited] Interview Transcript
D: I’m chatting with composer Sarah Wallin Huff and we’re going to talk about your 2023 Navona CD release. Thank you, Parma. Thank you, Navona. Thank you, all of you wonderful people out there that put this, these kind of packages together. Just a quick aside about Navona, including everything that we need as critics, really somewhat truncated, makes perfect sense, but up on a website. And very few other companies do this. I just think it’s fabulous.
I’ve seen your interview, or I’ve read your interview, I should say, with Parma. And we’re going to talk about your 2023 Navona CD release of Contemporary Classical Chamber Works and an album for diverse instrumental combinations. Anyway, the CD is called Shards. Do not run away in the night and be afraid. It’s a wonderful album of very interesting and very accessible, if I may say so, and I think it’s perfectly OK to say so.
Here, just a sampling: Ayre of Grievances, for viola, violin, flute, lovely. The flute I wondered about. Those are pretty heavy instruments and the balancing and everything is wonderful in terms of your compositional skills.
DodecaFunky, let me say that once more. DodecaFunky, for piano, and it is cute… oh, did I miss one?
S: DodecaFunky.
D: Anyway, it’s cute. I think I can say it’s fun. It’s wonderful. And it’s a wonderful, very fascinating piano piece. Audiences would love it, I think.
“Of Roses and Lilies.” This one’s a little complex for soprano, piano, soprano recorder. Nice colors. Nice. English horn, very interesting. And women’s chorus. I mean, not since Holst have I heard women’s chorus used in this way.
So, Wabi-Sabi, it’s in three movements. Juventas, the new music ensemble performs it. This is a string quartet, so four players of the Juventas ensemble. I hope I’m pronouncing that right since I live in California. Three movements: Emergence, Evolution, Entropy. Very, very interesting. And maybe even kind of the heart of who you might be. I don’t know. I’m just guessing.
The next piece, Nevermore for viola and piano, an absolutely gorgeous, wonderful, three-movement sonata for viola and piano. The movements: The Raven, Annabelle Lee, The Tell-Tale Heart. And I love Poe, what a genius, what a genius. So glad you have included this wonderful, wonderful piece for viola and piano. And I mean by that, again, your compositional skills, the way you use these, didn’t you play viola? I thought I that read somewhere. Were you a violist?
S: I double on viola. I feel more comfortable on violin, but I can pick up a viola if I need it.
D: Okay. So you got all that stuff, you know, under your fingernails, so to say.
And then the last piece, wonderful piece for orchestra, The Dark Glass Sinfonia, gives me shivers, but it’s wonderful. And with a little subtype, if I’m reading it correctly: “We see through a glass darkly.” Wonderful piece, performed by wonderful people, while you really say it right out, right, and I just want to deal with this a little bit before I get to where you know, I’m going.
We all know people with autism and what I have found in my experience with people, and you know, autism is here, there, everywhere in various variations. You’re going to speak to it, I think in a bit, but the people that I have known with autism, some people have had troubles, others have been really, really talented, clever, and innovative. Autism is not a deficit. Okay.
S: Yeah. It’s a difference.
D: It’s a difference. Thank you. That’s better. Okay. Because I too, like most of, especially like with dyslexia, in the seventies, we all thought people with dyslexia were just lazy. Just didn’t want to do a job. Well, they couldn’t help it. They couldn’t read. Everything was backwards. My, my oldest nephew, uh, is dyslexic. So I just want everybody to understand…
And, and where are you in the autism spectrum? Can I ask that question?
S: Sure.
D: Of course, you’re clearly under great control. You have mastered the magic of autism.
S: Yeah. Well, what’s funny about that is I’ve actually only just in the past year, really got confirmation. Um, I’m still don’t have, yeah, I still don’t have an official diagnosis because that’s a whole other bag of worms for adult diagnosis and it costs thousands of dollars. And, uh, some doctors still don’t believe that women have it. Um, so, but just taking several screening tests, um, I’ve taken about five of the clinical screening tests and they all point very highly to autism. Um, and thinking about my experiences growing up, it really makes a lot of sense.
D: That’s what I was going to ask you next. You must have known, you know, that something was different.
S: Well, yeah. I, I thought something was always…
D: Can you give an example or two, you know, when you were a little kid. What I remember is the kids that I’ve known have various symptoms of autism.
S: Definitely. Um, emotional dysregulation, um, is still difficult where, well, and for me, because I kind of triggered emotional response to things like, um, there’s a famous phrase that “you don’t have enough spoons”, but the phrase means basically like, I only have so many ways of coping with life and when I’m out of those ways, I have to take a nap. I have to, I have to go to the corner for a second. And for different people, there’s different levels of that.
And growing up with a family who expected me to be normal. Um, I got really good at masking. I got really good at holding it all in, but then I’d get home and just. Like, um, I didn’t want to do my homework. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t want to do anything except just sit there after school. Um, unfortunately I had to keep pushing through. Um, and so I just got used to doing that, hiding who I really was, you know?
D: Um, as you know, we talked, I’m very openly gay and…what we’re getting to, the bottom line is you have to be who you are. To keep these things secret or to try and work around who you are is exhausting, as you said. And just mentally, you know, exactly.
S: I’ve actually, I did actually get a diagnosis like 15 years ago for anxiety disorder and what I’ve discovered since then is that it is a part of the autism masking, just, I had been masking for 40 years. And so, um, that just built up a lot of anxiety in me for everything, you know? Um, but now that I’m just past year, starting to learn who I am and learn what my triggers are.
Um, I am very sensitive to sound, ironically enough, um, disorganized sound, I really have a hard time handling with, but music is organized sounds. So for me, my brain likes it, you know? Um, but yeah, so I’m just learning a lot more about myself and how my brain works and that it’s okay that my brain has trouble where other people seem to have things worked out, you know? And that’s okay.
D: You see, if you will, with your brain, things that we don’t, and so on. So, you know, I mean, that’s the beauty of all, for all of us. Uh, it’s the tremendous beauty of diversity.
Um… Let’s talk about Ancients. This is psycho-messaging to our brains. I mean, give me a break. It’s not random. It’s pure messaging to ourselves, uh, Tarot and all the rest of it. And I love traditions that have been there for 8,000 years. We’re going to talk about it. Cause you use, you do, you do this formula for a piece with Tarot cards that drives me crazy, but often told me it, speaking of what you had spoken to, uh, just a moment ago, when one gets kind of focused, the focus becomes quite, uh, extravagant. And was that for you? You really got into constructing this piece around Tarot.
S: Oh, yeah, I tend to, this tends to be a theme that I, if I hit on something that’s been very useful for me, um, mentally and psychologically, spiritually, I tend to write a piece about it. So that’s what the Oracle, the Oracle tended to be Tarot. I fell, fell onto, um, as a way to deal with my anxiety and it really, luckily, I had a therapist at the time who was open to the idea of me exploring my subconscious through the Tarot cards.
D: It’s about this idea of finding oneself, of reveling in these discoveries, uh, you know, and so is there any, can you give me a, um, what a topography of when, where, if even you feel now, like who you are, you know what I mean? How, what, what trajectory, where did you arrive? Have you arrived yet?
S: Um, well, definitely starting roughly a little less than a year ago when I finally did those, um, screenings for autism, like is when everything really started clicking and, and I did a lot of reading and, and, um, researching and, and finding others like me, you know, um, and it just helped click, you know, uh, it helped make, help me make sense of who I am and why I am the way I am.
Um, so often, especially throughout my whole life, um, I would be upset that I didn’t seem to be like everybody else. Even as a teacher, I mean, one of my favorite compliments from a student of mine was I’m the quirkiest teacher on campus. And I wear that like a badge. You know, I don’t teach like other teachers teach. I don’t think like other people think, and I’ve learned that that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with me. Um, that diversity is a great thing.
D: So now we’re going to deal with the, uh, the product of your, uh, satisfactions, although this is, let’s see, 2023. I know these are recorded over a rather large span of time.
S: Maybe, uh, yeah, about five years or so.
D: So in other words, I guess what now has me curious is feeling where you are feeling now. Do you see, do you hear, see things in your focus on this CD?
S: I do actually. Um, the CD actually came about simply by virtue of, um, the way the economy works in the music recording industry and classical music, et cetera, where we just recorded piece by piece by piece as we could, um, and then finally had enough and say, Hey, let’s put together an album, you know…
D: And then let’s figure out how to pay for it. That’s what everybody watching this knows all about. It’s not like it [just] happens.
S: Exactly. Uh, so now, like I said, especially after these past several months, I look at the CD and I do really see it as if it’s sort of a culmination of my past 15 years or so, um, because all the pieces have been written, I think the earliest one was. Well, I think “Roses and Lilies” was what, like 2012 or something like that. Um, 2013, maybe.
D: Oh, well, we’ll find it.
S: I don’t remember.
D: Why did you use the word, “Shards”?
S: My husband picked it. He, he actually made up the title Ayre of Grievances too. He comes up with great titles. We thought about “Shards” because there are pieces like Dark Glass Sinfonia, so glass and, and breaking, uh, Wabi-Sabi is sort of like the fractal nature of life. And so you see shards of glass reflecting, reflecting different things, um, basically it’s supposed to be sort of the fragmentations of personality and life and spirituality.
D: That’s a good definition here. I was, I was expecting, uh, the, as I told you, I was expecting a wild ride. And by the way, everybody knows it isn’t, it’s absolutely a magnificent recording of simply superb music. This is what just blew me away.
In a way, this text that’s on your CD tells us how fresh the CD is. So it’s been put together. You’ve done that. It’s been five years. You’re there. And then it’s like, son of a gun.
“One inherent trait I possess is finding my emotional fulfillment through the active, creative manipulation of music.” And this fascinates me. I’m, I’m not a fix the watch kind of guy. I don’t get into the little details. I’m, I’m the conductor. I’m the, you know, I want the big pastel, you know, horses crossing the plains or something. You know, does that speak to your autism in a way, the focus?
S: I think so. The hyper fixation. I mean, there are times when I’m working on a piece that if my husband wasn’t there to remind me, I’d forget to eat, you know, I’ll just be like focused on these patterns and what else can I do with them? And, and, oh, that sounds really cool. Let me try this. Let’s see.
D: And you say, “I’m not, I’m not seeking to impose specific emotions on listeners.” That’s something that’s very important, “…but rather to facilitate a deeper connection with their inner selves.” Now, I’m not quite sure what kind of, what kind of a labyrinth you just, you know, created with those words. “I’m not seeking to impose specific emotions on listeners” yet, “I would like them to get in touch with their deeper…” you know, you know what I mean, you’re clever, aren’t you?
S: Well, that’s a question I get a lot is, well, how do you want the audience to feel? Even, even composition teachers… “How do you want them to feel?” And, and I think that’s another part of my autism. I relate to emotions differently than some other people do from what I can tell. Um, I, for me, the emotion and joy comes from the patterns. And so that’s what it is for me. Um, you know, it can be a completely atonal piece and if the patterns are cool then I’m getting such delight out of it. Uh, but for other people that might not be the case and I totally recognize that. So I’m hoping through my music, even though I might find joy in places they won’t, um, that they’ll still find something that they can resonate with.
D: Oh, that was very well, well, spracht and I can only agree with you because as I think I mentioned to you and probably everybody else and probably about three times already by now, but that was the shock. This music is just simply gorgeous. And I was expecting a few more “shards”, something expecting something, something a little, little more fractious, if you will.
The first piece on the, on the CD is Ayre of Grievances. I love the spelling. I presume clever, uh, you know, and, and, uh, awfully medieval or something. For viola, violin, and flute. It’s from 2020. So that’s a bad year. Oh my God.
S: Hence the grievances.
D: Hence the grievances is right. Uh, composed during the worldwide COVID epidemic. And you and I’ve talked about it. People are not yet clear how profoundly we as a planet of human beings and animals have been affected. This is going to take another half dozen years if we don’t have World War Three somewhere in between to sort it out. So it’s a, this was a big thing. And the biggest thing in my life, maybe, uh, to go through. So, Ayre of Grievances, and, uh, and, you know, you set us up with all the frustrations, fear, sorrow, and anger, and I’m going, Oh, can’t wait.
And I put it on. And it’s absolutely gorgeous. I totally did not expect it. Here’s a bit of my stream of consciousness, totally not expecting such… well, tonality. It’s wonderful already. Tense, beautifully crafted, thoroughly contemporarily classical. I mean, it’s, it’s totally accessible. And I, again, I almost want to spit when I say that word, but I think it’s okay now to use that, to create accessible music, um, things get a little crazy and frustrated.
You mentioned in your program notes, there’s that frustration and you describe it very well. How, although in my case, I just went comatose and just stared out the windows for two years and allowed the checks to come in. Cause I was a freelancer unemployed and boy, the money was better than I’ve ever received. Thank you, Uncle Sam, but, but so I didn’t really experience a whole lot of frustration. I just sort of couldn’t believe what was going on for about two years.
In other words, there is a narrative to this piece, Ayre of Grievances. Um, but I think it, you know, it is much more than the sum of its narrative is what I’m trying to say. Uh, tonalities are altogether satisfying throughout the piece.
Go, give me an overview. What was this about for you?
S: During the, during the lockdowns for me, it was frustrating. Well, because… guy, giving three hour lectures on zoom, I never want to do that again. Oh my gosh. Not being able to see anybody, not being able to see family. Um, that was really frustrating, but at the same time, because I wasn’t able to play live concerts, like I had been, um, it gave me a chance to sit down and really think about who I am.
Um, up until that point, it was very much, oh, I’m a major violinist and a composer and a teacher at all at once.
D: Don’t forget viola… and viola too.
S: Yes. I love the viola. Um, but then I came to realize. I really much prefer writing, uh, and recording. Uh, so I, I allowed myself to let go of the, the things that maybe didn’t bring me quite as much joy. So when things did open back up, I’m, I’m being more careful to balance my life, uh, with what really brings me more joy and less stress, hopefully. Um, that’s, that’s what that piece really sort of represented is it was frustrating. It was lonely. I was angry at the world. Um, but at the same time, there was some beauty in there and some peace.
And, um, and I just love the interaction of the three parts. They’re both, they’re all three very independent, but they speak together and sometimes they’re arguing with each other. Sometimes they’re singing with each other and supporting each other. And, um, I just really liked that intimacy of the work.
D: Well, that whole narrative thing about what you’re very good, uh, you know, voices, uh, having discussions between each other, but I found, and I may sound like I’m an idiot or something, but when I saw that viola, violin, flute, I told you earlier, I thought, I remember thinking that’s going to be tricky, you know, that the flute doesn’t get lost, and all of that works beautifully. And that is not about, you know, microphones. It’s about the way you wrote the piece. Using those three instruments. So, so beautifully. And later you use instruments in the most magical way.
S: Yeah, we actually debuted it during the pandemic where I recorded the violin and viola part. And then I recorded a friend of mine playing the flute part and we just did one of those YouTube stitched videos where we stitched our videos together. That was the thing.
D: Yeah. Am I pronouncing it reasonably close? “DodecaFunky” And of course we’re playing, playing with, uh, dodeca cacophony or something. You can fill me in on that. There’s all this funny stuff going on. That’s all inside stuff for musicians.
It’s for flute and piano from 2015. I think you mentioned this might be the earliest piece, maybe…
S: “Of Roses and Lilies”, I actually wrote the original piece for voice and piano in like the early aughts. But then I went back and fleshed it out and sort of made it fuller.
D: So then you know, the early aughts, I love that. So DodecaFunky, uh, flute and piano. I want to tell everybody out there that’s looking for a repertoire. This is a beauty. This is a recital beauty. A funky solo for flute with piano accompaniment, this intense and spastic work. Is that me or you?
S: I think it’s me.
D: I think it was you. So it… “exploits various manipulations”. Oh, here you go. Yeah, it is you… “of a 12 tone row (dodecaphony).” I’m supposed to be a musician and I couldn’t care less how it’s pronounced or even what it is these days. It’s just the serial melody to a backdrop, et cetera, et cetera. But the point of, oh, this is why it’s so cute. A hard bop and swing and, uh, and stuff. It’s just a delicious piece. And it’s, it’s aggressive in its funky way. I say about the opening, while the piano adds to the delightful confusion with various playful styles, a pause and it starts to get feisty. Uh, now I don’t know where I am in the piece, but now some casual virtuoso boogie woogie, boogie funky, uh, it’s a delight.
It’s kind of a series of descriptive tableau. Am I closer? Cause I love dance. I, you know, I reviewed dance a lot and these are like little tableau. It’s wonderful to the max. Should be, uh, on programming all over the place. It’s a beauty.
Tell me, tell me, what do you think? What do you think of this?
S: I love this piece. It just makes, it makes me giggle.
D: It’s just a charm. Beautiful. It’s so cute.
S: Thank you, thank you.
D: Again, if you, you’ll forgive me the accessibility word. This is irresistible. Of course, you know what I’m trying to say?
S: I’m glad you like it. That one actually took a little bit of inspiration from Bernstein. Um, I, I love, uh, I was studying his symphony, Age of Anxiety. Oh, and I love how he merged, well, he merged…
D: By the way, you know, I’m a conductor. Uh, and I know all three of those symphonies very, very well. I’ve never conducted them because they’re too hard. “Jeremiah” I could conduct. That one makes sense. Uh, the, the age of anxiety for piano and orchestra is unbelievable, but it’s also unbelievably difficult to conduct, you know? And then Kaddish, he wrote the original and then tore it all to pieces and stuff. So, but anyway, I just want, I’m so glad somebody also has studied [those works]. Anyway, excuse me.
S: That’s okay. Uh, but yeah, I really loved the idea of merging modernist, modernistic tendencies as Bernstein would say, um, with jazz and other accessible popular genres. And so that’s what I did with this flute piece is I took a 12 tone row and it is an authentic 12 tone row, but I, you could say I cheated, I cheated a little bit because I used transpositions. So what I would do is it’s still the same row, but I would transpose fragments of it to places that I liked it, where it fit better.
D: Arnold [Schoenberg] is turning into his grave.
S: Well, this is true. Ah but see, Stravinsky did it first. So, you know, let’s blame him.
It’s still, it still has the same intervallic structures. Um, but then I back it up, with that really jazzy, different, like you say, different tableaus of different jazzy styles to kind of increase the…
D: It’s a great dance piece…
S: That’d be fun.
D: In other words, there’s lots of possibilities.
Okay. We’re going to move on.
“Of Roses and Lilies”, this is for soprano, piano, soprano recorder, which I don’t think I hear very often used in these kinds of chamber pieces. And it’s a perfect color. English horn… what got into you ?…and women’s chorus. And then the, are there strings there? I have this question.
S: String orchestra.
D: String orchestra, because I didn’t, you know, I didn’t see it in the, in the brief and it’s from 2013, so we’re getting closer to, to the bottom of the stack here. Tell us about it.
S: This one’s a really fascinating piece for me. I, like I said, I had first written it many, many, many, several decades ago. And this was written…
D: Don’t be so hard on yourself…It’s only been 10 years…
S: But the original piece for just soprano and piano was written, like I said, in the late nineties or early aughts, um, this was when I was still with my very Christian family, um, yeah, there you go. And so I fell in love with the song of Solomon and I thought, why don’t I write quick snippets of the song of Solomon and put it together as sort of a love song. And so I did. And, um, eventually just another like 10 years or so down the road, I’d said, you know what, I really love this piece. I’m going to flesh it out. So, um, I took the original just two parts and added the strings and added the color of the soprano recorder and the English horn, um, and, you know, added the women’s chorus as sort of this almost Greek chorus kind of response thing.
So it’s a very, it’s a very different piece. Uh, it’s a very dramatic kind of theater-esque, drama-esque kind of, uh, kind of a feel.
D: And you don’t use the word romantic. It reeks of romanticism. I see in my notes there, a rich tapestry of sound and a highly romantic tonal aesthetic. I was not ready for that.
S: Well, actually, uh, every, everybody don’t hate on me, but I actually recorded it myself. So it’s only, it’s only two microphones with, uh, the soloist, Claire is one of my best friends and she teaches at Azusa. So she was able to grab us a classroom. And so I recorded with the two microphones, her and another good friend of mine, the pianist, Lydia. Um, and at the time we weren’t sure if I was just going to put together a digital background to it and like release it online or something. But, you know, this CD was coming to the, coming toward finishing and I was like, you know, this would be really awesome if we can get the rest of it recorded.
So I, yeah, I took two more sessions. I got the strings and the winds together for one session. Uh, and then I finally got the women’s chorus together for a session.
D: So that makes sense too. Very hard undertaking just in terms of production.
S: Yeah, it’s such a good, such a good learning experience. And again, so many of my dear, dear friends are on that recording and it’s just, it was just so special to me.
D: It’s something else. And I hope you understand what I’m saying here, because we want to get this, these pieces performed. It’s a beauty. It’s very accessible. So it doesn’t sound terribly hard to put together. What do you think? Am I all wet? I don’t know, but just, it seemed very, it seemed to just flow pretty freely.
S: Here’s the… I would say, here’s the danger with my music. And, um, especially with this piece, this has happened before. There have been pianists who think they can sight read it and they suddenly quit. It’s like, oh, I can’t sight read this. So this is something my very first composition teacher warned me about is that my music seems really easy. But then you dig into it and there are some little quirks in there and some tricks that you might not be expecting. So as long as you know…
D: It shouldn’t be a big problem. If you know what I mean, so I think I’m okay in saying that I think it’s not like, you know…
S: It’s not terrible.
D: Yeah…[not] terribly virtuosic. And that is, that is to say this should go off the shelf and into performance and rehearsal. And that’s exactly what I see. Nothing but college, college ensemble. Because of the difficulty of getting, you know, professionals together in that kind of complex, you know, but, but, so I found it really very, very…a flowing, lovely, entirely tonal journey. The soprano recorder is charming. Your writing is absolutely first-class. You handle transitions of mood with smooth aplomb. Boy, that came out of my head. Geez. The piece soars with beauty. Your compositional savvy and skill are beyond question.
S: Thank you.
D: Let’s see. Now this is “The Oracle,” for violin, cello, flute and piccolo, clarinet, piano. That’s from 2016. Go ahead. Tell us, but the bottom line is you constructed this thing from random throws of tarot cards. Go.
S: Exactly. Okay. So…
D: Aleatoric indeed!
S: Uh, I really, like I said, this was the time in my life when I had just really started to latch on to tarot as a means of exploring my own subconscious.
D: Which is correct, by the way. Let’s make sure. Exactly what it’s supposed to be. No, let the self-conscious speak to us.
S: Exactly. I like to think of it, it’s like a mirror for myself. It’s a way for me to talk to myself when sometimes I’m having trouble understanding my brain. So, uh, I really love tarot and I wrote this when I first really started getting into it. And so what I did is, um, I had an opportunity. It was like a call for scores for this ensemble. Uh, and so I was like, this will be fun. Why don’t I use that as an excuse to try it out?
So, and I wanted to do sort of a homage to John Cage by using an aleatoric kind of method. And so tarot seemed like the perfect way to do it. So I set up, um, I think it was five different spreads of 10 cards. I think I did like, um, some kind of a sacred pyramid, uh, spread for each of those. Um, and what I did is I, I assigned certain, you know, in tarot, the different suits represent different aspects of life and personality.
So you have the cups, which is emotion. Um, you have, you know, the, uh, the pentacles, uh, the pentacles are, uh, earth, uh, and, um, material wellbeing and reality and such. Uh, so what I did is I attached each of the instruments to those suits. The, uh, violin was fire, uh, or wands. Uh, the, uh, the cello was water or cups and the, uh, the clarinet was earth and the flute, of course, was air. And then for the piano, uh, I made the piano, the tree of life itself. Uh, because I like to read tarot from a Kabbalistic tree of life sort of interpretation.
D: You’re starting to get over my head. I thought I was with you pretty well, but Kabbalistic something, something…with a tree of life.
S: So Jewish mysticism, basically. So on the tree of life, each of the cards have their place on that tree. And the higher up the tree you are, the closer to the divine source you are. And then you travel down the tree and experience various phases of life and emotion, et cetera, until you get to the bottom, which is material reality. Everything you’ve experienced becomes real. Uh, and then you cycle back to the top, back to the divine source again.
So for the piano, um, when I had a spread that, that spoke of being closer to the divine source, I had the piano playing up in its higher registers. And then as it got closer to the bottom, to the ground, the piano went down. So the higher, if you hear the piano going, noodling up really high, that’s up at the divine source of things. If you hear the piano kind of in the middle, that’s sort of where balance and harmony are. If the piano is down in the basement, that’s down in material reality.
And then in the meantime, you have all the other instruments that are reflecting on emotion or, um, you know, or, or thought, or power
D: …and character that may be interpreted…in countless ways. That’s the beauty of the idea of randomness, the beauty of the order, if you will, of randomness, that even random events will speak to us.
S: Exactly.
D: Once in a while, I really want to play an album, uh, for other people in my, you know, over a dinner or something. This is one of them. Um, what an amazing chamber piece. I say this is, uh, this long cello obbligato, then into the klezmer aesthetic I call, uh, with, with all of that playing. Now I understand the cabalistic, if you will, right. Uh, meaning to it all. Uh, but the klezmer, uh, aesthetic is, is clearly there. The, and of course the Oracle is a Jew, right? I say the Oracle is a Jew? Question mark.
A wonderful transition, transitional writing. And you know what I mean? Making segments and, and, uh, themes make sense. That transition material is very, very important to get it right. [Your] compositional savvy is top notch. I think I’ve been saying that, but the piece is a wonderful narrative. It’s complex. It’s a complex narrative. Um, and as you have just described the instruments are characters.
S: They’re, they’re the suits of the, of the cards, but they do have sort of, they evoke their sort of, uh, certain characteristics about it.
D: Okay. That’s much more complex. Thank you. That clarifies.
This is quite a journey. So, and, uh, and then I say, um, a jaunty section now as CODA, I assume that’s a CODA. Uh, still a fun ending. I love it. I don’t think you can get any more, you know, any, any better than that.
Okay. Next is, is, uh, Wabi-Sabi, this, uh, uh, the aesthetic and metaphysical ideals that Japanese Wabi-Sabi encapsulates. Tell us about Wabi-Sabi. Is it animist or something? Is it part of their religion? Animist religion?
S: It can be. Uh, I’m trying to remember where it historically started. It actually started with monochromatic Chinese drawings and then the Japanese sort of took that ideal and enhanced it. A lot of people think of a Zen garden when they think of Wabi Sabi.
D: I see what you mean. Now I understand exactly what you mean. Even the artwork, strokes, you know, just very spare strokes.
S: Yeah. The tea ceremony. Um, everything about that ceremony is part of their Wabi Sabi aesthetic and metaphysical ideals.
D: I’m trying to remember this [for] parties.
S: Simplicity is, is a major part of it, but it goes beyond that. This, and this is what the string quartet throughout the three movements sort of encapsulates is that, uh, the beginning that, that…you know, in the west the idea of nothing is like zero, there’s nothing there. It’s very stark, but in Wabi Sabi ideas, um, nothing is full of potential. There’s a lot that could be there, but isn’t there yet.
D: That’s so profound.
S: Um, and then you go through, especially at the beginning of the first movement, sort of these random particles where the players can choose how they want to play it.
D: I understand that. We’re talking about the first movement Emergence, what have you just said that the players have some choice and they have choices.
S: So, so each of the players have a collection of notes that they can choose from to play. Uh, and they do it in different ways. Like the cello trills all their notes, but they can choose how they want to trill and how fast they want to trill and when they want to come in, uh, and things like that. Um, until they finally come together in the middle of the first movement and it sort of builds from there. So the idea is like that of creation of these particles coming into space and slowly merging together to become something.
D: And by the way, this sounds like an homage to Stockhausen, you know?
S: Yeah, absolutely.
D: Another great. Distance… these distant sounds… I remember performance, you know, Stockhausen, and it all comes together.
S: And then, and then Evolution is a short, it’s intentionally a short little two minute burst because that’s where everything is kind of locked in.
D: This is Evolution.
S: This is the, the cells are coming together and creating fish that are coming out of the water and, you know, becoming man. Um, et cetera. Possibility.
D: Alive with possibility, yeah. …Nothingness itself…
S: Yeah, exactly. Um, and then it gives way to Entropy, uh, and Entropy starts with a very strict structure. Uh, funnily enough, I wasn’t sure compositionally how I wanted to go about the third movement, but I was in the middle of teaching about isorhythm in one of my classes. So I’m like, Hey, I can do isorhythm with this. That’d be fun. So it starts out very strict, um, but then gets really complex and starts falling apart. And again, that’s the idea of returning back to nothingness. Everything’s falling apart.
Uh, and, and that’s the idea of, um, the idea that you, um, sometimes the best course of action is to decide to do nothing, you know…
D: I think you have just described an exact, uh, arc in the, they come together. I’m looking at Emergence. The first one builds quite satisfyingly. Uh, the construct is fascinating and sensible to the intellect, I say to myself. And of course, if there, if you don’t get it off the ground, intellectually from the beginning, you’re in trouble… Ok, Evolution. Um, I love this, uh, I call it a flowing sea sort of opening. Or whatever that vibe could be. Anything, forget sea, whatever that undulating flowing thing…so mesmerizing. Again, wonderful quartet writing.
I’m going to have to stop using this word accessible, but that’s the whole idea to get these performed. And that’s exactly to be well written and also to be a happy time for an audience. Give me a break. And I, and here’s the thing about Evolution that it’s, uh, utterly accessible to the listener, though the subject, listening, but I think I got it. Although the subject matter may have sub-basements. Now a walking cello fits that, that walking cello thing. It’s wonderful to keep the piece moving and, and, uh, energetic. Um, quite a narrative.
S: It’s like a little metronome marking I have in the, uh, the second movement is “Like dancing molecules.”
D: Oh!
S: Kind of the spinning, whirling…
D: I might have to dream about that tonight. And the third movement, if you will, Entropy. It’s such a nice, uh, I, I, do I hear a little fugue…? I wanted… the stream of consciousness thing…fuguetto. You know what I mean? That opening is a, is it a genuine, but it’s a fuguetto, right?
S: Yeah, it’s, um, it starts out exactly as a canon. Then what happens is that each time the line comes back, uh, I either in diminution or augmentation. Uh, so I, I, like I said, if you see the score, um, I start doing crazy little sub meters within each of the parts just to help, just to help the players keep, keep time with each other, but yeah, that’s part of the unraveling part is they start very much together and then they start in like ratios of two to one or one to two, but yeah, then it starts getting into weird ratios…
D: …because I think I wondered about those, those asymmetrical collisions… A slightly dysfunctional intentional section. I’m toward the end here of pizz’s.
S: Well, the very ending, I go back to the beginning idea where the, each player has a selection of notes. They can pizz. whenever they want to. So each performance should be a little different than each other.
D: So the end of entropy, they go back to this idea and they can even change their mind about it.
S: Exactly.
D: Stockhausen, he’s smiling.
“Nevermore,” this major Sonata, I think for viola and piano from 2019 to 2021. Nevermore for viola and piano, also a subtitle of a Gothic Suite, so delightful, it’s an absolutely magnificent Sonata for viola and piano. It’s just absolutely, it’s so American, because we’re talking about Edgar Allan Poe and each movement is after one of his most famous pieces. But you have, I feel very powerfully about American composers choosing American subjects. The Raven, Annabelle Lee, the Telltale Heart.
S: Actually, Charlotte Goode, the violist on this recording, is actually another one of my bestest friends. And she is also a gothic nut and a fellow autistic. And she just, she was like, oh my gosh, we need to collaborate. We need to do this for viola. And I’m like, yes. So I started out with the Raven, you know, and she debuted that at a recital. And then I was like, okay, we need to come up with two other, you know, two other movements to finish it out. And the thing I love about the recording of this, again, this is so her, the viola part is so her, the subject matter is so her, and then I was lucky enough to be able to fly out with her to Boston to have her record it for PARMA. So…that day I went to Salem after we recorded it. So it was perfect.
D: You mean, the Witch Town or Salem, Oregon?
S: No, no, no, the Witch Town, yeah, Salem, Massachusetts.
D: So Poe inspired you to go to the seat of evil.
S: Exactly. It was so good.
D: Well, what I have to say is here, I worked on looking at the first movement. First of all, a fascinating piano introduction that really nails the interest immediately because it hints at mysteries, then it’s followed by the viola’s intensely Poe-ish colors and temperament, so congrats to your friend. It’s a beauty, again, of narrative imagination, a wonderful piece of writing for viola. It is virtuosic.
S: Yeah, it is. I won’t play it on my viola. I’ll let somebody else do it. I’m not that good.
D: Well, everything a violist looks for in a recital piece, you know, and it’s romantic, there are romantic bits in here, some hair-raising twilight zone intervals between notes, if that makes any sense, thrilling, kooky, mysterious, as was the man, nice new idea… that roiling keyboard stuff toward the end of the piece, does that make any sense? Under viola, that middle and low register as it goes.
“Annabelle Lee.” It’s gorgeous, that movement is just gorgeous.
S: So beautiful, it’s one of my absolute favorites, just, and the poem, too, is just absolutely, it really struck me.
D: It brings you to tears, really, that poem.
S: It really does. I really wanted to capture that complete childlike innocence, just absolutely purest childlike innocent love of a little boy and a little girl. And then the angels cruelly take her away from him, you know, and just that drama.
D: And that’s the true story, isn’t it? Doesn’t he marry her, his wife, when she was 15, and then did she die? I can’t quite remember.
S: I don’t remember. I’d have to look it up.
D: We just missed the good parts that neither of us can remember. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, Annabelle Lee speaks to a very personal experience.
S: I do know this was his last poem that he wrote before he died. That’s also a very haunting little tidbit. So, yeah, I love this movement so much. It actually, it was the hardest to record, too, because it’s deceptively simple. But it’s because it’s kind of like Mozart in that way, where it’s so simple and exposed that the violist has to be really careful and really in tune. So it took us a little bit longer to do this one.
D: Nice. Yeah, it’s a beautiful reading. I call it magical writing. It’s exceptionally sensitive.
The Tell-Tale Heart: the intro, sufficiently terrifying. Very imaginative character development. It’s exactly creepy enough to fit the narrative, because it is that narrative, the pulsing, the clicking, and the floorboards… Then the beginning of real paranoia. I mean, you describe this tale very well.
S: Actually, I decided the best way to put it together was to take the story apart and make each of the sections of music a section of the story. So it’s probably the most narratively accurate of the three movements.
D: And that makes good sense to me.
S: Yeah, and in the music, each of the section headings has a little quote from the story. So you can kind of tell where you are in the story. But yeah, the idea of just. I wanted the opening theme that the viola starts playing is supposed to be sort of the love theme that the narrator has for his master.
“I loved the old man…It was his eye!” …you know, so it’s this really creepy. It’s a love song, but it’s twisted. It’s got something off.
So that’s where it opens. And then from there, then I get into the part where it’s for seven nights. He he peeks in at the bedroom. And so that section is like in seven four or something like that. It has odd. It’s asymmetrical. So, again, it feels a little off, you know, a little bit of the heartbeat taps and then, you know, stuff like that. And then little answering in the piano… And then you hear him murder him.
D: I call it shades of the shower scene in Psycho.
S: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
D: Brava, I say after that.
S: …yeah, thank you. Yeah. And then you just get, like you say, the paranoia as the cops won’t leave. But the narrator keeps hearing the heartbeat and he can’t get away from it. And he just has to give up.
D: And indeed, it’s an internal conflict. Yeah, that’s the order of the soundscape. It’s kind of this internal conflict that becomes, you know, insupportable, disturbingly deliberate. And it’s so well done, well done.
So that’s a beautiful sonata. And as I mentioned, here it is. It’s a, it’s a viola sonata. It’s, it’s tough. Well, you know, at a certain level, you know, you almost want it to be. So it’s not inaccessible at all. It has a it has a tremendous connection to America and American history and American literature. It is a beautiful sonata and it sounds so beautiful. The writing is so gorgeous.
So take note, everybody. Nevermore for viola and piano.
And then now the last, the grand finale on the CD, The Dark Glass Sinfonia: We see through a glass darkly. For orchestra from 2017 built upon an integrated set…Oh, here you go again.
S: I love patterns!
D: …that’s why I pulled it. Because in all of my life in the arts and even at college, these things never came up in my experience. “Built,” she says, confident, “built upon an integrated set of hexachordal formulae.” End quote. I say to myself, please explain. You will, then you go on: “Free atonality with modal harmony…In doing so, it is meant to represent the enigmatic and ongoing emotional flux of the soul.”
S: This is another…it started out as just a love affair with patterns. And one thing, I’m not a major post-tonalist. You can tell from the accessibleness of my music. But I do love some of the number patterns that come about from, you know, post-tonal exercises. And hexachordal combinatoriality is one of my favorite ideas. I just love saying it. Hexachordal combinatoriality.
D: Yeah, I bet when you have students, they just sort of collapse.
S: Yeah, I’m like, OK, learn how to say it, you can impress all of your friends.
D: But then again, formulae is rather…
S: …It’s very pompous sounding…it’s basically it’s built upon the 12-tone ideal, but it breaks up the 12 tones into six tones, hexachords. So each of the hexachords has its own unique intervallic character to it. And so in the same way that you can take kind of the same way where I cheated with DodecaFunky, where I took segments of it and like transposed it, it’s kind of like that, but I did less cheating. Hexachords kind of do their own cheating because you can take one part of the tone row and then take the second half of it and flip it or reverse it. Or, you know, all that kind of stuff. And then if you break them down into numbers, you can add them up into cool combinations and things like that. So that’s what this was. This piece was sort of a play on that and seeing what I could do with it. And that’s how I developed the main themes.
You really hear it come out, especially in the little woodwind stuff throughout the top. That’s really where it shines. But it really is woven into it.
D: The row shines?…
S: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
D: Well, you must have been in heaven putting this piece together.
S: It was very, very fun. And again, and I don’t know how my brain does this, but what starts out with a whole bunch of numbers and patterns usually comes out as something really lovely that I continue to love listening to.
D: Well, guess what? That’s exactly the whole point of the genius of autism. You just exactly described what we’ve been kind of…that autism is, is just different.
S: You know, you know, that’s another thing that shines through with this orchestral piece, too, is that one of the comments sometimes I get from other people is, oh, why can’t you just have the instruments all stacked up on top of each other? You know, why can’t they all play at once? And I’m like, I just don’t like that. I like to have the layers. Somebody’s always doing something. And so there’s kind of a medievalness to it, you know, going back to that old polyphony idea. But then I’ll integrate it with these numbers and patterns. And I just love seeing it layer.
D: Speaking of layering, did I hear I see in my notes here. Is there any kind of pyramid that you constructed a sound pyramid somewhere in the beginning of that piece? Or is it a stupid word?
S: No it’s not stupid. I like to call it a waterfall, where…
D: Yeah, ….I got the idea of what you were creating there.
S: Yeah. The hexachordal pattern is there. But what I do is I pass it starting from the top and have it kind of trickle down like that.
D: So pyramid is not quite the right way of describing it. But I was hearing a very specific concept. And of course, thinking pyramid, I’m describing it as from the bottom up. But you’ve just described it as from top to trickle down, if you will.
Let’s see… There was a lovely little brass tune. I’m hearing that I’m hearing cinematic moments. Of course, it’s an orchestral piece. I’m sure you really got your teeth into that one.
Let’s see, lovely wind section work, as we’ve discussed, nicely orchestrated. Well, it’s brilliant and wonderful and very accessible and a beautiful, beautiful orchestral piece of what? I can’t remember. Seven minutes or…
S: Yeah, it’s only like seven minutes or so, which I have found, again, economically and just competition wise…
D: That’s exactly right.
S: People like shorter, shorter pieces.
D: That’s kind of what we ask, because then the next question is how? Because I’m again thinking collegiate orchestras. And then let’s see that as we’ve discussed, there’s that thematic return, you know, that the whole thing does a perfect arc. So there you go.
S: I just really love the very, very ending of it. When I first put it together and to me, it evoked sort of almost this organ, this organ like texture with. I just love the resonance… T
D: That section with percussion. That’s toward the end. I see more complicated in narrative in terms of just the construct of the piece. Definitely descriptive, martial, perfectly accessible. It’s a perfect piece for a college orchestra if it’s in that sphere of capability.
S: Yeah. …that little fast march like scherzo thing. I kind of had a like a like a Russian, Russian romantic vibe almost or like early 20th century Russian vibe, you know, almost like kind of Shostakovich-esque, you know…
D: Each question mark was starting to rise out of my head there, the Shostakovich-ish.
S: Yeah, exactly.
D: What a great talk we’ve had. And I think just anybody could pick up that the world of our profession, of our music making, is the world at large. I mean, we speak to the wonderful, fascinating world around us. That’s the whole idea of being a creative person.
So, again, wonderful chat with composer Sarah Wallin Huff. And we’re talking about your 2023 Navona release. It’s contemporary classic chamber music for diverse instrumental combinations. You’ve heard this before. It’s called Shards. Don’t worry, anybody. It’s fine. And wonderful pieces that as we’ve discussed that are chamber works and then, of course, the orchestral piece at the very end.
But this is music that should be heard a lot more. And it’s not off the top of the charts of virtuosity. But, it’s just good, solid, wonderful music-making with enough virtuosity to keep…Why did I say those of us who are gifted…busy…you know what I’m trying to say… I’m gonna shut my mouth up here.
Anyway, great fun chatting with you.
S: Thank you so much. I really I’m really flattered, you know, that you reached out.
D: Well, I’m flattered that I heard what I heard. I’ll tell you, because it’s always a gamble. I just sort of pick up, pick up whatever. And I thought I’ve never heard of this thing. Well, who is this person and what is that stuff? And that’s got us started.
It’s been a tremendous treat and a really important and a very important CD you’ve got. So, congratulations all around.
#chamberMusic #classical #Interview #orchestra #review #StudioRecording
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Sept. 2023 Interview with Daniel Kepl
Back in the fall of 2023, right after the release of my second solo album with Navona, I got the opportunity to sit down with longtime American conductor, arts administrator, and music/theater/dance critic, Daniel Kepl, and talk with him about my album, SHARDS.
Unfortunately, the audio in that video interview was extremely unbalanced and distorted, so I took some time to try and clean it up, to make it as listenable as possible. So… that edited video is now here, below, ready for your viewing pleasure (complete with chapter breaks, if you’d prefer to jump around)!
While the pops and crackles and background noises are mostly gone, sometimes the words are still a little garbly, so I’ve embedded captions in the video and am providing a full transcript, for those who would prefer to read the discussion. If you would like to see the original unedited video, you can do that here.
Dan Kepl’s Review Highlights
The high points of Dan Kepl’s praise, as stated in the video below.
About the Album:
[SHARDS is] a wonderful album, very interesting and very accessible, if I may say. It’s absolutely a magnificent recording of simply superb music… This music is just simply gorgeous. You use instruments in the most magical way.
This is music that should be heard a lot more…it’s just good, solid, wonderful music-making. It’s…a very important CD you’ve got.
About “Ayre of Grievances”:
It’s absolutely gorgeous. Tense, beautifully crafted, thoroughly contemporarily classical. tonalities are altogether satisfying throughout the piece. The balancing and everything is wonderful in terms of your compositional skills.
About “DodecaFunky”:
I want to tell everybody out there that’s looking for a repertoire, this is a beauty. This is a recital beauty. I think I can say it’s fun. It’s wonderful. It’s just a delicious piece, it’s aggressive in its funky way. It’s wonderful to the max. Should be on programming all over the place. This is irresistible. Audiences would love it, I think.
About “Of Roses and Lilies”:
It’s a beauty; a rich tapestry of sound and a highly romantic tonal aesthetic. …this should go off the shelf and into performance and rehearsal. A flowing, lovely, entirely tonal journey. The soprano recorder is charming. Your writing is absolutely first-class. You handle transitions of mood with smooth aplomb. The piece soars with beauty. Your compositional savvy and skill are beyond question.
About “The Oracle”:
Once in a while, I really want to play [a track of] an album, uh, for other people…you know, over a dinner or something. This is one of them. What an amazing chamber piece. Wonderful transitional writing; compositional savvy is top notch. The piece is a wonderful narrative. It’s complex. This piece is quite a journey.
About “Wabi-Sabi”:
The construct is fascinating and sensible to the intellect…quite a narrative…wonderful quartet writing.
About “Nevermore”:
An absolutely gorgeous, wonderful, magnificent Sonata for viola and piano…so American. …a fascinating piano introduction that really nails the interest immediately because it hints at mysteries, then it’s followed by the viola’s intensely Poe-ish colors and temperament. It’s a beauty, again, of narrative imagination, a wonderful piece of writing for viola. It is virtuosic, everything a violist looks for in a recital piece. There are romantic bits in here, some hair-raising twilight zone intervals between notes, if that makes any sense, thrilling, kooky, mysterious, as was the man. It has a tremendous connection to America and American history and American literature. It is a beautiful sonata and it sounds so beautiful. The writing is so gorgeous.
[For Annabelle Lee] I call it magical writing. It’s exceptionally sensitive.
The Tell-Tale Heart: the intro, sufficiently terrifying. Very imaginative character development. It’s exactly creepy enough to fit the narrative, because it is that narrative, the pulsing, the clicking…the floorboards…Then the beginning of real paranoia. Shades of the shower scene in Psycho – Brava! Disturbingly deliberate ending.
About “The Dark Glass Sinfonia”:
…wonderful piece for orchestra, “The Dark Glass Sinfonia,” gives me shivers, but it’s wonderful.
Lovely wind section work…nicely orchestrated. It’s brilliant and wonderful and very accessible…a beautiful, beautiful orchestral piece. Definitely descriptive, martial, perfectly accessible.
Sept. 2023 Interview with Daniel Kepl (Edited, with Captions)Full [Edited] Interview Transcript
D: I’m chatting with composer Sarah Wallin Huff and we’re going to talk about your 2023 Navona CD release. Thank you, Parma. Thank you, Navona. Thank you, all of you wonderful people out there that put this, these kind of packages together. Just a quick aside about Navona, including everything that we need as critics, really somewhat truncated, makes perfect sense, but up on a website. And very few other companies do this. I just think it’s fabulous.
I’ve seen your interview, or I’ve read your interview, I should say, with Parma. And we’re going to talk about your 2023 Navona CD release of Contemporary Classical Chamber Works and an album for diverse instrumental combinations. Anyway, the CD is called Shards. Do not run away in the night and be afraid. It’s a wonderful album of very interesting and very accessible, if I may say so, and I think it’s perfectly OK to say so.
Here, just a sampling: Ayre of Grievances, for viola, violin, flute, lovely. The flute I wondered about. Those are pretty heavy instruments and the balancing and everything is wonderful in terms of your compositional skills.
DodecaFunky, let me say that once more. DodecaFunky, for piano, and it is cute… oh, did I miss one?
S: DodecaFunky.
D: Anyway, it’s cute. I think I can say it’s fun. It’s wonderful. And it’s a wonderful, very fascinating piano piece. Audiences would love it, I think.
“Of Roses and Lilies.” This one’s a little complex for soprano, piano, soprano recorder. Nice colors. Nice. English horn, very interesting. And women’s chorus. I mean, not since Holst have I heard women’s chorus used in this way.
So, Wabi-Sabi, it’s in three movements. Juventas, the new music ensemble performs it. This is a string quartet, so four players of the Juventas ensemble. I hope I’m pronouncing that right since I live in California. Three movements: Emergence, Evolution, Entropy. Very, very interesting. And maybe even kind of the heart of who you might be. I don’t know. I’m just guessing.
The next piece, Nevermore for viola and piano, an absolutely gorgeous, wonderful, three-movement sonata for viola and piano. The movements: The Raven, Annabelle Lee, The Tell-Tale Heart. And I love Poe, what a genius, what a genius. So glad you have included this wonderful, wonderful piece for viola and piano. And I mean by that, again, your compositional skills, the way you use these, didn’t you play viola? I thought I that read somewhere. Were you a violist?
S: I double on viola. I feel more comfortable on violin, but I can pick up a viola if I need it.
D: Okay. So you got all that stuff, you know, under your fingernails, so to say.
And then the last piece, wonderful piece for orchestra, The Dark Glass Sinfonia, gives me shivers, but it’s wonderful. And with a little subtype, if I’m reading it correctly: “We see through a glass darkly.” Wonderful piece, performed by wonderful people, while you really say it right out, right, and I just want to deal with this a little bit before I get to where you know, I’m going.
We all know people with autism and what I have found in my experience with people, and you know, autism is here, there, everywhere in various variations. You’re going to speak to it, I think in a bit, but the people that I have known with autism, some people have had troubles, others have been really, really talented, clever, and innovative. Autism is not a deficit. Okay.
S: Yeah. It’s a difference.
D: It’s a difference. Thank you. That’s better. Okay. Because I too, like most of, especially like with dyslexia, in the seventies, we all thought people with dyslexia were just lazy. Just didn’t want to do a job. Well, they couldn’t help it. They couldn’t read. Everything was backwards. My, my oldest nephew, uh, is dyslexic. So I just want everybody to understand…
And, and where are you in the autism spectrum? Can I ask that question?
S: Sure.
D: Of course, you’re clearly under great control. You have mastered the magic of autism.
S: Yeah. Well, what’s funny about that is I’ve actually only just in the past year, really got confirmation. Um, I’m still don’t have, yeah, I still don’t have an official diagnosis because that’s a whole other bag of worms for adult diagnosis and it costs thousands of dollars. And, uh, some doctors still don’t believe that women have it. Um, so, but just taking several screening tests, um, I’ve taken about five of the clinical screening tests and they all point very highly to autism. Um, and thinking about my experiences growing up, it really makes a lot of sense.
D: That’s what I was going to ask you next. You must have known, you know, that something was different.
S: Well, yeah. I, I thought something was always…
D: Can you give an example or two, you know, when you were a little kid. What I remember is the kids that I’ve known have various symptoms of autism.
S: Definitely. Um, emotional dysregulation, um, is still difficult where, well, and for me, because I kind of triggered emotional response to things like, um, there’s a famous phrase that “you don’t have enough spoons”, but the phrase means basically like, I only have so many ways of coping with life and when I’m out of those ways, I have to take a nap. I have to, I have to go to the corner for a second. And for different people, there’s different levels of that.
And growing up with a family who expected me to be normal. Um, I got really good at masking. I got really good at holding it all in, but then I’d get home and just. Like, um, I didn’t want to do my homework. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t want to do anything except just sit there after school. Um, unfortunately I had to keep pushing through. Um, and so I just got used to doing that, hiding who I really was, you know?
D: Um, as you know, we talked, I’m very openly gay and…what we’re getting to, the bottom line is you have to be who you are. To keep these things secret or to try and work around who you are is exhausting, as you said. And just mentally, you know, exactly.
S: I’ve actually, I did actually get a diagnosis like 15 years ago for anxiety disorder and what I’ve discovered since then is that it is a part of the autism masking, just, I had been masking for 40 years. And so, um, that just built up a lot of anxiety in me for everything, you know? Um, but now that I’m just past year, starting to learn who I am and learn what my triggers are.
Um, I am very sensitive to sound, ironically enough, um, disorganized sound, I really have a hard time handling with, but music is organized sounds. So for me, my brain likes it, you know? Um, but yeah, so I’m just learning a lot more about myself and how my brain works and that it’s okay that my brain has trouble where other people seem to have things worked out, you know? And that’s okay.
D: You see, if you will, with your brain, things that we don’t, and so on. So, you know, I mean, that’s the beauty of all, for all of us. Uh, it’s the tremendous beauty of diversity.
Um… Let’s talk about Ancients. This is psycho-messaging to our brains. I mean, give me a break. It’s not random. It’s pure messaging to ourselves, uh, Tarot and all the rest of it. And I love traditions that have been there for 8,000 years. We’re going to talk about it. Cause you use, you do, you do this formula for a piece with Tarot cards that drives me crazy, but often told me it, speaking of what you had spoken to, uh, just a moment ago, when one gets kind of focused, the focus becomes quite, uh, extravagant. And was that for you? You really got into constructing this piece around Tarot.
S: Oh, yeah, I tend to, this tends to be a theme that I, if I hit on something that’s been very useful for me, um, mentally and psychologically, spiritually, I tend to write a piece about it. So that’s what the Oracle, the Oracle tended to be Tarot. I fell, fell onto, um, as a way to deal with my anxiety and it really, luckily, I had a therapist at the time who was open to the idea of me exploring my subconscious through the Tarot cards.
D: It’s about this idea of finding oneself, of reveling in these discoveries, uh, you know, and so is there any, can you give me a, um, what a topography of when, where, if even you feel now, like who you are, you know what I mean? How, what, what trajectory, where did you arrive? Have you arrived yet?
S: Um, well, definitely starting roughly a little less than a year ago when I finally did those, um, screenings for autism, like is when everything really started clicking and, and I did a lot of reading and, and, um, researching and, and finding others like me, you know, um, and it just helped click, you know, uh, it helped make, help me make sense of who I am and why I am the way I am.
Um, so often, especially throughout my whole life, um, I would be upset that I didn’t seem to be like everybody else. Even as a teacher, I mean, one of my favorite compliments from a student of mine was I’m the quirkiest teacher on campus. And I wear that like a badge. You know, I don’t teach like other teachers teach. I don’t think like other people think, and I’ve learned that that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with me. Um, that diversity is a great thing.
D: So now we’re going to deal with the, uh, the product of your, uh, satisfactions, although this is, let’s see, 2023. I know these are recorded over a rather large span of time.
S: Maybe, uh, yeah, about five years or so.
D: So in other words, I guess what now has me curious is feeling where you are feeling now. Do you see, do you hear, see things in your focus on this CD?
S: I do actually. Um, the CD actually came about simply by virtue of, um, the way the economy works in the music recording industry and classical music, et cetera, where we just recorded piece by piece by piece as we could, um, and then finally had enough and say, Hey, let’s put together an album, you know…
D: And then let’s figure out how to pay for it. That’s what everybody watching this knows all about. It’s not like it [just] happens.
S: Exactly. Uh, so now, like I said, especially after these past several months, I look at the CD and I do really see it as if it’s sort of a culmination of my past 15 years or so, um, because all the pieces have been written, I think the earliest one was. Well, I think “Roses and Lilies” was what, like 2012 or something like that. Um, 2013, maybe.
D: Oh, well, we’ll find it.
S: I don’t remember.
D: Why did you use the word, “Shards”?
S: My husband picked it. He, he actually made up the title Ayre of Grievances too. He comes up with great titles. We thought about “Shards” because there are pieces like Dark Glass Sinfonia, so glass and, and breaking, uh, Wabi-Sabi is sort of like the fractal nature of life. And so you see shards of glass reflecting, reflecting different things, um, basically it’s supposed to be sort of the fragmentations of personality and life and spirituality.
D: That’s a good definition here. I was, I was expecting, uh, the, as I told you, I was expecting a wild ride. And by the way, everybody knows it isn’t, it’s absolutely a magnificent recording of simply superb music. This is what just blew me away.
In a way, this text that’s on your CD tells us how fresh the CD is. So it’s been put together. You’ve done that. It’s been five years. You’re there. And then it’s like, son of a gun.
“One inherent trait I possess is finding my emotional fulfillment through the active, creative manipulation of music.” And this fascinates me. I’m, I’m not a fix the watch kind of guy. I don’t get into the little details. I’m, I’m the conductor. I’m the, you know, I want the big pastel, you know, horses crossing the plains or something. You know, does that speak to your autism in a way, the focus?
S: I think so. The hyper fixation. I mean, there are times when I’m working on a piece that if my husband wasn’t there to remind me, I’d forget to eat, you know, I’ll just be like focused on these patterns and what else can I do with them? And, and, oh, that sounds really cool. Let me try this. Let’s see.
D: And you say, “I’m not, I’m not seeking to impose specific emotions on listeners.” That’s something that’s very important, “…but rather to facilitate a deeper connection with their inner selves.” Now, I’m not quite sure what kind of, what kind of a labyrinth you just, you know, created with those words. “I’m not seeking to impose specific emotions on listeners” yet, “I would like them to get in touch with their deeper…” you know, you know what I mean, you’re clever, aren’t you?
S: Well, that’s a question I get a lot is, well, how do you want the audience to feel? Even, even composition teachers… “How do you want them to feel?” And, and I think that’s another part of my autism. I relate to emotions differently than some other people do from what I can tell. Um, I, for me, the emotion and joy comes from the patterns. And so that’s what it is for me. Um, you know, it can be a completely atonal piece and if the patterns are cool then I’m getting such delight out of it. Uh, but for other people that might not be the case and I totally recognize that. So I’m hoping through my music, even though I might find joy in places they won’t, um, that they’ll still find something that they can resonate with.
D: Oh, that was very well, well, spracht and I can only agree with you because as I think I mentioned to you and probably everybody else and probably about three times already by now, but that was the shock. This music is just simply gorgeous. And I was expecting a few more “shards”, something expecting something, something a little, little more fractious, if you will.
The first piece on the, on the CD is Ayre of Grievances. I love the spelling. I presume clever, uh, you know, and, and, uh, awfully medieval or something. For viola, violin, and flute. It’s from 2020. So that’s a bad year. Oh my God.
S: Hence the grievances.
D: Hence the grievances is right. Uh, composed during the worldwide COVID epidemic. And you and I’ve talked about it. People are not yet clear how profoundly we as a planet of human beings and animals have been affected. This is going to take another half dozen years if we don’t have World War Three somewhere in between to sort it out. So it’s a, this was a big thing. And the biggest thing in my life, maybe, uh, to go through. So, Ayre of Grievances, and, uh, and, you know, you set us up with all the frustrations, fear, sorrow, and anger, and I’m going, Oh, can’t wait.
And I put it on. And it’s absolutely gorgeous. I totally did not expect it. Here’s a bit of my stream of consciousness, totally not expecting such… well, tonality. It’s wonderful already. Tense, beautifully crafted, thoroughly contemporarily classical. I mean, it’s, it’s totally accessible. And I, again, I almost want to spit when I say that word, but I think it’s okay now to use that, to create accessible music, um, things get a little crazy and frustrated.
You mentioned in your program notes, there’s that frustration and you describe it very well. How, although in my case, I just went comatose and just stared out the windows for two years and allowed the checks to come in. Cause I was a freelancer unemployed and boy, the money was better than I’ve ever received. Thank you, Uncle Sam, but, but so I didn’t really experience a whole lot of frustration. I just sort of couldn’t believe what was going on for about two years.
In other words, there is a narrative to this piece, Ayre of Grievances. Um, but I think it, you know, it is much more than the sum of its narrative is what I’m trying to say. Uh, tonalities are altogether satisfying throughout the piece.
Go, give me an overview. What was this about for you?
S: During the, during the lockdowns for me, it was frustrating. Well, because… guy, giving three hour lectures on zoom, I never want to do that again. Oh my gosh. Not being able to see anybody, not being able to see family. Um, that was really frustrating, but at the same time, because I wasn’t able to play live concerts, like I had been, um, it gave me a chance to sit down and really think about who I am.
Um, up until that point, it was very much, oh, I’m a major violinist and a composer and a teacher at all at once.
D: Don’t forget viola… and viola too.
S: Yes. I love the viola. Um, but then I came to realize. I really much prefer writing, uh, and recording. Uh, so I, I allowed myself to let go of the, the things that maybe didn’t bring me quite as much joy. So when things did open back up, I’m, I’m being more careful to balance my life, uh, with what really brings me more joy and less stress, hopefully. Um, that’s, that’s what that piece really sort of represented is it was frustrating. It was lonely. I was angry at the world. Um, but at the same time, there was some beauty in there and some peace.
And, um, and I just love the interaction of the three parts. They’re both, they’re all three very independent, but they speak together and sometimes they’re arguing with each other. Sometimes they’re singing with each other and supporting each other. And, um, I just really liked that intimacy of the work.
D: Well, that whole narrative thing about what you’re very good, uh, you know, voices, uh, having discussions between each other, but I found, and I may sound like I’m an idiot or something, but when I saw that viola, violin, flute, I told you earlier, I thought, I remember thinking that’s going to be tricky, you know, that the flute doesn’t get lost, and all of that works beautifully. And that is not about, you know, microphones. It’s about the way you wrote the piece. Using those three instruments. So, so beautifully. And later you use instruments in the most magical way.
S: Yeah, we actually debuted it during the pandemic where I recorded the violin and viola part. And then I recorded a friend of mine playing the flute part and we just did one of those YouTube stitched videos where we stitched our videos together. That was the thing.
D: Yeah. Am I pronouncing it reasonably close? “DodecaFunky” And of course we’re playing, playing with, uh, dodeca cacophony or something. You can fill me in on that. There’s all this funny stuff going on. That’s all inside stuff for musicians.
It’s for flute and piano from 2015. I think you mentioned this might be the earliest piece, maybe…
S: “Of Roses and Lilies”, I actually wrote the original piece for voice and piano in like the early aughts. But then I went back and fleshed it out and sort of made it fuller.
D: So then you know, the early aughts, I love that. So DodecaFunky, uh, flute and piano. I want to tell everybody out there that’s looking for a repertoire. This is a beauty. This is a recital beauty. A funky solo for flute with piano accompaniment, this intense and spastic work. Is that me or you?
S: I think it’s me.
D: I think it was you. So it… “exploits various manipulations”. Oh, here you go. Yeah, it is you… “of a 12 tone row (dodecaphony).” I’m supposed to be a musician and I couldn’t care less how it’s pronounced or even what it is these days. It’s just the serial melody to a backdrop, et cetera, et cetera. But the point of, oh, this is why it’s so cute. A hard bop and swing and, uh, and stuff. It’s just a delicious piece. And it’s, it’s aggressive in its funky way. I say about the opening, while the piano adds to the delightful confusion with various playful styles, a pause and it starts to get feisty. Uh, now I don’t know where I am in the piece, but now some casual virtuoso boogie woogie, boogie funky, uh, it’s a delight.
It’s kind of a series of descriptive tableau. Am I closer? Cause I love dance. I, you know, I reviewed dance a lot and these are like little tableau. It’s wonderful to the max. Should be, uh, on programming all over the place. It’s a beauty.
Tell me, tell me, what do you think? What do you think of this?
S: I love this piece. It just makes, it makes me giggle.
D: It’s just a charm. Beautiful. It’s so cute.
S: Thank you, thank you.
D: Again, if you, you’ll forgive me the accessibility word. This is irresistible. Of course, you know what I’m trying to say?
S: I’m glad you like it. That one actually took a little bit of inspiration from Bernstein. Um, I, I love, uh, I was studying his symphony, Age of Anxiety. Oh, and I love how he merged, well, he merged…
D: By the way, you know, I’m a conductor. Uh, and I know all three of those symphonies very, very well. I’ve never conducted them because they’re too hard. “Jeremiah” I could conduct. That one makes sense. Uh, the, the age of anxiety for piano and orchestra is unbelievable, but it’s also unbelievably difficult to conduct, you know? And then Kaddish, he wrote the original and then tore it all to pieces and stuff. So, but anyway, I just want, I’m so glad somebody also has studied [those works]. Anyway, excuse me.
S: That’s okay. Uh, but yeah, I really loved the idea of merging modernist, modernistic tendencies as Bernstein would say, um, with jazz and other accessible popular genres. And so that’s what I did with this flute piece is I took a 12 tone row and it is an authentic 12 tone row, but I, you could say I cheated, I cheated a little bit because I used transpositions. So what I would do is it’s still the same row, but I would transpose fragments of it to places that I liked it, where it fit better.
D: Arnold [Schoenberg] is turning into his grave.
S: Well, this is true. Ah but see, Stravinsky did it first. So, you know, let’s blame him.
It’s still, it still has the same intervallic structures. Um, but then I back it up, with that really jazzy, different, like you say, different tableaus of different jazzy styles to kind of increase the…
D: It’s a great dance piece…
S: That’d be fun.
D: In other words, there’s lots of possibilities.
Okay. We’re going to move on.
“Of Roses and Lilies”, this is for soprano, piano, soprano recorder, which I don’t think I hear very often used in these kinds of chamber pieces. And it’s a perfect color. English horn… what got into you ?…and women’s chorus. And then the, are there strings there? I have this question.
S: String orchestra.
D: String orchestra, because I didn’t, you know, I didn’t see it in the, in the brief and it’s from 2013, so we’re getting closer to, to the bottom of the stack here. Tell us about it.
S: This one’s a really fascinating piece for me. I, like I said, I had first written it many, many, many, several decades ago. And this was written…
D: Don’t be so hard on yourself…It’s only been 10 years…
S: But the original piece for just soprano and piano was written, like I said, in the late nineties or early aughts, um, this was when I was still with my very Christian family, um, yeah, there you go. And so I fell in love with the song of Solomon and I thought, why don’t I write quick snippets of the song of Solomon and put it together as sort of a love song. And so I did. And, um, eventually just another like 10 years or so down the road, I’d said, you know what, I really love this piece. I’m going to flesh it out. So, um, I took the original just two parts and added the strings and added the color of the soprano recorder and the English horn, um, and, you know, added the women’s chorus as sort of this almost Greek chorus kind of response thing.
So it’s a very, it’s a very different piece. Uh, it’s a very dramatic kind of theater-esque, drama-esque kind of, uh, kind of a feel.
D: And you don’t use the word romantic. It reeks of romanticism. I see in my notes there, a rich tapestry of sound and a highly romantic tonal aesthetic. I was not ready for that.
S: Well, actually, uh, every, everybody don’t hate on me, but I actually recorded it myself. So it’s only, it’s only two microphones with, uh, the soloist, Claire is one of my best friends and she teaches at Azusa. So she was able to grab us a classroom. And so I recorded with the two microphones, her and another good friend of mine, the pianist, Lydia. Um, and at the time we weren’t sure if I was just going to put together a digital background to it and like release it online or something. But, you know, this CD was coming to the, coming toward finishing and I was like, you know, this would be really awesome if we can get the rest of it recorded.
So I, yeah, I took two more sessions. I got the strings and the winds together for one session. Uh, and then I finally got the women’s chorus together for a session.
D: So that makes sense too. Very hard undertaking just in terms of production.
S: Yeah, it’s such a good, such a good learning experience. And again, so many of my dear, dear friends are on that recording and it’s just, it was just so special to me.
D: It’s something else. And I hope you understand what I’m saying here, because we want to get this, these pieces performed. It’s a beauty. It’s very accessible. So it doesn’t sound terribly hard to put together. What do you think? Am I all wet? I don’t know, but just, it seemed very, it seemed to just flow pretty freely.
S: Here’s the… I would say, here’s the danger with my music. And, um, especially with this piece, this has happened before. There have been pianists who think they can sight read it and they suddenly quit. It’s like, oh, I can’t sight read this. So this is something my very first composition teacher warned me about is that my music seems really easy. But then you dig into it and there are some little quirks in there and some tricks that you might not be expecting. So as long as you know…
D: It shouldn’t be a big problem. If you know what I mean, so I think I’m okay in saying that I think it’s not like, you know…
S: It’s not terrible.
D: Yeah…[not] terribly virtuosic. And that is, that is to say this should go off the shelf and into performance and rehearsal. And that’s exactly what I see. Nothing but college, college ensemble. Because of the difficulty of getting, you know, professionals together in that kind of complex, you know, but, but, so I found it really very, very…a flowing, lovely, entirely tonal journey. The soprano recorder is charming. Your writing is absolutely first-class. You handle transitions of mood with smooth aplomb. Boy, that came out of my head. Geez. The piece soars with beauty. Your compositional savvy and skill are beyond question.
S: Thank you.
D: Let’s see. Now this is “The Oracle,” for violin, cello, flute and piccolo, clarinet, piano. That’s from 2016. Go ahead. Tell us, but the bottom line is you constructed this thing from random throws of tarot cards. Go.
S: Exactly. Okay. So…
D: Aleatoric indeed!
S: Uh, I really, like I said, this was the time in my life when I had just really started to latch on to tarot as a means of exploring my own subconscious.
D: Which is correct, by the way. Let’s make sure. Exactly what it’s supposed to be. No, let the self-conscious speak to us.
S: Exactly. I like to think of it, it’s like a mirror for myself. It’s a way for me to talk to myself when sometimes I’m having trouble understanding my brain. So, uh, I really love tarot and I wrote this when I first really started getting into it. And so what I did is, um, I had an opportunity. It was like a call for scores for this ensemble. Uh, and so I was like, this will be fun. Why don’t I use that as an excuse to try it out?
So, and I wanted to do sort of a homage to John Cage by using an aleatoric kind of method. And so tarot seemed like the perfect way to do it. So I set up, um, I think it was five different spreads of 10 cards. I think I did like, um, some kind of a sacred pyramid, uh, spread for each of those. Um, and what I did is I, I assigned certain, you know, in tarot, the different suits represent different aspects of life and personality.
So you have the cups, which is emotion. Um, you have, you know, the, uh, the pentacles, uh, the pentacles are, uh, earth, uh, and, um, material wellbeing and reality and such. Uh, so what I did is I attached each of the instruments to those suits. The, uh, violin was fire, uh, or wands. Uh, the, uh, the cello was water or cups and the, uh, the clarinet was earth and the flute, of course, was air. And then for the piano, uh, I made the piano, the tree of life itself. Uh, because I like to read tarot from a Kabbalistic tree of life sort of interpretation.
D: You’re starting to get over my head. I thought I was with you pretty well, but Kabbalistic something, something…with a tree of life.
S: So Jewish mysticism, basically. So on the tree of life, each of the cards have their place on that tree. And the higher up the tree you are, the closer to the divine source you are. And then you travel down the tree and experience various phases of life and emotion, et cetera, until you get to the bottom, which is material reality. Everything you’ve experienced becomes real. Uh, and then you cycle back to the top, back to the divine source again.
So for the piano, um, when I had a spread that, that spoke of being closer to the divine source, I had the piano playing up in its higher registers. And then as it got closer to the bottom, to the ground, the piano went down. So the higher, if you hear the piano going, noodling up really high, that’s up at the divine source of things. If you hear the piano kind of in the middle, that’s sort of where balance and harmony are. If the piano is down in the basement, that’s down in material reality.
And then in the meantime, you have all the other instruments that are reflecting on emotion or, um, you know, or, or thought, or power
D: …and character that may be interpreted…in countless ways. That’s the beauty of the idea of randomness, the beauty of the order, if you will, of randomness, that even random events will speak to us.
S: Exactly.
D: Once in a while, I really want to play an album, uh, for other people in my, you know, over a dinner or something. This is one of them. Um, what an amazing chamber piece. I say this is, uh, this long cello obbligato, then into the klezmer aesthetic I call, uh, with, with all of that playing. Now I understand the cabalistic, if you will, right. Uh, meaning to it all. Uh, but the klezmer, uh, aesthetic is, is clearly there. The, and of course the Oracle is a Jew, right? I say the Oracle is a Jew? Question mark.
A wonderful transition, transitional writing. And you know what I mean? Making segments and, and, uh, themes make sense. That transition material is very, very important to get it right. [Your] compositional savvy is top notch. I think I’ve been saying that, but the piece is a wonderful narrative. It’s complex. It’s a complex narrative. Um, and as you have just described the instruments are characters.
S: They’re, they’re the suits of the, of the cards, but they do have sort of, they evoke their sort of, uh, certain characteristics about it.
D: Okay. That’s much more complex. Thank you. That clarifies.
This is quite a journey. So, and, uh, and then I say, um, a jaunty section now as CODA, I assume that’s a CODA. Uh, still a fun ending. I love it. I don’t think you can get any more, you know, any, any better than that.
Okay. Next is, is, uh, Wabi-Sabi, this, uh, uh, the aesthetic and metaphysical ideals that Japanese Wabi-Sabi encapsulates. Tell us about Wabi-Sabi. Is it animist or something? Is it part of their religion? Animist religion?
S: It can be. Uh, I’m trying to remember where it historically started. It actually started with monochromatic Chinese drawings and then the Japanese sort of took that ideal and enhanced it. A lot of people think of a Zen garden when they think of Wabi Sabi.
D: I see what you mean. Now I understand exactly what you mean. Even the artwork, strokes, you know, just very spare strokes.
S: Yeah. The tea ceremony. Um, everything about that ceremony is part of their Wabi Sabi aesthetic and metaphysical ideals.
D: I’m trying to remember this [for] parties.
S: Simplicity is, is a major part of it, but it goes beyond that. This, and this is what the string quartet throughout the three movements sort of encapsulates is that, uh, the beginning that, that…you know, in the west the idea of nothing is like zero, there’s nothing there. It’s very stark, but in Wabi Sabi ideas, um, nothing is full of potential. There’s a lot that could be there, but isn’t there yet.
D: That’s so profound.
S: Um, and then you go through, especially at the beginning of the first movement, sort of these random particles where the players can choose how they want to play it.
D: I understand that. We’re talking about the first movement Emergence, what have you just said that the players have some choice and they have choices.
S: So, so each of the players have a collection of notes that they can choose from to play. Uh, and they do it in different ways. Like the cello trills all their notes, but they can choose how they want to trill and how fast they want to trill and when they want to come in, uh, and things like that. Um, until they finally come together in the middle of the first movement and it sort of builds from there. So the idea is like that of creation of these particles coming into space and slowly merging together to become something.
D: And by the way, this sounds like an homage to Stockhausen, you know?
S: Yeah, absolutely.
D: Another great. Distance… these distant sounds… I remember performance, you know, Stockhausen, and it all comes together.
S: And then, and then Evolution is a short, it’s intentionally a short little two minute burst because that’s where everything is kind of locked in.
D: This is Evolution.
S: This is the, the cells are coming together and creating fish that are coming out of the water and, you know, becoming man. Um, et cetera. Possibility.
D: Alive with possibility, yeah. …Nothingness itself…
S: Yeah, exactly. Um, and then it gives way to Entropy, uh, and Entropy starts with a very strict structure. Uh, funnily enough, I wasn’t sure compositionally how I wanted to go about the third movement, but I was in the middle of teaching about isorhythm in one of my classes. So I’m like, Hey, I can do isorhythm with this. That’d be fun. So it starts out very strict, um, but then gets really complex and starts falling apart. And again, that’s the idea of returning back to nothingness. Everything’s falling apart.
Uh, and, and that’s the idea of, um, the idea that you, um, sometimes the best course of action is to decide to do nothing, you know…
D: I think you have just described an exact, uh, arc in the, they come together. I’m looking at Emergence. The first one builds quite satisfyingly. Uh, the construct is fascinating and sensible to the intellect, I say to myself. And of course, if there, if you don’t get it off the ground, intellectually from the beginning, you’re in trouble… Ok, Evolution. Um, I love this, uh, I call it a flowing sea sort of opening. Or whatever that vibe could be. Anything, forget sea, whatever that undulating flowing thing…so mesmerizing. Again, wonderful quartet writing.
I’m going to have to stop using this word accessible, but that’s the whole idea to get these performed. And that’s exactly to be well written and also to be a happy time for an audience. Give me a break. And I, and here’s the thing about Evolution that it’s, uh, utterly accessible to the listener, though the subject, listening, but I think I got it. Although the subject matter may have sub-basements. Now a walking cello fits that, that walking cello thing. It’s wonderful to keep the piece moving and, and, uh, energetic. Um, quite a narrative.
S: It’s like a little metronome marking I have in the, uh, the second movement is “Like dancing molecules.”
D: Oh!
S: Kind of the spinning, whirling…
D: I might have to dream about that tonight. And the third movement, if you will, Entropy. It’s such a nice, uh, I, I, do I hear a little fugue…? I wanted… the stream of consciousness thing…fuguetto. You know what I mean? That opening is a, is it a genuine, but it’s a fuguetto, right?
S: Yeah, it’s, um, it starts out exactly as a canon. Then what happens is that each time the line comes back, uh, I either in diminution or augmentation. Uh, so I, I, like I said, if you see the score, um, I start doing crazy little sub meters within each of the parts just to help, just to help the players keep, keep time with each other, but yeah, that’s part of the unraveling part is they start very much together and then they start in like ratios of two to one or one to two, but yeah, then it starts getting into weird ratios…
D: …because I think I wondered about those, those asymmetrical collisions… A slightly dysfunctional intentional section. I’m toward the end here of pizz’s.
S: Well, the very ending, I go back to the beginning idea where the, each player has a selection of notes. They can pizz. whenever they want to. So each performance should be a little different than each other.
D: So the end of entropy, they go back to this idea and they can even change their mind about it.
S: Exactly.
D: Stockhausen, he’s smiling.
“Nevermore,” this major Sonata, I think for viola and piano from 2019 to 2021. Nevermore for viola and piano, also a subtitle of a Gothic Suite, so delightful, it’s an absolutely magnificent Sonata for viola and piano. It’s just absolutely, it’s so American, because we’re talking about Edgar Allan Poe and each movement is after one of his most famous pieces. But you have, I feel very powerfully about American composers choosing American subjects. The Raven, Annabelle Lee, the Telltale Heart.
S: Actually, Charlotte Goode, the violist on this recording, is actually another one of my bestest friends. And she is also a gothic nut and a fellow autistic. And she just, she was like, oh my gosh, we need to collaborate. We need to do this for viola. And I’m like, yes. So I started out with the Raven, you know, and she debuted that at a recital. And then I was like, okay, we need to come up with two other, you know, two other movements to finish it out. And the thing I love about the recording of this, again, this is so her, the viola part is so her, the subject matter is so her, and then I was lucky enough to be able to fly out with her to Boston to have her record it for PARMA. So…that day I went to Salem after we recorded it. So it was perfect.
D: You mean, the Witch Town or Salem, Oregon?
S: No, no, no, the Witch Town, yeah, Salem, Massachusetts.
D: So Poe inspired you to go to the seat of evil.
S: Exactly. It was so good.
D: Well, what I have to say is here, I worked on looking at the first movement. First of all, a fascinating piano introduction that really nails the interest immediately because it hints at mysteries, then it’s followed by the viola’s intensely Poe-ish colors and temperament, so congrats to your friend. It’s a beauty, again, of narrative imagination, a wonderful piece of writing for viola. It is virtuosic.
S: Yeah, it is. I won’t play it on my viola. I’ll let somebody else do it. I’m not that good.
D: Well, everything a violist looks for in a recital piece, you know, and it’s romantic, there are romantic bits in here, some hair-raising twilight zone intervals between notes, if that makes any sense, thrilling, kooky, mysterious, as was the man, nice new idea… that roiling keyboard stuff toward the end of the piece, does that make any sense? Under viola, that middle and low register as it goes.
“Annabelle Lee.” It’s gorgeous, that movement is just gorgeous.
S: So beautiful, it’s one of my absolute favorites, just, and the poem, too, is just absolutely, it really struck me.
D: It brings you to tears, really, that poem.
S: It really does. I really wanted to capture that complete childlike innocence, just absolutely purest childlike innocent love of a little boy and a little girl. And then the angels cruelly take her away from him, you know, and just that drama.
D: And that’s the true story, isn’t it? Doesn’t he marry her, his wife, when she was 15, and then did she die? I can’t quite remember.
S: I don’t remember. I’d have to look it up.
D: We just missed the good parts that neither of us can remember. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, Annabelle Lee speaks to a very personal experience.
S: I do know this was his last poem that he wrote before he died. That’s also a very haunting little tidbit. So, yeah, I love this movement so much. It actually, it was the hardest to record, too, because it’s deceptively simple. But it’s because it’s kind of like Mozart in that way, where it’s so simple and exposed that the violist has to be really careful and really in tune. So it took us a little bit longer to do this one.
D: Nice. Yeah, it’s a beautiful reading. I call it magical writing. It’s exceptionally sensitive.
The Tell-Tale Heart: the intro, sufficiently terrifying. Very imaginative character development. It’s exactly creepy enough to fit the narrative, because it is that narrative, the pulsing, the clicking, and the floorboards… Then the beginning of real paranoia. I mean, you describe this tale very well.
S: Actually, I decided the best way to put it together was to take the story apart and make each of the sections of music a section of the story. So it’s probably the most narratively accurate of the three movements.
D: And that makes good sense to me.
S: Yeah, and in the music, each of the section headings has a little quote from the story. So you can kind of tell where you are in the story. But yeah, the idea of just. I wanted the opening theme that the viola starts playing is supposed to be sort of the love theme that the narrator has for his master.
“I loved the old man…It was his eye!” …you know, so it’s this really creepy. It’s a love song, but it’s twisted. It’s got something off.
So that’s where it opens. And then from there, then I get into the part where it’s for seven nights. He he peeks in at the bedroom. And so that section is like in seven four or something like that. It has odd. It’s asymmetrical. So, again, it feels a little off, you know, a little bit of the heartbeat taps and then, you know, stuff like that. And then little answering in the piano… And then you hear him murder him.
D: I call it shades of the shower scene in Psycho.
S: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
D: Brava, I say after that.
S: …yeah, thank you. Yeah. And then you just get, like you say, the paranoia as the cops won’t leave. But the narrator keeps hearing the heartbeat and he can’t get away from it. And he just has to give up.
D: And indeed, it’s an internal conflict. Yeah, that’s the order of the soundscape. It’s kind of this internal conflict that becomes, you know, insupportable, disturbingly deliberate. And it’s so well done, well done.
So that’s a beautiful sonata. And as I mentioned, here it is. It’s a, it’s a viola sonata. It’s, it’s tough. Well, you know, at a certain level, you know, you almost want it to be. So it’s not inaccessible at all. It has a it has a tremendous connection to America and American history and American literature. It is a beautiful sonata and it sounds so beautiful. The writing is so gorgeous.
So take note, everybody. Nevermore for viola and piano.
And then now the last, the grand finale on the CD, The Dark Glass Sinfonia: We see through a glass darkly. For orchestra from 2017 built upon an integrated set…Oh, here you go again.
S: I love patterns!
D: …that’s why I pulled it. Because in all of my life in the arts and even at college, these things never came up in my experience. “Built,” she says, confident, “built upon an integrated set of hexachordal formulae.” End quote. I say to myself, please explain. You will, then you go on: “Free atonality with modal harmony…In doing so, it is meant to represent the enigmatic and ongoing emotional flux of the soul.”
S: This is another…it started out as just a love affair with patterns. And one thing, I’m not a major post-tonalist. You can tell from the accessibleness of my music. But I do love some of the number patterns that come about from, you know, post-tonal exercises. And hexachordal combinatoriality is one of my favorite ideas. I just love saying it. Hexachordal combinatoriality.
D: Yeah, I bet when you have students, they just sort of collapse.
S: Yeah, I’m like, OK, learn how to say it, you can impress all of your friends.
D: But then again, formulae is rather…
S: …It’s very pompous sounding…it’s basically it’s built upon the 12-tone ideal, but it breaks up the 12 tones into six tones, hexachords. So each of the hexachords has its own unique intervallic character to it. And so in the same way that you can take kind of the same way where I cheated with DodecaFunky, where I took segments of it and like transposed it, it’s kind of like that, but I did less cheating. Hexachords kind of do their own cheating because you can take one part of the tone row and then take the second half of it and flip it or reverse it. Or, you know, all that kind of stuff. And then if you break them down into numbers, you can add them up into cool combinations and things like that. So that’s what this was. This piece was sort of a play on that and seeing what I could do with it. And that’s how I developed the main themes.
You really hear it come out, especially in the little woodwind stuff throughout the top. That’s really where it shines. But it really is woven into it.
D: The row shines?…
S: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
D: Well, you must have been in heaven putting this piece together.
S: It was very, very fun. And again, and I don’t know how my brain does this, but what starts out with a whole bunch of numbers and patterns usually comes out as something really lovely that I continue to love listening to.
D: Well, guess what? That’s exactly the whole point of the genius of autism. You just exactly described what we’ve been kind of…that autism is, is just different.
S: You know, you know, that’s another thing that shines through with this orchestral piece, too, is that one of the comments sometimes I get from other people is, oh, why can’t you just have the instruments all stacked up on top of each other? You know, why can’t they all play at once? And I’m like, I just don’t like that. I like to have the layers. Somebody’s always doing something. And so there’s kind of a medievalness to it, you know, going back to that old polyphony idea. But then I’ll integrate it with these numbers and patterns. And I just love seeing it layer.
D: Speaking of layering, did I hear I see in my notes here. Is there any kind of pyramid that you constructed a sound pyramid somewhere in the beginning of that piece? Or is it a stupid word?
S: No it’s not stupid. I like to call it a waterfall, where…
D: Yeah, ….I got the idea of what you were creating there.
S: Yeah. The hexachordal pattern is there. But what I do is I pass it starting from the top and have it kind of trickle down like that.
D: So pyramid is not quite the right way of describing it. But I was hearing a very specific concept. And of course, thinking pyramid, I’m describing it as from the bottom up. But you’ve just described it as from top to trickle down, if you will.
Let’s see… There was a lovely little brass tune. I’m hearing that I’m hearing cinematic moments. Of course, it’s an orchestral piece. I’m sure you really got your teeth into that one.
Let’s see, lovely wind section work, as we’ve discussed, nicely orchestrated. Well, it’s brilliant and wonderful and very accessible and a beautiful, beautiful orchestral piece of what? I can’t remember. Seven minutes or…
S: Yeah, it’s only like seven minutes or so, which I have found, again, economically and just competition wise…
D: That’s exactly right.
S: People like shorter, shorter pieces.
D: That’s kind of what we ask, because then the next question is how? Because I’m again thinking collegiate orchestras. And then let’s see that as we’ve discussed, there’s that thematic return, you know, that the whole thing does a perfect arc. So there you go.
S: I just really love the very, very ending of it. When I first put it together and to me, it evoked sort of almost this organ, this organ like texture with. I just love the resonance… T
D: That section with percussion. That’s toward the end. I see more complicated in narrative in terms of just the construct of the piece. Definitely descriptive, martial, perfectly accessible. It’s a perfect piece for a college orchestra if it’s in that sphere of capability.
S: Yeah. …that little fast march like scherzo thing. I kind of had a like a like a Russian, Russian romantic vibe almost or like early 20th century Russian vibe, you know, almost like kind of Shostakovich-esque, you know…
D: Each question mark was starting to rise out of my head there, the Shostakovich-ish.
S: Yeah, exactly.
D: What a great talk we’ve had. And I think just anybody could pick up that the world of our profession, of our music making, is the world at large. I mean, we speak to the wonderful, fascinating world around us. That’s the whole idea of being a creative person.
So, again, wonderful chat with composer Sarah Wallin Huff. And we’re talking about your 2023 Navona release. It’s contemporary classic chamber music for diverse instrumental combinations. You’ve heard this before. It’s called Shards. Don’t worry, anybody. It’s fine. And wonderful pieces that as we’ve discussed that are chamber works and then, of course, the orchestral piece at the very end.
But this is music that should be heard a lot more. And it’s not off the top of the charts of virtuosity. But, it’s just good, solid, wonderful music-making with enough virtuosity to keep…Why did I say those of us who are gifted…busy…you know what I’m trying to say… I’m gonna shut my mouth up here.
Anyway, great fun chatting with you.
S: Thank you so much. I really I’m really flattered, you know, that you reached out.
D: Well, I’m flattered that I heard what I heard. I’ll tell you, because it’s always a gamble. I just sort of pick up, pick up whatever. And I thought I’ve never heard of this thing. Well, who is this person and what is that stuff? And that’s got us started.
It’s been a tremendous treat and a really important and a very important CD you’ve got. So, congratulations all around.
#chamberMusic #classical #Interview #orchestra #review #StudioRecording
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Sept. 2023 Interview with Daniel Kepl
Back in the fall of 2023, right after the release of my second solo album with Navona, I got the opportunity to sit down with longtime American conductor, arts administrator, and music/theater/dance critic, Daniel Kepl, and talk with him about my album, SHARDS.
Unfortunately, the audio in that video interview was extremely unbalanced and distorted, so I took some time to try and clean it up, to make it as listenable as possible. So… that edited video is now here, below, ready for your viewing pleasure (complete with chapter breaks, if you’d prefer to jump around)!
While the pops and crackles and background noises are mostly gone, sometimes the words are still a little garbly, so I’ve embedded captions in the video and am providing a full transcript, for those who would prefer to read the discussion. If you would like to see the original unedited video, you can do that here.
Dan Kepl’s Review Highlights
The high points of Dan Kepl’s praise, as stated in the video below.
About the Album:
[SHARDS is] a wonderful album, very interesting and very accessible, if I may say. It’s absolutely a magnificent recording of simply superb music… This music is just simply gorgeous. You use instruments in the most magical way.
This is music that should be heard a lot more…it’s just good, solid, wonderful music-making. It’s…a very important CD you’ve got.
About “Ayre of Grievances”:
It’s absolutely gorgeous. Tense, beautifully crafted, thoroughly contemporarily classical. tonalities are altogether satisfying throughout the piece. The balancing and everything is wonderful in terms of your compositional skills.
About “DodecaFunky”:
I want to tell everybody out there that’s looking for a repertoire, this is a beauty. This is a recital beauty. I think I can say it’s fun. It’s wonderful. It’s just a delicious piece, it’s aggressive in its funky way. It’s wonderful to the max. Should be on programming all over the place. This is irresistible. Audiences would love it, I think.
About “Of Roses and Lilies”:
It’s a beauty; a rich tapestry of sound and a highly romantic tonal aesthetic. …this should go off the shelf and into performance and rehearsal. A flowing, lovely, entirely tonal journey. The soprano recorder is charming. Your writing is absolutely first-class. You handle transitions of mood with smooth aplomb. The piece soars with beauty. Your compositional savvy and skill are beyond question.
About “The Oracle”:
Once in a while, I really want to play [a track of] an album, uh, for other people…you know, over a dinner or something. This is one of them. What an amazing chamber piece. Wonderful transitional writing; compositional savvy is top notch. The piece is a wonderful narrative. It’s complex. This piece is quite a journey.
About “Wabi-Sabi”:
The construct is fascinating and sensible to the intellect…quite a narrative…wonderful quartet writing.
About “Nevermore”:
An absolutely gorgeous, wonderful, magnificent Sonata for viola and piano…so American. …a fascinating piano introduction that really nails the interest immediately because it hints at mysteries, then it’s followed by the viola’s intensely Poe-ish colors and temperament. It’s a beauty, again, of narrative imagination, a wonderful piece of writing for viola. It is virtuosic, everything a violist looks for in a recital piece. There are romantic bits in here, some hair-raising twilight zone intervals between notes, if that makes any sense, thrilling, kooky, mysterious, as was the man. It has a tremendous connection to America and American history and American literature. It is a beautiful sonata and it sounds so beautiful. The writing is so gorgeous.
[For Annabelle Lee] I call it magical writing. It’s exceptionally sensitive.
The Tell-Tale Heart: the intro, sufficiently terrifying. Very imaginative character development. It’s exactly creepy enough to fit the narrative, because it is that narrative, the pulsing, the clicking…the floorboards…Then the beginning of real paranoia. Shades of the shower scene in Psycho – Brava! Disturbingly deliberate ending.
About “The Dark Glass Sinfonia”:
…wonderful piece for orchestra, “The Dark Glass Sinfonia,” gives me shivers, but it’s wonderful.
Lovely wind section work…nicely orchestrated. It’s brilliant and wonderful and very accessible…a beautiful, beautiful orchestral piece. Definitely descriptive, martial, perfectly accessible.
Sept. 2023 Interview with Daniel Kepl (Edited, with Captions)Full [Edited] Interview Transcript
D: I’m chatting with composer Sarah Wallin Huff and we’re going to talk about your 2023 Navona CD release. Thank you, Parma. Thank you, Navona. Thank you, all of you wonderful people out there that put this, these kind of packages together. Just a quick aside about Navona, including everything that we need as critics, really somewhat truncated, makes perfect sense, but up on a website. And very few other companies do this. I just think it’s fabulous.
I’ve seen your interview, or I’ve read your interview, I should say, with Parma. And we’re going to talk about your 2023 Navona CD release of Contemporary Classical Chamber Works and an album for diverse instrumental combinations. Anyway, the CD is called Shards. Do not run away in the night and be afraid. It’s a wonderful album of very interesting and very accessible, if I may say so, and I think it’s perfectly OK to say so.
Here, just a sampling: Ayre of Grievances, for viola, violin, flute, lovely. The flute I wondered about. Those are pretty heavy instruments and the balancing and everything is wonderful in terms of your compositional skills.
DodecaFunky, let me say that once more. DodecaFunky, for piano, and it is cute… oh, did I miss one?
S: DodecaFunky.
D: Anyway, it’s cute. I think I can say it’s fun. It’s wonderful. And it’s a wonderful, very fascinating piano piece. Audiences would love it, I think.
“Of Roses and Lilies.” This one’s a little complex for soprano, piano, soprano recorder. Nice colors. Nice. English horn, very interesting. And women’s chorus. I mean, not since Holst have I heard women’s chorus used in this way.
So, Wabi-Sabi, it’s in three movements. Juventas, the new music ensemble performs it. This is a string quartet, so four players of the Juventas ensemble. I hope I’m pronouncing that right since I live in California. Three movements: Emergence, Evolution, Entropy. Very, very interesting. And maybe even kind of the heart of who you might be. I don’t know. I’m just guessing.
The next piece, Nevermore for viola and piano, an absolutely gorgeous, wonderful, three-movement sonata for viola and piano. The movements: The Raven, Annabelle Lee, The Tell-Tale Heart. And I love Poe, what a genius, what a genius. So glad you have included this wonderful, wonderful piece for viola and piano. And I mean by that, again, your compositional skills, the way you use these, didn’t you play viola? I thought I that read somewhere. Were you a violist?
S: I double on viola. I feel more comfortable on violin, but I can pick up a viola if I need it.
D: Okay. So you got all that stuff, you know, under your fingernails, so to say.
And then the last piece, wonderful piece for orchestra, The Dark Glass Sinfonia, gives me shivers, but it’s wonderful. And with a little subtype, if I’m reading it correctly: “We see through a glass darkly.” Wonderful piece, performed by wonderful people, while you really say it right out, right, and I just want to deal with this a little bit before I get to where you know, I’m going.
We all know people with autism and what I have found in my experience with people, and you know, autism is here, there, everywhere in various variations. You’re going to speak to it, I think in a bit, but the people that I have known with autism, some people have had troubles, others have been really, really talented, clever, and innovative. Autism is not a deficit. Okay.
S: Yeah. It’s a difference.
D: It’s a difference. Thank you. That’s better. Okay. Because I too, like most of, especially like with dyslexia, in the seventies, we all thought people with dyslexia were just lazy. Just didn’t want to do a job. Well, they couldn’t help it. They couldn’t read. Everything was backwards. My, my oldest nephew, uh, is dyslexic. So I just want everybody to understand…
And, and where are you in the autism spectrum? Can I ask that question?
S: Sure.
D: Of course, you’re clearly under great control. You have mastered the magic of autism.
S: Yeah. Well, what’s funny about that is I’ve actually only just in the past year, really got confirmation. Um, I’m still don’t have, yeah, I still don’t have an official diagnosis because that’s a whole other bag of worms for adult diagnosis and it costs thousands of dollars. And, uh, some doctors still don’t believe that women have it. Um, so, but just taking several screening tests, um, I’ve taken about five of the clinical screening tests and they all point very highly to autism. Um, and thinking about my experiences growing up, it really makes a lot of sense.
D: That’s what I was going to ask you next. You must have known, you know, that something was different.
S: Well, yeah. I, I thought something was always…
D: Can you give an example or two, you know, when you were a little kid. What I remember is the kids that I’ve known have various symptoms of autism.
S: Definitely. Um, emotional dysregulation, um, is still difficult where, well, and for me, because I kind of triggered emotional response to things like, um, there’s a famous phrase that “you don’t have enough spoons”, but the phrase means basically like, I only have so many ways of coping with life and when I’m out of those ways, I have to take a nap. I have to, I have to go to the corner for a second. And for different people, there’s different levels of that.
And growing up with a family who expected me to be normal. Um, I got really good at masking. I got really good at holding it all in, but then I’d get home and just. Like, um, I didn’t want to do my homework. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t want to do anything except just sit there after school. Um, unfortunately I had to keep pushing through. Um, and so I just got used to doing that, hiding who I really was, you know?
D: Um, as you know, we talked, I’m very openly gay and…what we’re getting to, the bottom line is you have to be who you are. To keep these things secret or to try and work around who you are is exhausting, as you said. And just mentally, you know, exactly.
S: I’ve actually, I did actually get a diagnosis like 15 years ago for anxiety disorder and what I’ve discovered since then is that it is a part of the autism masking, just, I had been masking for 40 years. And so, um, that just built up a lot of anxiety in me for everything, you know? Um, but now that I’m just past year, starting to learn who I am and learn what my triggers are.
Um, I am very sensitive to sound, ironically enough, um, disorganized sound, I really have a hard time handling with, but music is organized sounds. So for me, my brain likes it, you know? Um, but yeah, so I’m just learning a lot more about myself and how my brain works and that it’s okay that my brain has trouble where other people seem to have things worked out, you know? And that’s okay.
D: You see, if you will, with your brain, things that we don’t, and so on. So, you know, I mean, that’s the beauty of all, for all of us. Uh, it’s the tremendous beauty of diversity.
Um… Let’s talk about Ancients. This is psycho-messaging to our brains. I mean, give me a break. It’s not random. It’s pure messaging to ourselves, uh, Tarot and all the rest of it. And I love traditions that have been there for 8,000 years. We’re going to talk about it. Cause you use, you do, you do this formula for a piece with Tarot cards that drives me crazy, but often told me it, speaking of what you had spoken to, uh, just a moment ago, when one gets kind of focused, the focus becomes quite, uh, extravagant. And was that for you? You really got into constructing this piece around Tarot.
S: Oh, yeah, I tend to, this tends to be a theme that I, if I hit on something that’s been very useful for me, um, mentally and psychologically, spiritually, I tend to write a piece about it. So that’s what the Oracle, the Oracle tended to be Tarot. I fell, fell onto, um, as a way to deal with my anxiety and it really, luckily, I had a therapist at the time who was open to the idea of me exploring my subconscious through the Tarot cards.
D: It’s about this idea of finding oneself, of reveling in these discoveries, uh, you know, and so is there any, can you give me a, um, what a topography of when, where, if even you feel now, like who you are, you know what I mean? How, what, what trajectory, where did you arrive? Have you arrived yet?
S: Um, well, definitely starting roughly a little less than a year ago when I finally did those, um, screenings for autism, like is when everything really started clicking and, and I did a lot of reading and, and, um, researching and, and finding others like me, you know, um, and it just helped click, you know, uh, it helped make, help me make sense of who I am and why I am the way I am.
Um, so often, especially throughout my whole life, um, I would be upset that I didn’t seem to be like everybody else. Even as a teacher, I mean, one of my favorite compliments from a student of mine was I’m the quirkiest teacher on campus. And I wear that like a badge. You know, I don’t teach like other teachers teach. I don’t think like other people think, and I’ve learned that that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with me. Um, that diversity is a great thing.
D: So now we’re going to deal with the, uh, the product of your, uh, satisfactions, although this is, let’s see, 2023. I know these are recorded over a rather large span of time.
S: Maybe, uh, yeah, about five years or so.
D: So in other words, I guess what now has me curious is feeling where you are feeling now. Do you see, do you hear, see things in your focus on this CD?
S: I do actually. Um, the CD actually came about simply by virtue of, um, the way the economy works in the music recording industry and classical music, et cetera, where we just recorded piece by piece by piece as we could, um, and then finally had enough and say, Hey, let’s put together an album, you know…
D: And then let’s figure out how to pay for it. That’s what everybody watching this knows all about. It’s not like it [just] happens.
S: Exactly. Uh, so now, like I said, especially after these past several months, I look at the CD and I do really see it as if it’s sort of a culmination of my past 15 years or so, um, because all the pieces have been written, I think the earliest one was. Well, I think “Roses and Lilies” was what, like 2012 or something like that. Um, 2013, maybe.
D: Oh, well, we’ll find it.
S: I don’t remember.
D: Why did you use the word, “Shards”?
S: My husband picked it. He, he actually made up the title Ayre of Grievances too. He comes up with great titles. We thought about “Shards” because there are pieces like Dark Glass Sinfonia, so glass and, and breaking, uh, Wabi-Sabi is sort of like the fractal nature of life. And so you see shards of glass reflecting, reflecting different things, um, basically it’s supposed to be sort of the fragmentations of personality and life and spirituality.
D: That’s a good definition here. I was, I was expecting, uh, the, as I told you, I was expecting a wild ride. And by the way, everybody knows it isn’t, it’s absolutely a magnificent recording of simply superb music. This is what just blew me away.
In a way, this text that’s on your CD tells us how fresh the CD is. So it’s been put together. You’ve done that. It’s been five years. You’re there. And then it’s like, son of a gun.
“One inherent trait I possess is finding my emotional fulfillment through the active, creative manipulation of music.” And this fascinates me. I’m, I’m not a fix the watch kind of guy. I don’t get into the little details. I’m, I’m the conductor. I’m the, you know, I want the big pastel, you know, horses crossing the plains or something. You know, does that speak to your autism in a way, the focus?
S: I think so. The hyper fixation. I mean, there are times when I’m working on a piece that if my husband wasn’t there to remind me, I’d forget to eat, you know, I’ll just be like focused on these patterns and what else can I do with them? And, and, oh, that sounds really cool. Let me try this. Let’s see.
D: And you say, “I’m not, I’m not seeking to impose specific emotions on listeners.” That’s something that’s very important, “…but rather to facilitate a deeper connection with their inner selves.” Now, I’m not quite sure what kind of, what kind of a labyrinth you just, you know, created with those words. “I’m not seeking to impose specific emotions on listeners” yet, “I would like them to get in touch with their deeper…” you know, you know what I mean, you’re clever, aren’t you?
S: Well, that’s a question I get a lot is, well, how do you want the audience to feel? Even, even composition teachers… “How do you want them to feel?” And, and I think that’s another part of my autism. I relate to emotions differently than some other people do from what I can tell. Um, I, for me, the emotion and joy comes from the patterns. And so that’s what it is for me. Um, you know, it can be a completely atonal piece and if the patterns are cool then I’m getting such delight out of it. Uh, but for other people that might not be the case and I totally recognize that. So I’m hoping through my music, even though I might find joy in places they won’t, um, that they’ll still find something that they can resonate with.
D: Oh, that was very well, well, spracht and I can only agree with you because as I think I mentioned to you and probably everybody else and probably about three times already by now, but that was the shock. This music is just simply gorgeous. And I was expecting a few more “shards”, something expecting something, something a little, little more fractious, if you will.
The first piece on the, on the CD is Ayre of Grievances. I love the spelling. I presume clever, uh, you know, and, and, uh, awfully medieval or something. For viola, violin, and flute. It’s from 2020. So that’s a bad year. Oh my God.
S: Hence the grievances.
D: Hence the grievances is right. Uh, composed during the worldwide COVID epidemic. And you and I’ve talked about it. People are not yet clear how profoundly we as a planet of human beings and animals have been affected. This is going to take another half dozen years if we don’t have World War Three somewhere in between to sort it out. So it’s a, this was a big thing. And the biggest thing in my life, maybe, uh, to go through. So, Ayre of Grievances, and, uh, and, you know, you set us up with all the frustrations, fear, sorrow, and anger, and I’m going, Oh, can’t wait.
And I put it on. And it’s absolutely gorgeous. I totally did not expect it. Here’s a bit of my stream of consciousness, totally not expecting such… well, tonality. It’s wonderful already. Tense, beautifully crafted, thoroughly contemporarily classical. I mean, it’s, it’s totally accessible. And I, again, I almost want to spit when I say that word, but I think it’s okay now to use that, to create accessible music, um, things get a little crazy and frustrated.
You mentioned in your program notes, there’s that frustration and you describe it very well. How, although in my case, I just went comatose and just stared out the windows for two years and allowed the checks to come in. Cause I was a freelancer unemployed and boy, the money was better than I’ve ever received. Thank you, Uncle Sam, but, but so I didn’t really experience a whole lot of frustration. I just sort of couldn’t believe what was going on for about two years.
In other words, there is a narrative to this piece, Ayre of Grievances. Um, but I think it, you know, it is much more than the sum of its narrative is what I’m trying to say. Uh, tonalities are altogether satisfying throughout the piece.
Go, give me an overview. What was this about for you?
S: During the, during the lockdowns for me, it was frustrating. Well, because… guy, giving three hour lectures on zoom, I never want to do that again. Oh my gosh. Not being able to see anybody, not being able to see family. Um, that was really frustrating, but at the same time, because I wasn’t able to play live concerts, like I had been, um, it gave me a chance to sit down and really think about who I am.
Um, up until that point, it was very much, oh, I’m a major violinist and a composer and a teacher at all at once.
D: Don’t forget viola… and viola too.
S: Yes. I love the viola. Um, but then I came to realize. I really much prefer writing, uh, and recording. Uh, so I, I allowed myself to let go of the, the things that maybe didn’t bring me quite as much joy. So when things did open back up, I’m, I’m being more careful to balance my life, uh, with what really brings me more joy and less stress, hopefully. Um, that’s, that’s what that piece really sort of represented is it was frustrating. It was lonely. I was angry at the world. Um, but at the same time, there was some beauty in there and some peace.
And, um, and I just love the interaction of the three parts. They’re both, they’re all three very independent, but they speak together and sometimes they’re arguing with each other. Sometimes they’re singing with each other and supporting each other. And, um, I just really liked that intimacy of the work.
D: Well, that whole narrative thing about what you’re very good, uh, you know, voices, uh, having discussions between each other, but I found, and I may sound like I’m an idiot or something, but when I saw that viola, violin, flute, I told you earlier, I thought, I remember thinking that’s going to be tricky, you know, that the flute doesn’t get lost, and all of that works beautifully. And that is not about, you know, microphones. It’s about the way you wrote the piece. Using those three instruments. So, so beautifully. And later you use instruments in the most magical way.
S: Yeah, we actually debuted it during the pandemic where I recorded the violin and viola part. And then I recorded a friend of mine playing the flute part and we just did one of those YouTube stitched videos where we stitched our videos together. That was the thing.
D: Yeah. Am I pronouncing it reasonably close? “DodecaFunky” And of course we’re playing, playing with, uh, dodeca cacophony or something. You can fill me in on that. There’s all this funny stuff going on. That’s all inside stuff for musicians.
It’s for flute and piano from 2015. I think you mentioned this might be the earliest piece, maybe…
S: “Of Roses and Lilies”, I actually wrote the original piece for voice and piano in like the early aughts. But then I went back and fleshed it out and sort of made it fuller.
D: So then you know, the early aughts, I love that. So DodecaFunky, uh, flute and piano. I want to tell everybody out there that’s looking for a repertoire. This is a beauty. This is a recital beauty. A funky solo for flute with piano accompaniment, this intense and spastic work. Is that me or you?
S: I think it’s me.
D: I think it was you. So it… “exploits various manipulations”. Oh, here you go. Yeah, it is you… “of a 12 tone row (dodecaphony).” I’m supposed to be a musician and I couldn’t care less how it’s pronounced or even what it is these days. It’s just the serial melody to a backdrop, et cetera, et cetera. But the point of, oh, this is why it’s so cute. A hard bop and swing and, uh, and stuff. It’s just a delicious piece. And it’s, it’s aggressive in its funky way. I say about the opening, while the piano adds to the delightful confusion with various playful styles, a pause and it starts to get feisty. Uh, now I don’t know where I am in the piece, but now some casual virtuoso boogie woogie, boogie funky, uh, it’s a delight.
It’s kind of a series of descriptive tableau. Am I closer? Cause I love dance. I, you know, I reviewed dance a lot and these are like little tableau. It’s wonderful to the max. Should be, uh, on programming all over the place. It’s a beauty.
Tell me, tell me, what do you think? What do you think of this?
S: I love this piece. It just makes, it makes me giggle.
D: It’s just a charm. Beautiful. It’s so cute.
S: Thank you, thank you.
D: Again, if you, you’ll forgive me the accessibility word. This is irresistible. Of course, you know what I’m trying to say?
S: I’m glad you like it. That one actually took a little bit of inspiration from Bernstein. Um, I, I love, uh, I was studying his symphony, Age of Anxiety. Oh, and I love how he merged, well, he merged…
D: By the way, you know, I’m a conductor. Uh, and I know all three of those symphonies very, very well. I’ve never conducted them because they’re too hard. “Jeremiah” I could conduct. That one makes sense. Uh, the, the age of anxiety for piano and orchestra is unbelievable, but it’s also unbelievably difficult to conduct, you know? And then Kaddish, he wrote the original and then tore it all to pieces and stuff. So, but anyway, I just want, I’m so glad somebody also has studied [those works]. Anyway, excuse me.
S: That’s okay. Uh, but yeah, I really loved the idea of merging modernist, modernistic tendencies as Bernstein would say, um, with jazz and other accessible popular genres. And so that’s what I did with this flute piece is I took a 12 tone row and it is an authentic 12 tone row, but I, you could say I cheated, I cheated a little bit because I used transpositions. So what I would do is it’s still the same row, but I would transpose fragments of it to places that I liked it, where it fit better.
D: Arnold [Schoenberg] is turning into his grave.
S: Well, this is true. Ah but see, Stravinsky did it first. So, you know, let’s blame him.
It’s still, it still has the same intervallic structures. Um, but then I back it up, with that really jazzy, different, like you say, different tableaus of different jazzy styles to kind of increase the…
D: It’s a great dance piece…
S: That’d be fun.
D: In other words, there’s lots of possibilities.
Okay. We’re going to move on.
“Of Roses and Lilies”, this is for soprano, piano, soprano recorder, which I don’t think I hear very often used in these kinds of chamber pieces. And it’s a perfect color. English horn… what got into you ?…and women’s chorus. And then the, are there strings there? I have this question.
S: String orchestra.
D: String orchestra, because I didn’t, you know, I didn’t see it in the, in the brief and it’s from 2013, so we’re getting closer to, to the bottom of the stack here. Tell us about it.
S: This one’s a really fascinating piece for me. I, like I said, I had first written it many, many, many, several decades ago. And this was written…
D: Don’t be so hard on yourself…It’s only been 10 years…
S: But the original piece for just soprano and piano was written, like I said, in the late nineties or early aughts, um, this was when I was still with my very Christian family, um, yeah, there you go. And so I fell in love with the song of Solomon and I thought, why don’t I write quick snippets of the song of Solomon and put it together as sort of a love song. And so I did. And, um, eventually just another like 10 years or so down the road, I’d said, you know what, I really love this piece. I’m going to flesh it out. So, um, I took the original just two parts and added the strings and added the color of the soprano recorder and the English horn, um, and, you know, added the women’s chorus as sort of this almost Greek chorus kind of response thing.
So it’s a very, it’s a very different piece. Uh, it’s a very dramatic kind of theater-esque, drama-esque kind of, uh, kind of a feel.
D: And you don’t use the word romantic. It reeks of romanticism. I see in my notes there, a rich tapestry of sound and a highly romantic tonal aesthetic. I was not ready for that.
S: Well, actually, uh, every, everybody don’t hate on me, but I actually recorded it myself. So it’s only, it’s only two microphones with, uh, the soloist, Claire is one of my best friends and she teaches at Azusa. So she was able to grab us a classroom. And so I recorded with the two microphones, her and another good friend of mine, the pianist, Lydia. Um, and at the time we weren’t sure if I was just going to put together a digital background to it and like release it online or something. But, you know, this CD was coming to the, coming toward finishing and I was like, you know, this would be really awesome if we can get the rest of it recorded.
So I, yeah, I took two more sessions. I got the strings and the winds together for one session. Uh, and then I finally got the women’s chorus together for a session.
D: So that makes sense too. Very hard undertaking just in terms of production.
S: Yeah, it’s such a good, such a good learning experience. And again, so many of my dear, dear friends are on that recording and it’s just, it was just so special to me.
D: It’s something else. And I hope you understand what I’m saying here, because we want to get this, these pieces performed. It’s a beauty. It’s very accessible. So it doesn’t sound terribly hard to put together. What do you think? Am I all wet? I don’t know, but just, it seemed very, it seemed to just flow pretty freely.
S: Here’s the… I would say, here’s the danger with my music. And, um, especially with this piece, this has happened before. There have been pianists who think they can sight read it and they suddenly quit. It’s like, oh, I can’t sight read this. So this is something my very first composition teacher warned me about is that my music seems really easy. But then you dig into it and there are some little quirks in there and some tricks that you might not be expecting. So as long as you know…
D: It shouldn’t be a big problem. If you know what I mean, so I think I’m okay in saying that I think it’s not like, you know…
S: It’s not terrible.
D: Yeah…[not] terribly virtuosic. And that is, that is to say this should go off the shelf and into performance and rehearsal. And that’s exactly what I see. Nothing but college, college ensemble. Because of the difficulty of getting, you know, professionals together in that kind of complex, you know, but, but, so I found it really very, very…a flowing, lovely, entirely tonal journey. The soprano recorder is charming. Your writing is absolutely first-class. You handle transitions of mood with smooth aplomb. Boy, that came out of my head. Geez. The piece soars with beauty. Your compositional savvy and skill are beyond question.
S: Thank you.
D: Let’s see. Now this is “The Oracle,” for violin, cello, flute and piccolo, clarinet, piano. That’s from 2016. Go ahead. Tell us, but the bottom line is you constructed this thing from random throws of tarot cards. Go.
S: Exactly. Okay. So…
D: Aleatoric indeed!
S: Uh, I really, like I said, this was the time in my life when I had just really started to latch on to tarot as a means of exploring my own subconscious.
D: Which is correct, by the way. Let’s make sure. Exactly what it’s supposed to be. No, let the self-conscious speak to us.
S: Exactly. I like to think of it, it’s like a mirror for myself. It’s a way for me to talk to myself when sometimes I’m having trouble understanding my brain. So, uh, I really love tarot and I wrote this when I first really started getting into it. And so what I did is, um, I had an opportunity. It was like a call for scores for this ensemble. Uh, and so I was like, this will be fun. Why don’t I use that as an excuse to try it out?
So, and I wanted to do sort of a homage to John Cage by using an aleatoric kind of method. And so tarot seemed like the perfect way to do it. So I set up, um, I think it was five different spreads of 10 cards. I think I did like, um, some kind of a sacred pyramid, uh, spread for each of those. Um, and what I did is I, I assigned certain, you know, in tarot, the different suits represent different aspects of life and personality.
So you have the cups, which is emotion. Um, you have, you know, the, uh, the pentacles, uh, the pentacles are, uh, earth, uh, and, um, material wellbeing and reality and such. Uh, so what I did is I attached each of the instruments to those suits. The, uh, violin was fire, uh, or wands. Uh, the, uh, the cello was water or cups and the, uh, the clarinet was earth and the flute, of course, was air. And then for the piano, uh, I made the piano, the tree of life itself. Uh, because I like to read tarot from a Kabbalistic tree of life sort of interpretation.
D: You’re starting to get over my head. I thought I was with you pretty well, but Kabbalistic something, something…with a tree of life.
S: So Jewish mysticism, basically. So on the tree of life, each of the cards have their place on that tree. And the higher up the tree you are, the closer to the divine source you are. And then you travel down the tree and experience various phases of life and emotion, et cetera, until you get to the bottom, which is material reality. Everything you’ve experienced becomes real. Uh, and then you cycle back to the top, back to the divine source again.
So for the piano, um, when I had a spread that, that spoke of being closer to the divine source, I had the piano playing up in its higher registers. And then as it got closer to the bottom, to the ground, the piano went down. So the higher, if you hear the piano going, noodling up really high, that’s up at the divine source of things. If you hear the piano kind of in the middle, that’s sort of where balance and harmony are. If the piano is down in the basement, that’s down in material reality.
And then in the meantime, you have all the other instruments that are reflecting on emotion or, um, you know, or, or thought, or power
D: …and character that may be interpreted…in countless ways. That’s the beauty of the idea of randomness, the beauty of the order, if you will, of randomness, that even random events will speak to us.
S: Exactly.
D: Once in a while, I really want to play an album, uh, for other people in my, you know, over a dinner or something. This is one of them. Um, what an amazing chamber piece. I say this is, uh, this long cello obbligato, then into the klezmer aesthetic I call, uh, with, with all of that playing. Now I understand the cabalistic, if you will, right. Uh, meaning to it all. Uh, but the klezmer, uh, aesthetic is, is clearly there. The, and of course the Oracle is a Jew, right? I say the Oracle is a Jew? Question mark.
A wonderful transition, transitional writing. And you know what I mean? Making segments and, and, uh, themes make sense. That transition material is very, very important to get it right. [Your] compositional savvy is top notch. I think I’ve been saying that, but the piece is a wonderful narrative. It’s complex. It’s a complex narrative. Um, and as you have just described the instruments are characters.
S: They’re, they’re the suits of the, of the cards, but they do have sort of, they evoke their sort of, uh, certain characteristics about it.
D: Okay. That’s much more complex. Thank you. That clarifies.
This is quite a journey. So, and, uh, and then I say, um, a jaunty section now as CODA, I assume that’s a CODA. Uh, still a fun ending. I love it. I don’t think you can get any more, you know, any, any better than that.
Okay. Next is, is, uh, Wabi-Sabi, this, uh, uh, the aesthetic and metaphysical ideals that Japanese Wabi-Sabi encapsulates. Tell us about Wabi-Sabi. Is it animist or something? Is it part of their religion? Animist religion?
S: It can be. Uh, I’m trying to remember where it historically started. It actually started with monochromatic Chinese drawings and then the Japanese sort of took that ideal and enhanced it. A lot of people think of a Zen garden when they think of Wabi Sabi.
D: I see what you mean. Now I understand exactly what you mean. Even the artwork, strokes, you know, just very spare strokes.
S: Yeah. The tea ceremony. Um, everything about that ceremony is part of their Wabi Sabi aesthetic and metaphysical ideals.
D: I’m trying to remember this [for] parties.
S: Simplicity is, is a major part of it, but it goes beyond that. This, and this is what the string quartet throughout the three movements sort of encapsulates is that, uh, the beginning that, that…you know, in the west the idea of nothing is like zero, there’s nothing there. It’s very stark, but in Wabi Sabi ideas, um, nothing is full of potential. There’s a lot that could be there, but isn’t there yet.
D: That’s so profound.
S: Um, and then you go through, especially at the beginning of the first movement, sort of these random particles where the players can choose how they want to play it.
D: I understand that. We’re talking about the first movement Emergence, what have you just said that the players have some choice and they have choices.
S: So, so each of the players have a collection of notes that they can choose from to play. Uh, and they do it in different ways. Like the cello trills all their notes, but they can choose how they want to trill and how fast they want to trill and when they want to come in, uh, and things like that. Um, until they finally come together in the middle of the first movement and it sort of builds from there. So the idea is like that of creation of these particles coming into space and slowly merging together to become something.
D: And by the way, this sounds like an homage to Stockhausen, you know?
S: Yeah, absolutely.
D: Another great. Distance… these distant sounds… I remember performance, you know, Stockhausen, and it all comes together.
S: And then, and then Evolution is a short, it’s intentionally a short little two minute burst because that’s where everything is kind of locked in.
D: This is Evolution.
S: This is the, the cells are coming together and creating fish that are coming out of the water and, you know, becoming man. Um, et cetera. Possibility.
D: Alive with possibility, yeah. …Nothingness itself…
S: Yeah, exactly. Um, and then it gives way to Entropy, uh, and Entropy starts with a very strict structure. Uh, funnily enough, I wasn’t sure compositionally how I wanted to go about the third movement, but I was in the middle of teaching about isorhythm in one of my classes. So I’m like, Hey, I can do isorhythm with this. That’d be fun. So it starts out very strict, um, but then gets really complex and starts falling apart. And again, that’s the idea of returning back to nothingness. Everything’s falling apart.
Uh, and, and that’s the idea of, um, the idea that you, um, sometimes the best course of action is to decide to do nothing, you know…
D: I think you have just described an exact, uh, arc in the, they come together. I’m looking at Emergence. The first one builds quite satisfyingly. Uh, the construct is fascinating and sensible to the intellect, I say to myself. And of course, if there, if you don’t get it off the ground, intellectually from the beginning, you’re in trouble… Ok, Evolution. Um, I love this, uh, I call it a flowing sea sort of opening. Or whatever that vibe could be. Anything, forget sea, whatever that undulating flowing thing…so mesmerizing. Again, wonderful quartet writing.
I’m going to have to stop using this word accessible, but that’s the whole idea to get these performed. And that’s exactly to be well written and also to be a happy time for an audience. Give me a break. And I, and here’s the thing about Evolution that it’s, uh, utterly accessible to the listener, though the subject, listening, but I think I got it. Although the subject matter may have sub-basements. Now a walking cello fits that, that walking cello thing. It’s wonderful to keep the piece moving and, and, uh, energetic. Um, quite a narrative.
S: It’s like a little metronome marking I have in the, uh, the second movement is “Like dancing molecules.”
D: Oh!
S: Kind of the spinning, whirling…
D: I might have to dream about that tonight. And the third movement, if you will, Entropy. It’s such a nice, uh, I, I, do I hear a little fugue…? I wanted… the stream of consciousness thing…fuguetto. You know what I mean? That opening is a, is it a genuine, but it’s a fuguetto, right?
S: Yeah, it’s, um, it starts out exactly as a canon. Then what happens is that each time the line comes back, uh, I either in diminution or augmentation. Uh, so I, I, like I said, if you see the score, um, I start doing crazy little sub meters within each of the parts just to help, just to help the players keep, keep time with each other, but yeah, that’s part of the unraveling part is they start very much together and then they start in like ratios of two to one or one to two, but yeah, then it starts getting into weird ratios…
D: …because I think I wondered about those, those asymmetrical collisions… A slightly dysfunctional intentional section. I’m toward the end here of pizz’s.
S: Well, the very ending, I go back to the beginning idea where the, each player has a selection of notes. They can pizz. whenever they want to. So each performance should be a little different than each other.
D: So the end of entropy, they go back to this idea and they can even change their mind about it.
S: Exactly.
D: Stockhausen, he’s smiling.
“Nevermore,” this major Sonata, I think for viola and piano from 2019 to 2021. Nevermore for viola and piano, also a subtitle of a Gothic Suite, so delightful, it’s an absolutely magnificent Sonata for viola and piano. It’s just absolutely, it’s so American, because we’re talking about Edgar Allan Poe and each movement is after one of his most famous pieces. But you have, I feel very powerfully about American composers choosing American subjects. The Raven, Annabelle Lee, the Telltale Heart.
S: Actually, Charlotte Goode, the violist on this recording, is actually another one of my bestest friends. And she is also a gothic nut and a fellow autistic. And she just, she was like, oh my gosh, we need to collaborate. We need to do this for viola. And I’m like, yes. So I started out with the Raven, you know, and she debuted that at a recital. And then I was like, okay, we need to come up with two other, you know, two other movements to finish it out. And the thing I love about the recording of this, again, this is so her, the viola part is so her, the subject matter is so her, and then I was lucky enough to be able to fly out with her to Boston to have her record it for PARMA. So…that day I went to Salem after we recorded it. So it was perfect.
D: You mean, the Witch Town or Salem, Oregon?
S: No, no, no, the Witch Town, yeah, Salem, Massachusetts.
D: So Poe inspired you to go to the seat of evil.
S: Exactly. It was so good.
D: Well, what I have to say is here, I worked on looking at the first movement. First of all, a fascinating piano introduction that really nails the interest immediately because it hints at mysteries, then it’s followed by the viola’s intensely Poe-ish colors and temperament, so congrats to your friend. It’s a beauty, again, of narrative imagination, a wonderful piece of writing for viola. It is virtuosic.
S: Yeah, it is. I won’t play it on my viola. I’ll let somebody else do it. I’m not that good.
D: Well, everything a violist looks for in a recital piece, you know, and it’s romantic, there are romantic bits in here, some hair-raising twilight zone intervals between notes, if that makes any sense, thrilling, kooky, mysterious, as was the man, nice new idea… that roiling keyboard stuff toward the end of the piece, does that make any sense? Under viola, that middle and low register as it goes.
“Annabelle Lee.” It’s gorgeous, that movement is just gorgeous.
S: So beautiful, it’s one of my absolute favorites, just, and the poem, too, is just absolutely, it really struck me.
D: It brings you to tears, really, that poem.
S: It really does. I really wanted to capture that complete childlike innocence, just absolutely purest childlike innocent love of a little boy and a little girl. And then the angels cruelly take her away from him, you know, and just that drama.
D: And that’s the true story, isn’t it? Doesn’t he marry her, his wife, when she was 15, and then did she die? I can’t quite remember.
S: I don’t remember. I’d have to look it up.
D: We just missed the good parts that neither of us can remember. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, Annabelle Lee speaks to a very personal experience.
S: I do know this was his last poem that he wrote before he died. That’s also a very haunting little tidbit. So, yeah, I love this movement so much. It actually, it was the hardest to record, too, because it’s deceptively simple. But it’s because it’s kind of like Mozart in that way, where it’s so simple and exposed that the violist has to be really careful and really in tune. So it took us a little bit longer to do this one.
D: Nice. Yeah, it’s a beautiful reading. I call it magical writing. It’s exceptionally sensitive.
The Tell-Tale Heart: the intro, sufficiently terrifying. Very imaginative character development. It’s exactly creepy enough to fit the narrative, because it is that narrative, the pulsing, the clicking, and the floorboards… Then the beginning of real paranoia. I mean, you describe this tale very well.
S: Actually, I decided the best way to put it together was to take the story apart and make each of the sections of music a section of the story. So it’s probably the most narratively accurate of the three movements.
D: And that makes good sense to me.
S: Yeah, and in the music, each of the section headings has a little quote from the story. So you can kind of tell where you are in the story. But yeah, the idea of just. I wanted the opening theme that the viola starts playing is supposed to be sort of the love theme that the narrator has for his master.
“I loved the old man…It was his eye!” …you know, so it’s this really creepy. It’s a love song, but it’s twisted. It’s got something off.
So that’s where it opens. And then from there, then I get into the part where it’s for seven nights. He he peeks in at the bedroom. And so that section is like in seven four or something like that. It has odd. It’s asymmetrical. So, again, it feels a little off, you know, a little bit of the heartbeat taps and then, you know, stuff like that. And then little answering in the piano… And then you hear him murder him.
D: I call it shades of the shower scene in Psycho.
S: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
D: Brava, I say after that.
S: …yeah, thank you. Yeah. And then you just get, like you say, the paranoia as the cops won’t leave. But the narrator keeps hearing the heartbeat and he can’t get away from it. And he just has to give up.
D: And indeed, it’s an internal conflict. Yeah, that’s the order of the soundscape. It’s kind of this internal conflict that becomes, you know, insupportable, disturbingly deliberate. And it’s so well done, well done.
So that’s a beautiful sonata. And as I mentioned, here it is. It’s a, it’s a viola sonata. It’s, it’s tough. Well, you know, at a certain level, you know, you almost want it to be. So it’s not inaccessible at all. It has a it has a tremendous connection to America and American history and American literature. It is a beautiful sonata and it sounds so beautiful. The writing is so gorgeous.
So take note, everybody. Nevermore for viola and piano.
And then now the last, the grand finale on the CD, The Dark Glass Sinfonia: We see through a glass darkly. For orchestra from 2017 built upon an integrated set…Oh, here you go again.
S: I love patterns!
D: …that’s why I pulled it. Because in all of my life in the arts and even at college, these things never came up in my experience. “Built,” she says, confident, “built upon an integrated set of hexachordal formulae.” End quote. I say to myself, please explain. You will, then you go on: “Free atonality with modal harmony…In doing so, it is meant to represent the enigmatic and ongoing emotional flux of the soul.”
S: This is another…it started out as just a love affair with patterns. And one thing, I’m not a major post-tonalist. You can tell from the accessibleness of my music. But I do love some of the number patterns that come about from, you know, post-tonal exercises. And hexachordal combinatoriality is one of my favorite ideas. I just love saying it. Hexachordal combinatoriality.
D: Yeah, I bet when you have students, they just sort of collapse.
S: Yeah, I’m like, OK, learn how to say it, you can impress all of your friends.
D: But then again, formulae is rather…
S: …It’s very pompous sounding…it’s basically it’s built upon the 12-tone ideal, but it breaks up the 12 tones into six tones, hexachords. So each of the hexachords has its own unique intervallic character to it. And so in the same way that you can take kind of the same way where I cheated with DodecaFunky, where I took segments of it and like transposed it, it’s kind of like that, but I did less cheating. Hexachords kind of do their own cheating because you can take one part of the tone row and then take the second half of it and flip it or reverse it. Or, you know, all that kind of stuff. And then if you break them down into numbers, you can add them up into cool combinations and things like that. So that’s what this was. This piece was sort of a play on that and seeing what I could do with it. And that’s how I developed the main themes.
You really hear it come out, especially in the little woodwind stuff throughout the top. That’s really where it shines. But it really is woven into it.
D: The row shines?…
S: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
D: Well, you must have been in heaven putting this piece together.
S: It was very, very fun. And again, and I don’t know how my brain does this, but what starts out with a whole bunch of numbers and patterns usually comes out as something really lovely that I continue to love listening to.
D: Well, guess what? That’s exactly the whole point of the genius of autism. You just exactly described what we’ve been kind of…that autism is, is just different.
S: You know, you know, that’s another thing that shines through with this orchestral piece, too, is that one of the comments sometimes I get from other people is, oh, why can’t you just have the instruments all stacked up on top of each other? You know, why can’t they all play at once? And I’m like, I just don’t like that. I like to have the layers. Somebody’s always doing something. And so there’s kind of a medievalness to it, you know, going back to that old polyphony idea. But then I’ll integrate it with these numbers and patterns. And I just love seeing it layer.
D: Speaking of layering, did I hear I see in my notes here. Is there any kind of pyramid that you constructed a sound pyramid somewhere in the beginning of that piece? Or is it a stupid word?
S: No it’s not stupid. I like to call it a waterfall, where…
D: Yeah, ….I got the idea of what you were creating there.
S: Yeah. The hexachordal pattern is there. But what I do is I pass it starting from the top and have it kind of trickle down like that.
D: So pyramid is not quite the right way of describing it. But I was hearing a very specific concept. And of course, thinking pyramid, I’m describing it as from the bottom up. But you’ve just described it as from top to trickle down, if you will.
Let’s see… There was a lovely little brass tune. I’m hearing that I’m hearing cinematic moments. Of course, it’s an orchestral piece. I’m sure you really got your teeth into that one.
Let’s see, lovely wind section work, as we’ve discussed, nicely orchestrated. Well, it’s brilliant and wonderful and very accessible and a beautiful, beautiful orchestral piece of what? I can’t remember. Seven minutes or…
S: Yeah, it’s only like seven minutes or so, which I have found, again, economically and just competition wise…
D: That’s exactly right.
S: People like shorter, shorter pieces.
D: That’s kind of what we ask, because then the next question is how? Because I’m again thinking collegiate orchestras. And then let’s see that as we’ve discussed, there’s that thematic return, you know, that the whole thing does a perfect arc. So there you go.
S: I just really love the very, very ending of it. When I first put it together and to me, it evoked sort of almost this organ, this organ like texture with. I just love the resonance… T
D: That section with percussion. That’s toward the end. I see more complicated in narrative in terms of just the construct of the piece. Definitely descriptive, martial, perfectly accessible. It’s a perfect piece for a college orchestra if it’s in that sphere of capability.
S: Yeah. …that little fast march like scherzo thing. I kind of had a like a like a Russian, Russian romantic vibe almost or like early 20th century Russian vibe, you know, almost like kind of Shostakovich-esque, you know…
D: Each question mark was starting to rise out of my head there, the Shostakovich-ish.
S: Yeah, exactly.
D: What a great talk we’ve had. And I think just anybody could pick up that the world of our profession, of our music making, is the world at large. I mean, we speak to the wonderful, fascinating world around us. That’s the whole idea of being a creative person.
So, again, wonderful chat with composer Sarah Wallin Huff. And we’re talking about your 2023 Navona release. It’s contemporary classic chamber music for diverse instrumental combinations. You’ve heard this before. It’s called Shards. Don’t worry, anybody. It’s fine. And wonderful pieces that as we’ve discussed that are chamber works and then, of course, the orchestral piece at the very end.
But this is music that should be heard a lot more. And it’s not off the top of the charts of virtuosity. But, it’s just good, solid, wonderful music-making with enough virtuosity to keep…Why did I say those of us who are gifted…busy…you know what I’m trying to say… I’m gonna shut my mouth up here.
Anyway, great fun chatting with you.
S: Thank you so much. I really I’m really flattered, you know, that you reached out.
D: Well, I’m flattered that I heard what I heard. I’ll tell you, because it’s always a gamble. I just sort of pick up, pick up whatever. And I thought I’ve never heard of this thing. Well, who is this person and what is that stuff? And that’s got us started.
It’s been a tremendous treat and a really important and a very important CD you’ve got. So, congratulations all around.
#chamberMusic #classical #Interview #orchestra #review #StudioRecording
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Sept. 2023 Interview with Daniel Kepl
Back in the fall of 2023, right after the release of my second solo album with Navona, I got the opportunity to sit down with longtime American conductor, arts administrator, and music/theater/dance critic, Daniel Kepl, and talk with him about my album, SHARDS.
Unfortunately, the audio in that video interview was extremely unbalanced and distorted, so I took some time to try and clean it up, to make it as listenable as possible. So… that edited video is now here, below, ready for your viewing pleasure (complete with chapter breaks, if you’d prefer to jump around)!
While the pops and crackles and background noises are mostly gone, sometimes the words are still a little garbly, so I’ve embedded captions in the video and am providing a full transcript, for those who would prefer to read the discussion. If you would like to see the original unedited video, you can do that here.
Dan Kepl’s Review Highlights
The high points of Dan Kepl’s praise, as stated in the video below.
About the Album:
[SHARDS is] a wonderful album, very interesting and very accessible, if I may say. It’s absolutely a magnificent recording of simply superb music… This music is just simply gorgeous. You use instruments in the most magical way.
This is music that should be heard a lot more…it’s just good, solid, wonderful music-making. It’s…a very important CD you’ve got.
About “Ayre of Grievances”:
It’s absolutely gorgeous. Tense, beautifully crafted, thoroughly contemporarily classical. tonalities are altogether satisfying throughout the piece. The balancing and everything is wonderful in terms of your compositional skills.
About “DodecaFunky”:
I want to tell everybody out there that’s looking for a repertoire, this is a beauty. This is a recital beauty. I think I can say it’s fun. It’s wonderful. It’s just a delicious piece, it’s aggressive in its funky way. It’s wonderful to the max. Should be on programming all over the place. This is irresistible. Audiences would love it, I think.
About “Of Roses and Lilies”:
It’s a beauty; a rich tapestry of sound and a highly romantic tonal aesthetic. …this should go off the shelf and into performance and rehearsal. A flowing, lovely, entirely tonal journey. The soprano recorder is charming. Your writing is absolutely first-class. You handle transitions of mood with smooth aplomb. The piece soars with beauty. Your compositional savvy and skill are beyond question.
About “The Oracle”:
Once in a while, I really want to play [a track of] an album, uh, for other people…you know, over a dinner or something. This is one of them. What an amazing chamber piece. Wonderful transitional writing; compositional savvy is top notch. The piece is a wonderful narrative. It’s complex. This piece is quite a journey.
About “Wabi-Sabi”:
The construct is fascinating and sensible to the intellect…quite a narrative…wonderful quartet writing.
About “Nevermore”:
An absolutely gorgeous, wonderful, magnificent Sonata for viola and piano…so American. …a fascinating piano introduction that really nails the interest immediately because it hints at mysteries, then it’s followed by the viola’s intensely Poe-ish colors and temperament. It’s a beauty, again, of narrative imagination, a wonderful piece of writing for viola. It is virtuosic, everything a violist looks for in a recital piece. There are romantic bits in here, some hair-raising twilight zone intervals between notes, if that makes any sense, thrilling, kooky, mysterious, as was the man. It has a tremendous connection to America and American history and American literature. It is a beautiful sonata and it sounds so beautiful. The writing is so gorgeous.
[For Annabelle Lee] I call it magical writing. It’s exceptionally sensitive.
The Tell-Tale Heart: the intro, sufficiently terrifying. Very imaginative character development. It’s exactly creepy enough to fit the narrative, because it is that narrative, the pulsing, the clicking…the floorboards…Then the beginning of real paranoia. Shades of the shower scene in Psycho – Brava! Disturbingly deliberate ending.
About “The Dark Glass Sinfonia”:
…wonderful piece for orchestra, “The Dark Glass Sinfonia,” gives me shivers, but it’s wonderful.
Lovely wind section work…nicely orchestrated. It’s brilliant and wonderful and very accessible…a beautiful, beautiful orchestral piece. Definitely descriptive, martial, perfectly accessible.
Sept. 2023 Interview with Daniel Kepl (Edited, with Captions)Full [Edited] Interview Transcript
D: I’m chatting with composer Sarah Wallin Huff and we’re going to talk about your 2023 Navona CD release. Thank you, Parma. Thank you, Navona. Thank you, all of you wonderful people out there that put this, these kind of packages together. Just a quick aside about Navona, including everything that we need as critics, really somewhat truncated, makes perfect sense, but up on a website. And very few other companies do this. I just think it’s fabulous.
I’ve seen your interview, or I’ve read your interview, I should say, with Parma. And we’re going to talk about your 2023 Navona CD release of Contemporary Classical Chamber Works and an album for diverse instrumental combinations. Anyway, the CD is called Shards. Do not run away in the night and be afraid. It’s a wonderful album of very interesting and very accessible, if I may say so, and I think it’s perfectly OK to say so.
Here, just a sampling: Ayre of Grievances, for viola, violin, flute, lovely. The flute I wondered about. Those are pretty heavy instruments and the balancing and everything is wonderful in terms of your compositional skills.
DodecaFunky, let me say that once more. DodecaFunky, for piano, and it is cute… oh, did I miss one?
S: DodecaFunky.
D: Anyway, it’s cute. I think I can say it’s fun. It’s wonderful. And it’s a wonderful, very fascinating piano piece. Audiences would love it, I think.
“Of Roses and Lilies.” This one’s a little complex for soprano, piano, soprano recorder. Nice colors. Nice. English horn, very interesting. And women’s chorus. I mean, not since Holst have I heard women’s chorus used in this way.
So, Wabi-Sabi, it’s in three movements. Juventas, the new music ensemble performs it. This is a string quartet, so four players of the Juventas ensemble. I hope I’m pronouncing that right since I live in California. Three movements: Emergence, Evolution, Entropy. Very, very interesting. And maybe even kind of the heart of who you might be. I don’t know. I’m just guessing.
The next piece, Nevermore for viola and piano, an absolutely gorgeous, wonderful, three-movement sonata for viola and piano. The movements: The Raven, Annabelle Lee, The Tell-Tale Heart. And I love Poe, what a genius, what a genius. So glad you have included this wonderful, wonderful piece for viola and piano. And I mean by that, again, your compositional skills, the way you use these, didn’t you play viola? I thought I that read somewhere. Were you a violist?
S: I double on viola. I feel more comfortable on violin, but I can pick up a viola if I need it.
D: Okay. So you got all that stuff, you know, under your fingernails, so to say.
And then the last piece, wonderful piece for orchestra, The Dark Glass Sinfonia, gives me shivers, but it’s wonderful. And with a little subtype, if I’m reading it correctly: “We see through a glass darkly.” Wonderful piece, performed by wonderful people, while you really say it right out, right, and I just want to deal with this a little bit before I get to where you know, I’m going.
We all know people with autism and what I have found in my experience with people, and you know, autism is here, there, everywhere in various variations. You’re going to speak to it, I think in a bit, but the people that I have known with autism, some people have had troubles, others have been really, really talented, clever, and innovative. Autism is not a deficit. Okay.
S: Yeah. It’s a difference.
D: It’s a difference. Thank you. That’s better. Okay. Because I too, like most of, especially like with dyslexia, in the seventies, we all thought people with dyslexia were just lazy. Just didn’t want to do a job. Well, they couldn’t help it. They couldn’t read. Everything was backwards. My, my oldest nephew, uh, is dyslexic. So I just want everybody to understand…
And, and where are you in the autism spectrum? Can I ask that question?
S: Sure.
D: Of course, you’re clearly under great control. You have mastered the magic of autism.
S: Yeah. Well, what’s funny about that is I’ve actually only just in the past year, really got confirmation. Um, I’m still don’t have, yeah, I still don’t have an official diagnosis because that’s a whole other bag of worms for adult diagnosis and it costs thousands of dollars. And, uh, some doctors still don’t believe that women have it. Um, so, but just taking several screening tests, um, I’ve taken about five of the clinical screening tests and they all point very highly to autism. Um, and thinking about my experiences growing up, it really makes a lot of sense.
D: That’s what I was going to ask you next. You must have known, you know, that something was different.
S: Well, yeah. I, I thought something was always…
D: Can you give an example or two, you know, when you were a little kid. What I remember is the kids that I’ve known have various symptoms of autism.
S: Definitely. Um, emotional dysregulation, um, is still difficult where, well, and for me, because I kind of triggered emotional response to things like, um, there’s a famous phrase that “you don’t have enough spoons”, but the phrase means basically like, I only have so many ways of coping with life and when I’m out of those ways, I have to take a nap. I have to, I have to go to the corner for a second. And for different people, there’s different levels of that.
And growing up with a family who expected me to be normal. Um, I got really good at masking. I got really good at holding it all in, but then I’d get home and just. Like, um, I didn’t want to do my homework. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t want to do anything except just sit there after school. Um, unfortunately I had to keep pushing through. Um, and so I just got used to doing that, hiding who I really was, you know?
D: Um, as you know, we talked, I’m very openly gay and…what we’re getting to, the bottom line is you have to be who you are. To keep these things secret or to try and work around who you are is exhausting, as you said. And just mentally, you know, exactly.
S: I’ve actually, I did actually get a diagnosis like 15 years ago for anxiety disorder and what I’ve discovered since then is that it is a part of the autism masking, just, I had been masking for 40 years. And so, um, that just built up a lot of anxiety in me for everything, you know? Um, but now that I’m just past year, starting to learn who I am and learn what my triggers are.
Um, I am very sensitive to sound, ironically enough, um, disorganized sound, I really have a hard time handling with, but music is organized sounds. So for me, my brain likes it, you know? Um, but yeah, so I’m just learning a lot more about myself and how my brain works and that it’s okay that my brain has trouble where other people seem to have things worked out, you know? And that’s okay.
D: You see, if you will, with your brain, things that we don’t, and so on. So, you know, I mean, that’s the beauty of all, for all of us. Uh, it’s the tremendous beauty of diversity.
Um… Let’s talk about Ancients. This is psycho-messaging to our brains. I mean, give me a break. It’s not random. It’s pure messaging to ourselves, uh, Tarot and all the rest of it. And I love traditions that have been there for 8,000 years. We’re going to talk about it. Cause you use, you do, you do this formula for a piece with Tarot cards that drives me crazy, but often told me it, speaking of what you had spoken to, uh, just a moment ago, when one gets kind of focused, the focus becomes quite, uh, extravagant. And was that for you? You really got into constructing this piece around Tarot.
S: Oh, yeah, I tend to, this tends to be a theme that I, if I hit on something that’s been very useful for me, um, mentally and psychologically, spiritually, I tend to write a piece about it. So that’s what the Oracle, the Oracle tended to be Tarot. I fell, fell onto, um, as a way to deal with my anxiety and it really, luckily, I had a therapist at the time who was open to the idea of me exploring my subconscious through the Tarot cards.
D: It’s about this idea of finding oneself, of reveling in these discoveries, uh, you know, and so is there any, can you give me a, um, what a topography of when, where, if even you feel now, like who you are, you know what I mean? How, what, what trajectory, where did you arrive? Have you arrived yet?
S: Um, well, definitely starting roughly a little less than a year ago when I finally did those, um, screenings for autism, like is when everything really started clicking and, and I did a lot of reading and, and, um, researching and, and finding others like me, you know, um, and it just helped click, you know, uh, it helped make, help me make sense of who I am and why I am the way I am.
Um, so often, especially throughout my whole life, um, I would be upset that I didn’t seem to be like everybody else. Even as a teacher, I mean, one of my favorite compliments from a student of mine was I’m the quirkiest teacher on campus. And I wear that like a badge. You know, I don’t teach like other teachers teach. I don’t think like other people think, and I’ve learned that that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with me. Um, that diversity is a great thing.
D: So now we’re going to deal with the, uh, the product of your, uh, satisfactions, although this is, let’s see, 2023. I know these are recorded over a rather large span of time.
S: Maybe, uh, yeah, about five years or so.
D: So in other words, I guess what now has me curious is feeling where you are feeling now. Do you see, do you hear, see things in your focus on this CD?
S: I do actually. Um, the CD actually came about simply by virtue of, um, the way the economy works in the music recording industry and classical music, et cetera, where we just recorded piece by piece by piece as we could, um, and then finally had enough and say, Hey, let’s put together an album, you know…
D: And then let’s figure out how to pay for it. That’s what everybody watching this knows all about. It’s not like it [just] happens.
S: Exactly. Uh, so now, like I said, especially after these past several months, I look at the CD and I do really see it as if it’s sort of a culmination of my past 15 years or so, um, because all the pieces have been written, I think the earliest one was. Well, I think “Roses and Lilies” was what, like 2012 or something like that. Um, 2013, maybe.
D: Oh, well, we’ll find it.
S: I don’t remember.
D: Why did you use the word, “Shards”?
S: My husband picked it. He, he actually made up the title Ayre of Grievances too. He comes up with great titles. We thought about “Shards” because there are pieces like Dark Glass Sinfonia, so glass and, and breaking, uh, Wabi-Sabi is sort of like the fractal nature of life. And so you see shards of glass reflecting, reflecting different things, um, basically it’s supposed to be sort of the fragmentations of personality and life and spirituality.
D: That’s a good definition here. I was, I was expecting, uh, the, as I told you, I was expecting a wild ride. And by the way, everybody knows it isn’t, it’s absolutely a magnificent recording of simply superb music. This is what just blew me away.
In a way, this text that’s on your CD tells us how fresh the CD is. So it’s been put together. You’ve done that. It’s been five years. You’re there. And then it’s like, son of a gun.
“One inherent trait I possess is finding my emotional fulfillment through the active, creative manipulation of music.” And this fascinates me. I’m, I’m not a fix the watch kind of guy. I don’t get into the little details. I’m, I’m the conductor. I’m the, you know, I want the big pastel, you know, horses crossing the plains or something. You know, does that speak to your autism in a way, the focus?
S: I think so. The hyper fixation. I mean, there are times when I’m working on a piece that if my husband wasn’t there to remind me, I’d forget to eat, you know, I’ll just be like focused on these patterns and what else can I do with them? And, and, oh, that sounds really cool. Let me try this. Let’s see.
D: And you say, “I’m not, I’m not seeking to impose specific emotions on listeners.” That’s something that’s very important, “…but rather to facilitate a deeper connection with their inner selves.” Now, I’m not quite sure what kind of, what kind of a labyrinth you just, you know, created with those words. “I’m not seeking to impose specific emotions on listeners” yet, “I would like them to get in touch with their deeper…” you know, you know what I mean, you’re clever, aren’t you?
S: Well, that’s a question I get a lot is, well, how do you want the audience to feel? Even, even composition teachers… “How do you want them to feel?” And, and I think that’s another part of my autism. I relate to emotions differently than some other people do from what I can tell. Um, I, for me, the emotion and joy comes from the patterns. And so that’s what it is for me. Um, you know, it can be a completely atonal piece and if the patterns are cool then I’m getting such delight out of it. Uh, but for other people that might not be the case and I totally recognize that. So I’m hoping through my music, even though I might find joy in places they won’t, um, that they’ll still find something that they can resonate with.
D: Oh, that was very well, well, spracht and I can only agree with you because as I think I mentioned to you and probably everybody else and probably about three times already by now, but that was the shock. This music is just simply gorgeous. And I was expecting a few more “shards”, something expecting something, something a little, little more fractious, if you will.
The first piece on the, on the CD is Ayre of Grievances. I love the spelling. I presume clever, uh, you know, and, and, uh, awfully medieval or something. For viola, violin, and flute. It’s from 2020. So that’s a bad year. Oh my God.
S: Hence the grievances.
D: Hence the grievances is right. Uh, composed during the worldwide COVID epidemic. And you and I’ve talked about it. People are not yet clear how profoundly we as a planet of human beings and animals have been affected. This is going to take another half dozen years if we don’t have World War Three somewhere in between to sort it out. So it’s a, this was a big thing. And the biggest thing in my life, maybe, uh, to go through. So, Ayre of Grievances, and, uh, and, you know, you set us up with all the frustrations, fear, sorrow, and anger, and I’m going, Oh, can’t wait.
And I put it on. And it’s absolutely gorgeous. I totally did not expect it. Here’s a bit of my stream of consciousness, totally not expecting such… well, tonality. It’s wonderful already. Tense, beautifully crafted, thoroughly contemporarily classical. I mean, it’s, it’s totally accessible. And I, again, I almost want to spit when I say that word, but I think it’s okay now to use that, to create accessible music, um, things get a little crazy and frustrated.
You mentioned in your program notes, there’s that frustration and you describe it very well. How, although in my case, I just went comatose and just stared out the windows for two years and allowed the checks to come in. Cause I was a freelancer unemployed and boy, the money was better than I’ve ever received. Thank you, Uncle Sam, but, but so I didn’t really experience a whole lot of frustration. I just sort of couldn’t believe what was going on for about two years.
In other words, there is a narrative to this piece, Ayre of Grievances. Um, but I think it, you know, it is much more than the sum of its narrative is what I’m trying to say. Uh, tonalities are altogether satisfying throughout the piece.
Go, give me an overview. What was this about for you?
S: During the, during the lockdowns for me, it was frustrating. Well, because… guy, giving three hour lectures on zoom, I never want to do that again. Oh my gosh. Not being able to see anybody, not being able to see family. Um, that was really frustrating, but at the same time, because I wasn’t able to play live concerts, like I had been, um, it gave me a chance to sit down and really think about who I am.
Um, up until that point, it was very much, oh, I’m a major violinist and a composer and a teacher at all at once.
D: Don’t forget viola… and viola too.
S: Yes. I love the viola. Um, but then I came to realize. I really much prefer writing, uh, and recording. Uh, so I, I allowed myself to let go of the, the things that maybe didn’t bring me quite as much joy. So when things did open back up, I’m, I’m being more careful to balance my life, uh, with what really brings me more joy and less stress, hopefully. Um, that’s, that’s what that piece really sort of represented is it was frustrating. It was lonely. I was angry at the world. Um, but at the same time, there was some beauty in there and some peace.
And, um, and I just love the interaction of the three parts. They’re both, they’re all three very independent, but they speak together and sometimes they’re arguing with each other. Sometimes they’re singing with each other and supporting each other. And, um, I just really liked that intimacy of the work.
D: Well, that whole narrative thing about what you’re very good, uh, you know, voices, uh, having discussions between each other, but I found, and I may sound like I’m an idiot or something, but when I saw that viola, violin, flute, I told you earlier, I thought, I remember thinking that’s going to be tricky, you know, that the flute doesn’t get lost, and all of that works beautifully. And that is not about, you know, microphones. It’s about the way you wrote the piece. Using those three instruments. So, so beautifully. And later you use instruments in the most magical way.
S: Yeah, we actually debuted it during the pandemic where I recorded the violin and viola part. And then I recorded a friend of mine playing the flute part and we just did one of those YouTube stitched videos where we stitched our videos together. That was the thing.
D: Yeah. Am I pronouncing it reasonably close? “DodecaFunky” And of course we’re playing, playing with, uh, dodeca cacophony or something. You can fill me in on that. There’s all this funny stuff going on. That’s all inside stuff for musicians.
It’s for flute and piano from 2015. I think you mentioned this might be the earliest piece, maybe…
S: “Of Roses and Lilies”, I actually wrote the original piece for voice and piano in like the early aughts. But then I went back and fleshed it out and sort of made it fuller.
D: So then you know, the early aughts, I love that. So DodecaFunky, uh, flute and piano. I want to tell everybody out there that’s looking for a repertoire. This is a beauty. This is a recital beauty. A funky solo for flute with piano accompaniment, this intense and spastic work. Is that me or you?
S: I think it’s me.
D: I think it was you. So it… “exploits various manipulations”. Oh, here you go. Yeah, it is you… “of a 12 tone row (dodecaphony).” I’m supposed to be a musician and I couldn’t care less how it’s pronounced or even what it is these days. It’s just the serial melody to a backdrop, et cetera, et cetera. But the point of, oh, this is why it’s so cute. A hard bop and swing and, uh, and stuff. It’s just a delicious piece. And it’s, it’s aggressive in its funky way. I say about the opening, while the piano adds to the delightful confusion with various playful styles, a pause and it starts to get feisty. Uh, now I don’t know where I am in the piece, but now some casual virtuoso boogie woogie, boogie funky, uh, it’s a delight.
It’s kind of a series of descriptive tableau. Am I closer? Cause I love dance. I, you know, I reviewed dance a lot and these are like little tableau. It’s wonderful to the max. Should be, uh, on programming all over the place. It’s a beauty.
Tell me, tell me, what do you think? What do you think of this?
S: I love this piece. It just makes, it makes me giggle.
D: It’s just a charm. Beautiful. It’s so cute.
S: Thank you, thank you.
D: Again, if you, you’ll forgive me the accessibility word. This is irresistible. Of course, you know what I’m trying to say?
S: I’m glad you like it. That one actually took a little bit of inspiration from Bernstein. Um, I, I love, uh, I was studying his symphony, Age of Anxiety. Oh, and I love how he merged, well, he merged…
D: By the way, you know, I’m a conductor. Uh, and I know all three of those symphonies very, very well. I’ve never conducted them because they’re too hard. “Jeremiah” I could conduct. That one makes sense. Uh, the, the age of anxiety for piano and orchestra is unbelievable, but it’s also unbelievably difficult to conduct, you know? And then Kaddish, he wrote the original and then tore it all to pieces and stuff. So, but anyway, I just want, I’m so glad somebody also has studied [those works]. Anyway, excuse me.
S: That’s okay. Uh, but yeah, I really loved the idea of merging modernist, modernistic tendencies as Bernstein would say, um, with jazz and other accessible popular genres. And so that’s what I did with this flute piece is I took a 12 tone row and it is an authentic 12 tone row, but I, you could say I cheated, I cheated a little bit because I used transpositions. So what I would do is it’s still the same row, but I would transpose fragments of it to places that I liked it, where it fit better.
D: Arnold [Schoenberg] is turning into his grave.
S: Well, this is true. Ah but see, Stravinsky did it first. So, you know, let’s blame him.
It’s still, it still has the same intervallic structures. Um, but then I back it up, with that really jazzy, different, like you say, different tableaus of different jazzy styles to kind of increase the…
D: It’s a great dance piece…
S: That’d be fun.
D: In other words, there’s lots of possibilities.
Okay. We’re going to move on.
“Of Roses and Lilies”, this is for soprano, piano, soprano recorder, which I don’t think I hear very often used in these kinds of chamber pieces. And it’s a perfect color. English horn… what got into you ?…and women’s chorus. And then the, are there strings there? I have this question.
S: String orchestra.
D: String orchestra, because I didn’t, you know, I didn’t see it in the, in the brief and it’s from 2013, so we’re getting closer to, to the bottom of the stack here. Tell us about it.
S: This one’s a really fascinating piece for me. I, like I said, I had first written it many, many, many, several decades ago. And this was written…
D: Don’t be so hard on yourself…It’s only been 10 years…
S: But the original piece for just soprano and piano was written, like I said, in the late nineties or early aughts, um, this was when I was still with my very Christian family, um, yeah, there you go. And so I fell in love with the song of Solomon and I thought, why don’t I write quick snippets of the song of Solomon and put it together as sort of a love song. And so I did. And, um, eventually just another like 10 years or so down the road, I’d said, you know what, I really love this piece. I’m going to flesh it out. So, um, I took the original just two parts and added the strings and added the color of the soprano recorder and the English horn, um, and, you know, added the women’s chorus as sort of this almost Greek chorus kind of response thing.
So it’s a very, it’s a very different piece. Uh, it’s a very dramatic kind of theater-esque, drama-esque kind of, uh, kind of a feel.
D: And you don’t use the word romantic. It reeks of romanticism. I see in my notes there, a rich tapestry of sound and a highly romantic tonal aesthetic. I was not ready for that.
S: Well, actually, uh, every, everybody don’t hate on me, but I actually recorded it myself. So it’s only, it’s only two microphones with, uh, the soloist, Claire is one of my best friends and she teaches at Azusa. So she was able to grab us a classroom. And so I recorded with the two microphones, her and another good friend of mine, the pianist, Lydia. Um, and at the time we weren’t sure if I was just going to put together a digital background to it and like release it online or something. But, you know, this CD was coming to the, coming toward finishing and I was like, you know, this would be really awesome if we can get the rest of it recorded.
So I, yeah, I took two more sessions. I got the strings and the winds together for one session. Uh, and then I finally got the women’s chorus together for a session.
D: So that makes sense too. Very hard undertaking just in terms of production.
S: Yeah, it’s such a good, such a good learning experience. And again, so many of my dear, dear friends are on that recording and it’s just, it was just so special to me.
D: It’s something else. And I hope you understand what I’m saying here, because we want to get this, these pieces performed. It’s a beauty. It’s very accessible. So it doesn’t sound terribly hard to put together. What do you think? Am I all wet? I don’t know, but just, it seemed very, it seemed to just flow pretty freely.
S: Here’s the… I would say, here’s the danger with my music. And, um, especially with this piece, this has happened before. There have been pianists who think they can sight read it and they suddenly quit. It’s like, oh, I can’t sight read this. So this is something my very first composition teacher warned me about is that my music seems really easy. But then you dig into it and there are some little quirks in there and some tricks that you might not be expecting. So as long as you know…
D: It shouldn’t be a big problem. If you know what I mean, so I think I’m okay in saying that I think it’s not like, you know…
S: It’s not terrible.
D: Yeah…[not] terribly virtuosic. And that is, that is to say this should go off the shelf and into performance and rehearsal. And that’s exactly what I see. Nothing but college, college ensemble. Because of the difficulty of getting, you know, professionals together in that kind of complex, you know, but, but, so I found it really very, very…a flowing, lovely, entirely tonal journey. The soprano recorder is charming. Your writing is absolutely first-class. You handle transitions of mood with smooth aplomb. Boy, that came out of my head. Geez. The piece soars with beauty. Your compositional savvy and skill are beyond question.
S: Thank you.
D: Let’s see. Now this is “The Oracle,” for violin, cello, flute and piccolo, clarinet, piano. That’s from 2016. Go ahead. Tell us, but the bottom line is you constructed this thing from random throws of tarot cards. Go.
S: Exactly. Okay. So…
D: Aleatoric indeed!
S: Uh, I really, like I said, this was the time in my life when I had just really started to latch on to tarot as a means of exploring my own subconscious.
D: Which is correct, by the way. Let’s make sure. Exactly what it’s supposed to be. No, let the self-conscious speak to us.
S: Exactly. I like to think of it, it’s like a mirror for myself. It’s a way for me to talk to myself when sometimes I’m having trouble understanding my brain. So, uh, I really love tarot and I wrote this when I first really started getting into it. And so what I did is, um, I had an opportunity. It was like a call for scores for this ensemble. Uh, and so I was like, this will be fun. Why don’t I use that as an excuse to try it out?
So, and I wanted to do sort of a homage to John Cage by using an aleatoric kind of method. And so tarot seemed like the perfect way to do it. So I set up, um, I think it was five different spreads of 10 cards. I think I did like, um, some kind of a sacred pyramid, uh, spread for each of those. Um, and what I did is I, I assigned certain, you know, in tarot, the different suits represent different aspects of life and personality.
So you have the cups, which is emotion. Um, you have, you know, the, uh, the pentacles, uh, the pentacles are, uh, earth, uh, and, um, material wellbeing and reality and such. Uh, so what I did is I attached each of the instruments to those suits. The, uh, violin was fire, uh, or wands. Uh, the, uh, the cello was water or cups and the, uh, the clarinet was earth and the flute, of course, was air. And then for the piano, uh, I made the piano, the tree of life itself. Uh, because I like to read tarot from a Kabbalistic tree of life sort of interpretation.
D: You’re starting to get over my head. I thought I was with you pretty well, but Kabbalistic something, something…with a tree of life.
S: So Jewish mysticism, basically. So on the tree of life, each of the cards have their place on that tree. And the higher up the tree you are, the closer to the divine source you are. And then you travel down the tree and experience various phases of life and emotion, et cetera, until you get to the bottom, which is material reality. Everything you’ve experienced becomes real. Uh, and then you cycle back to the top, back to the divine source again.
So for the piano, um, when I had a spread that, that spoke of being closer to the divine source, I had the piano playing up in its higher registers. And then as it got closer to the bottom, to the ground, the piano went down. So the higher, if you hear the piano going, noodling up really high, that’s up at the divine source of things. If you hear the piano kind of in the middle, that’s sort of where balance and harmony are. If the piano is down in the basement, that’s down in material reality.
And then in the meantime, you have all the other instruments that are reflecting on emotion or, um, you know, or, or thought, or power
D: …and character that may be interpreted…in countless ways. That’s the beauty of the idea of randomness, the beauty of the order, if you will, of randomness, that even random events will speak to us.
S: Exactly.
D: Once in a while, I really want to play an album, uh, for other people in my, you know, over a dinner or something. This is one of them. Um, what an amazing chamber piece. I say this is, uh, this long cello obbligato, then into the klezmer aesthetic I call, uh, with, with all of that playing. Now I understand the cabalistic, if you will, right. Uh, meaning to it all. Uh, but the klezmer, uh, aesthetic is, is clearly there. The, and of course the Oracle is a Jew, right? I say the Oracle is a Jew? Question mark.
A wonderful transition, transitional writing. And you know what I mean? Making segments and, and, uh, themes make sense. That transition material is very, very important to get it right. [Your] compositional savvy is top notch. I think I’ve been saying that, but the piece is a wonderful narrative. It’s complex. It’s a complex narrative. Um, and as you have just described the instruments are characters.
S: They’re, they’re the suits of the, of the cards, but they do have sort of, they evoke their sort of, uh, certain characteristics about it.
D: Okay. That’s much more complex. Thank you. That clarifies.
This is quite a journey. So, and, uh, and then I say, um, a jaunty section now as CODA, I assume that’s a CODA. Uh, still a fun ending. I love it. I don’t think you can get any more, you know, any, any better than that.
Okay. Next is, is, uh, Wabi-Sabi, this, uh, uh, the aesthetic and metaphysical ideals that Japanese Wabi-Sabi encapsulates. Tell us about Wabi-Sabi. Is it animist or something? Is it part of their religion? Animist religion?
S: It can be. Uh, I’m trying to remember where it historically started. It actually started with monochromatic Chinese drawings and then the Japanese sort of took that ideal and enhanced it. A lot of people think of a Zen garden when they think of Wabi Sabi.
D: I see what you mean. Now I understand exactly what you mean. Even the artwork, strokes, you know, just very spare strokes.
S: Yeah. The tea ceremony. Um, everything about that ceremony is part of their Wabi Sabi aesthetic and metaphysical ideals.
D: I’m trying to remember this [for] parties.
S: Simplicity is, is a major part of it, but it goes beyond that. This, and this is what the string quartet throughout the three movements sort of encapsulates is that, uh, the beginning that, that…you know, in the west the idea of nothing is like zero, there’s nothing there. It’s very stark, but in Wabi Sabi ideas, um, nothing is full of potential. There’s a lot that could be there, but isn’t there yet.
D: That’s so profound.
S: Um, and then you go through, especially at the beginning of the first movement, sort of these random particles where the players can choose how they want to play it.
D: I understand that. We’re talking about the first movement Emergence, what have you just said that the players have some choice and they have choices.
S: So, so each of the players have a collection of notes that they can choose from to play. Uh, and they do it in different ways. Like the cello trills all their notes, but they can choose how they want to trill and how fast they want to trill and when they want to come in, uh, and things like that. Um, until they finally come together in the middle of the first movement and it sort of builds from there. So the idea is like that of creation of these particles coming into space and slowly merging together to become something.
D: And by the way, this sounds like an homage to Stockhausen, you know?
S: Yeah, absolutely.
D: Another great. Distance… these distant sounds… I remember performance, you know, Stockhausen, and it all comes together.
S: And then, and then Evolution is a short, it’s intentionally a short little two minute burst because that’s where everything is kind of locked in.
D: This is Evolution.
S: This is the, the cells are coming together and creating fish that are coming out of the water and, you know, becoming man. Um, et cetera. Possibility.
D: Alive with possibility, yeah. …Nothingness itself…
S: Yeah, exactly. Um, and then it gives way to Entropy, uh, and Entropy starts with a very strict structure. Uh, funnily enough, I wasn’t sure compositionally how I wanted to go about the third movement, but I was in the middle of teaching about isorhythm in one of my classes. So I’m like, Hey, I can do isorhythm with this. That’d be fun. So it starts out very strict, um, but then gets really complex and starts falling apart. And again, that’s the idea of returning back to nothingness. Everything’s falling apart.
Uh, and, and that’s the idea of, um, the idea that you, um, sometimes the best course of action is to decide to do nothing, you know…
D: I think you have just described an exact, uh, arc in the, they come together. I’m looking at Emergence. The first one builds quite satisfyingly. Uh, the construct is fascinating and sensible to the intellect, I say to myself. And of course, if there, if you don’t get it off the ground, intellectually from the beginning, you’re in trouble… Ok, Evolution. Um, I love this, uh, I call it a flowing sea sort of opening. Or whatever that vibe could be. Anything, forget sea, whatever that undulating flowing thing…so mesmerizing. Again, wonderful quartet writing.
I’m going to have to stop using this word accessible, but that’s the whole idea to get these performed. And that’s exactly to be well written and also to be a happy time for an audience. Give me a break. And I, and here’s the thing about Evolution that it’s, uh, utterly accessible to the listener, though the subject, listening, but I think I got it. Although the subject matter may have sub-basements. Now a walking cello fits that, that walking cello thing. It’s wonderful to keep the piece moving and, and, uh, energetic. Um, quite a narrative.
S: It’s like a little metronome marking I have in the, uh, the second movement is “Like dancing molecules.”
D: Oh!
S: Kind of the spinning, whirling…
D: I might have to dream about that tonight. And the third movement, if you will, Entropy. It’s such a nice, uh, I, I, do I hear a little fugue…? I wanted… the stream of consciousness thing…fuguetto. You know what I mean? That opening is a, is it a genuine, but it’s a fuguetto, right?
S: Yeah, it’s, um, it starts out exactly as a canon. Then what happens is that each time the line comes back, uh, I either in diminution or augmentation. Uh, so I, I, like I said, if you see the score, um, I start doing crazy little sub meters within each of the parts just to help, just to help the players keep, keep time with each other, but yeah, that’s part of the unraveling part is they start very much together and then they start in like ratios of two to one or one to two, but yeah, then it starts getting into weird ratios…
D: …because I think I wondered about those, those asymmetrical collisions… A slightly dysfunctional intentional section. I’m toward the end here of pizz’s.
S: Well, the very ending, I go back to the beginning idea where the, each player has a selection of notes. They can pizz. whenever they want to. So each performance should be a little different than each other.
D: So the end of entropy, they go back to this idea and they can even change their mind about it.
S: Exactly.
D: Stockhausen, he’s smiling.
“Nevermore,” this major Sonata, I think for viola and piano from 2019 to 2021. Nevermore for viola and piano, also a subtitle of a Gothic Suite, so delightful, it’s an absolutely magnificent Sonata for viola and piano. It’s just absolutely, it’s so American, because we’re talking about Edgar Allan Poe and each movement is after one of his most famous pieces. But you have, I feel very powerfully about American composers choosing American subjects. The Raven, Annabelle Lee, the Telltale Heart.
S: Actually, Charlotte Goode, the violist on this recording, is actually another one of my bestest friends. And she is also a gothic nut and a fellow autistic. And she just, she was like, oh my gosh, we need to collaborate. We need to do this for viola. And I’m like, yes. So I started out with the Raven, you know, and she debuted that at a recital. And then I was like, okay, we need to come up with two other, you know, two other movements to finish it out. And the thing I love about the recording of this, again, this is so her, the viola part is so her, the subject matter is so her, and then I was lucky enough to be able to fly out with her to Boston to have her record it for PARMA. So…that day I went to Salem after we recorded it. So it was perfect.
D: You mean, the Witch Town or Salem, Oregon?
S: No, no, no, the Witch Town, yeah, Salem, Massachusetts.
D: So Poe inspired you to go to the seat of evil.
S: Exactly. It was so good.
D: Well, what I have to say is here, I worked on looking at the first movement. First of all, a fascinating piano introduction that really nails the interest immediately because it hints at mysteries, then it’s followed by the viola’s intensely Poe-ish colors and temperament, so congrats to your friend. It’s a beauty, again, of narrative imagination, a wonderful piece of writing for viola. It is virtuosic.
S: Yeah, it is. I won’t play it on my viola. I’ll let somebody else do it. I’m not that good.
D: Well, everything a violist looks for in a recital piece, you know, and it’s romantic, there are romantic bits in here, some hair-raising twilight zone intervals between notes, if that makes any sense, thrilling, kooky, mysterious, as was the man, nice new idea… that roiling keyboard stuff toward the end of the piece, does that make any sense? Under viola, that middle and low register as it goes.
“Annabelle Lee.” It’s gorgeous, that movement is just gorgeous.
S: So beautiful, it’s one of my absolute favorites, just, and the poem, too, is just absolutely, it really struck me.
D: It brings you to tears, really, that poem.
S: It really does. I really wanted to capture that complete childlike innocence, just absolutely purest childlike innocent love of a little boy and a little girl. And then the angels cruelly take her away from him, you know, and just that drama.
D: And that’s the true story, isn’t it? Doesn’t he marry her, his wife, when she was 15, and then did she die? I can’t quite remember.
S: I don’t remember. I’d have to look it up.
D: We just missed the good parts that neither of us can remember. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, Annabelle Lee speaks to a very personal experience.
S: I do know this was his last poem that he wrote before he died. That’s also a very haunting little tidbit. So, yeah, I love this movement so much. It actually, it was the hardest to record, too, because it’s deceptively simple. But it’s because it’s kind of like Mozart in that way, where it’s so simple and exposed that the violist has to be really careful and really in tune. So it took us a little bit longer to do this one.
D: Nice. Yeah, it’s a beautiful reading. I call it magical writing. It’s exceptionally sensitive.
The Tell-Tale Heart: the intro, sufficiently terrifying. Very imaginative character development. It’s exactly creepy enough to fit the narrative, because it is that narrative, the pulsing, the clicking, and the floorboards… Then the beginning of real paranoia. I mean, you describe this tale very well.
S: Actually, I decided the best way to put it together was to take the story apart and make each of the sections of music a section of the story. So it’s probably the most narratively accurate of the three movements.
D: And that makes good sense to me.
S: Yeah, and in the music, each of the section headings has a little quote from the story. So you can kind of tell where you are in the story. But yeah, the idea of just. I wanted the opening theme that the viola starts playing is supposed to be sort of the love theme that the narrator has for his master.
“I loved the old man…It was his eye!” …you know, so it’s this really creepy. It’s a love song, but it’s twisted. It’s got something off.
So that’s where it opens. And then from there, then I get into the part where it’s for seven nights. He he peeks in at the bedroom. And so that section is like in seven four or something like that. It has odd. It’s asymmetrical. So, again, it feels a little off, you know, a little bit of the heartbeat taps and then, you know, stuff like that. And then little answering in the piano… And then you hear him murder him.
D: I call it shades of the shower scene in Psycho.
S: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
D: Brava, I say after that.
S: …yeah, thank you. Yeah. And then you just get, like you say, the paranoia as the cops won’t leave. But the narrator keeps hearing the heartbeat and he can’t get away from it. And he just has to give up.
D: And indeed, it’s an internal conflict. Yeah, that’s the order of the soundscape. It’s kind of this internal conflict that becomes, you know, insupportable, disturbingly deliberate. And it’s so well done, well done.
So that’s a beautiful sonata. And as I mentioned, here it is. It’s a, it’s a viola sonata. It’s, it’s tough. Well, you know, at a certain level, you know, you almost want it to be. So it’s not inaccessible at all. It has a it has a tremendous connection to America and American history and American literature. It is a beautiful sonata and it sounds so beautiful. The writing is so gorgeous.
So take note, everybody. Nevermore for viola and piano.
And then now the last, the grand finale on the CD, The Dark Glass Sinfonia: We see through a glass darkly. For orchestra from 2017 built upon an integrated set…Oh, here you go again.
S: I love patterns!
D: …that’s why I pulled it. Because in all of my life in the arts and even at college, these things never came up in my experience. “Built,” she says, confident, “built upon an integrated set of hexachordal formulae.” End quote. I say to myself, please explain. You will, then you go on: “Free atonality with modal harmony…In doing so, it is meant to represent the enigmatic and ongoing emotional flux of the soul.”
S: This is another…it started out as just a love affair with patterns. And one thing, I’m not a major post-tonalist. You can tell from the accessibleness of my music. But I do love some of the number patterns that come about from, you know, post-tonal exercises. And hexachordal combinatoriality is one of my favorite ideas. I just love saying it. Hexachordal combinatoriality.
D: Yeah, I bet when you have students, they just sort of collapse.
S: Yeah, I’m like, OK, learn how to say it, you can impress all of your friends.
D: But then again, formulae is rather…
S: …It’s very pompous sounding…it’s basically it’s built upon the 12-tone ideal, but it breaks up the 12 tones into six tones, hexachords. So each of the hexachords has its own unique intervallic character to it. And so in the same way that you can take kind of the same way where I cheated with DodecaFunky, where I took segments of it and like transposed it, it’s kind of like that, but I did less cheating. Hexachords kind of do their own cheating because you can take one part of the tone row and then take the second half of it and flip it or reverse it. Or, you know, all that kind of stuff. And then if you break them down into numbers, you can add them up into cool combinations and things like that. So that’s what this was. This piece was sort of a play on that and seeing what I could do with it. And that’s how I developed the main themes.
You really hear it come out, especially in the little woodwind stuff throughout the top. That’s really where it shines. But it really is woven into it.
D: The row shines?…
S: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
D: Well, you must have been in heaven putting this piece together.
S: It was very, very fun. And again, and I don’t know how my brain does this, but what starts out with a whole bunch of numbers and patterns usually comes out as something really lovely that I continue to love listening to.
D: Well, guess what? That’s exactly the whole point of the genius of autism. You just exactly described what we’ve been kind of…that autism is, is just different.
S: You know, you know, that’s another thing that shines through with this orchestral piece, too, is that one of the comments sometimes I get from other people is, oh, why can’t you just have the instruments all stacked up on top of each other? You know, why can’t they all play at once? And I’m like, I just don’t like that. I like to have the layers. Somebody’s always doing something. And so there’s kind of a medievalness to it, you know, going back to that old polyphony idea. But then I’ll integrate it with these numbers and patterns. And I just love seeing it layer.
D: Speaking of layering, did I hear I see in my notes here. Is there any kind of pyramid that you constructed a sound pyramid somewhere in the beginning of that piece? Or is it a stupid word?
S: No it’s not stupid. I like to call it a waterfall, where…
D: Yeah, ….I got the idea of what you were creating there.
S: Yeah. The hexachordal pattern is there. But what I do is I pass it starting from the top and have it kind of trickle down like that.
D: So pyramid is not quite the right way of describing it. But I was hearing a very specific concept. And of course, thinking pyramid, I’m describing it as from the bottom up. But you’ve just described it as from top to trickle down, if you will.
Let’s see… There was a lovely little brass tune. I’m hearing that I’m hearing cinematic moments. Of course, it’s an orchestral piece. I’m sure you really got your teeth into that one.
Let’s see, lovely wind section work, as we’ve discussed, nicely orchestrated. Well, it’s brilliant and wonderful and very accessible and a beautiful, beautiful orchestral piece of what? I can’t remember. Seven minutes or…
S: Yeah, it’s only like seven minutes or so, which I have found, again, economically and just competition wise…
D: That’s exactly right.
S: People like shorter, shorter pieces.
D: That’s kind of what we ask, because then the next question is how? Because I’m again thinking collegiate orchestras. And then let’s see that as we’ve discussed, there’s that thematic return, you know, that the whole thing does a perfect arc. So there you go.
S: I just really love the very, very ending of it. When I first put it together and to me, it evoked sort of almost this organ, this organ like texture with. I just love the resonance… T
D: That section with percussion. That’s toward the end. I see more complicated in narrative in terms of just the construct of the piece. Definitely descriptive, martial, perfectly accessible. It’s a perfect piece for a college orchestra if it’s in that sphere of capability.
S: Yeah. …that little fast march like scherzo thing. I kind of had a like a like a Russian, Russian romantic vibe almost or like early 20th century Russian vibe, you know, almost like kind of Shostakovich-esque, you know…
D: Each question mark was starting to rise out of my head there, the Shostakovich-ish.
S: Yeah, exactly.
D: What a great talk we’ve had. And I think just anybody could pick up that the world of our profession, of our music making, is the world at large. I mean, we speak to the wonderful, fascinating world around us. That’s the whole idea of being a creative person.
So, again, wonderful chat with composer Sarah Wallin Huff. And we’re talking about your 2023 Navona release. It’s contemporary classic chamber music for diverse instrumental combinations. You’ve heard this before. It’s called Shards. Don’t worry, anybody. It’s fine. And wonderful pieces that as we’ve discussed that are chamber works and then, of course, the orchestral piece at the very end.
But this is music that should be heard a lot more. And it’s not off the top of the charts of virtuosity. But, it’s just good, solid, wonderful music-making with enough virtuosity to keep…Why did I say those of us who are gifted…busy…you know what I’m trying to say… I’m gonna shut my mouth up here.
Anyway, great fun chatting with you.
S: Thank you so much. I really I’m really flattered, you know, that you reached out.
D: Well, I’m flattered that I heard what I heard. I’ll tell you, because it’s always a gamble. I just sort of pick up, pick up whatever. And I thought I’ve never heard of this thing. Well, who is this person and what is that stuff? And that’s got us started.
It’s been a tremendous treat and a really important and a very important CD you’ve got. So, congratulations all around.
#chamberMusic #classical #Interview #orchestra #review #StudioRecording
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By ClarkKent
Those of you hoping to turn your ancient civilization cosplay group into a power metal band, sorry to burst your bubble–Warkings has beat you to it. Including Armageddon, this prolific German outfit has released five albums since their founding in 2018.1 Perhaps realizing that one new LP per year is not sustainable, Warkings waited three years to record Armageddon. In that span, the quartet has transformed itself into a quintet, making permanent Morgana le Fay, who previously served as a guest collaborator. Admittedly, it’s not easy to take a group seriously when it dresses up and poses like the members in the band photo below. Fortunately, nobody takes power metal too seriously anyway. Trve fans only care about the following questions: Is the album fun? Is it catchy? Does it make you sing and dance to ridiculous choruses? Let’s find out if Warkings checks these boxes.
Warkings follows the Sabaton and Powerwolf schools of power metal, playing with high levels of bombast while following Sabaton’s lead in writing about historical events. These range from a song (“Armageddon”) about a Viking raid on a church in 793 to a song (“Genghis Khan”) about the famed Mongolian ruler to a song (“Hangman’s Night”) about when France’s King Phillip IV arrested and executed the Knights Templar in 1307. Those unfamiliar with Warkings’s previous work might assume the addition of a female vocalist puts them in the beauty and the beast dynamic of Epica or Nightwish. In a twist, it’s the female, Morgana le Fay, who performs with an edgier, more aggressive approach than the male, The Tribune. The Tribune has a cleaner, softer sound than his Sabaton and Powerwolf brethren, while Morgana le Fay sounds more like Lzzy Hale of Halestorm. The difference in impact that these two have couldn’t be starker. Whereas The Tribune brings a more upbeat feel akin to Fellowship, Morgana le Fay adds grit, which is most evident on the relentlessly heavy “Circle of Witches.”
Don’t expect a hearty meal from Armageddon; it’s more like junk food for your ears. Just as junk food hooks you with additives like sugar and salt, Warkings hooks you with effective, catchy choruses and high-energy drum beats. Opening tracks “Armageddon” and “Genghis Khan” are particularly tasty morsels. If there was ever a heavy metal sing-along album, those two songs would be near the top of the playlist. There are plenty of other examples of good earworms, but Armageddon is at its best on collaborations with other German power metal bands. These include “Hangman’s Night” performed with horror-themed collaborator Dominum, and “Stahl auf Stahl” performed with folk-themed Subway to Sally. On these songs, the bands mix and match their strengths, such that “Hangman’s Night” adds atmospheric chanting and “Stahl auf Stahl” features some tasty violin melodies alongside the guitars.2 Just as too much junk food will make you sick, Warkings wisely limits tunes to four minutes or less, and the fourteen-track record clocks in at a swift 40 minutes.
With some modifications, Warkings could upgrade into a more filling and nutritious snack. For one, while the guitar riffs are adequate in driving the high energy, they’re often generic and uninspired. Sometimes the riffs are great during the intro and chorus but disappear during the rest of the song (“Genghis Khan”), or they’re just bland throughout (“Kingdom Come”). The solos similarly suffer a lack of imagination, and they’re so brief you wonder why Warkings bothered in the first place. The other issue is that Armageddon sags in the middle. This is where a couple of four-minute tracks, “Kingdom Come” and “Kings of Ragnarok”, prove the wisdom of the wham-bam approach. When you rely on simple formulas without including Ascension–level shredding during the solos, anything longer than three minutes starts to spoil.
Armageddon marks my first venture with Warkings, and admittedly, I wasn’t impressed during my first few listens. With each subsequent listen, however, the hooks embedded themselves deeper and deeper into my brain. Those who are more familiar with Warkings might be happy to learn that they appear to have benefited from the lengthier gestation period between albums. They have come back from this break not only with a new member who benefits their sound, but sharper songwriting and stronger choruses. So prepare to dust off your old suit of ancient armor and regale your neighbors with anthems about centuries-old historical events.
Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: N/A | Format Reviewed: Stream
Label: Napalm Records
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Site
Releases Worldwide: July 4th, 2025#2025 #30 #Armageddon #Ascension #Dominum #Epica #Fellowship #GermanMetal #Halestorm #Jul25 #NapalmRecords #Nightwish #PowerMetal #Powerwolf #Review #Reviews #Sabaton #SubwayToSally #WarKings
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Feeling unsettled today. I’m trying to make sense of a lot of things. A conversation with a friend about prayer and God seems to have stirred something deep in me, something I can’t fully name. She said that prayer broke something off me last night, that scripture and God’s promises have power if we claim them. She also said that sometimes we cause our own struggles by not trusting those promises. I’m thankful for the love in her words, but they’ve left me wrestling with some questions.
I’ve often been told that my faith isn’t strong enough, that if I just believed more, I’d see healing or change. That narrative weighs heavily, especially when prayer feels hollow. It can feel like a way for people—including myself—to avoid real action. If someone’s struggling, isn’t it more meaningful to do something to help them rather than saying, “I’ll pray for you”? And how do we even discern what’s God’s action versus our own? My friend says she feels things in her spirit, but isn’t that just another word for opinion?
The God I’ve known and trusted has shaped my life, but the version of God I hear about in church—the one who demands worship or threatens hell—feels hard to reconcile. Love, at least as I understand it, shouldn’t be conditional. Why would a loving God need belief to extend love? Why would God punish someone for walking a different path? I know the “free will” argument, but I still can’t make it sit comfortably.
What resonates with me is the beauty and grounding of liturgy. Chant, structure, moments of stillness—these connect me to something bigger. I’ve also been drawn to traditions that embrace the inner work of faith—the slow, unspoken transformations that happen not through dramatic moments but through small, persistent acts of love and reflection. Faith that allows space for honesty and questions feels truer to me than faith that demands answers.
I’ve come to realise that some struggles aren’t meant to be fixed overnight, and no amount of pressure or prayer will force them to disappear. Instead, maybe the work of faith is to make space for all of it—the questions, the doubts, the pain—and allow something to shift in its own time.
I don’t have all the answers, but maybe faith isn’t about that. It’s about showing up, even in uncertainty. The God I’ve experienced is still there, even if the constructs around him feel shaky. Perhaps faith is less about certainty and more about seeking truth and meaning in the complexity of it all.
#Faith #Doubt #Questions #Christianity #Prayer #Liturgy #Spirituality #ContemplativeFaith
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Sean Moncrieff: In animation, it’s still all about the fabulous hair
"The hero-female has to have a waist so tiny that it couldn’t possibly accommodate ribs or any internal organs. Intelligent female characters are invariably nerdy and far less attractive; beauty and brains can’t go together in animation world. "
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Novembers Doom – Major Arcana Review
By Steel Druhm
Chicago’s Novembers Doom have charted a unique course for themselves over the last 30 years. Their unnatural pairing of beefy, cargo-beshorted death metal and highly emotional doom originally felt unstable and liable to erupt into chaos at any moment, but over time, they became adept at finding the ideal balance between madman and sadboi. Albums like The Pale Haunt Departure and Hamartia were loaded with ripping riffs and plaintive gloom, and at their best, Novembers Doom can tear at the heartstrings even as they snap your neck. The wild swings from hugely emotional, weepy sadboi melancholy and femur-fracturing death could sometimes feel forced, but more often it just fucking worked. 2019s Nephilim Grove had big moments but felt underbaked with too much filler. It’s been almost six years since, but now we get their 12th album, Major Arcana, and hopefully, a rebound for these Autumnal leaf reapers of despair.
Nothing’s really changed in the way Novembers Doom approach their trade. After an ominous and forboding intro piece, they come out swinging on the massive title track and hit you like a runaway battleship with a wide collection of primal feelz. Grinding riffs are coated with Paul Kuhr’s excellent clean and death metal vocals as the intensity builds and Kuhr warns, “This has gone too far.” The way his vocals increase in intensity is gripping, and all the usual melodic tricks Novembers Doom are known for come to the fore. This is really good shit. Another high point comes with “Mercy,” where the band hits gold with an emotionally crushing piece that evokes Woods of Ypres, Pink Floyd, and latter-era Anthema. It will break your fucking heart with its beauty and poignancy. Also quite tasty is album centerpiece “Bleed Static,” which uses its 8-minute runtime to explore a variety of despondent emotions effectively. Elsewhere, “The Dance” sticks out for its very Amorphis-esque airy, melodic guitar work and a chorus that you can easily imagine Tomi Joutsen singing.
Unfortunately, the rest of Major Arcana doesn’t operate at this level, and though most tracks have something worthwhile to offer, they won’t whisk you away in a leafblower maelstrom. “Ravenous” is a basic melodeath tune that should run 3-4 minutes, but gets stretched to 6 for no good reason. The back third of the album is significantly less enthralling than the early tracks, and while the songs work in the context of the album, they aren’t especially captivating individually. At 56-plus minutes, it would have been easy to drop 2 or 3 tracks to deliver a leaner, meaner release, but that isn’t the Novembers Doom way. This is a mood piece kind of listen, though, and if you’re in the right state of mind, it will all drift by without much resistance.
As ever, Paul Kuhr is the epicenter of the band’s sound, and he does his usual first-rate job. His singing voice is so perfect for doom that he should run a clinic on it.1 He sounds so desperately hurt and broken on “Mercy” that you can’t help but want to give him a big hug and tell him everything will be OK. At times, his singing reminds me a lot of the late great Eric Wagner of Trouble, and that’s great company to be in. His death roars are also as good as ever, big, booming, nasty, and venomous. His transitions between extremes are smooth and well-timed, and he knows how to wring a song for the maximum emotional impact. Lawrence Roberts and Vito Marchese wield potent riff hammers that often feel like they belong on a caveman death metal platter. When they do lapse into doom and melancholic sadboi mode, they deliver the goods there too. On cuts like the title track, “Mercy,” and “Bleed Static,” you can feel the pathos dripping from their fretboards. I just wish they spread that quality more evenly across the whole record.
Albums like Major Arcana can end up a frustrating experience because you get a few really amazing songs and the remainder ends up looking pale in comparison, even if nothing is bad. Novembers Doom have struggled with this issue over their career, and both 2019s Nephilim Grove and this one are held back by inconsistent songcraft. This is a good release with really high points, but you’re left feeling it could be so much more. I want MOAR leaf doom, dammit!
Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Prophecy Productions
Websites: novembersdoom1989.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/novembersdoom1989 | instagram.com/novembersdoom
Releases Worldwide: September 19th, 2025#2025 #30 #AmericanMetal #DoomMetal #FieldsOfNephilim #MajorArcana #NovembersDoom #ProphecyProductions #Review #Reviews #Sep25 #WoodsOfYpres
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Novembers Doom – Major Arcana Review
By Steel Druhm
Chicago’s Novembers Doom have charted a unique course for themselves over the last 30 years. Their unnatural pairing of beefy, cargo-beshorted death metal and highly emotional doom originally felt unstable and liable to erupt into chaos at any moment, but over time, they became adept at finding the ideal balance between madman and sadboi. Albums like The Pale Haunt Departure and Hamartia were loaded with ripping riffs and plaintive gloom, and at their best, Novembers Doom can tear at the heartstrings even as they snap your neck. The wild swings from hugely emotional, weepy sadboi melancholy and femur-fracturing death could sometimes feel forced, but more often it just fucking worked. 2019s Nephilim Grove had big moments but felt underbaked with too much filler. It’s been almost six years since, but now we get their 12th album, Major Arcana, and hopefully, a rebound for these Autumnal leaf reapers of despair.
Nothing’s really changed in the way Novembers Doom approach their trade. After an ominous and forboding intro piece, they come out swinging on the massive title track and hit you like a runaway battleship with a wide collection of primal feelz. Grinding riffs are coated with Paul Kuhr’s excellent clean and death metal vocals as the intensity builds and Kuhr warns, “This has gone too far.” The way his vocals increase in intensity is gripping, and all the usual melodic tricks Novembers Doom are known for come to the fore. This is really good shit. Another high point comes with “Mercy,” where the band hits gold with an emotionally crushing piece that evokes Woods of Ypres, Pink Floyd, and latter-era Anthema. It will break your fucking heart with its beauty and poignancy. Also quite tasty is album centerpiece “Bleed Static,” which uses its 8-minute runtime to explore a variety of despondent emotions effectively. Elsewhere, “The Dance” sticks out for its very Amorphis-esque airy, melodic guitar work and a chorus that you can easily imagine Tomi Joutsen singing.
Unfortunately, the rest of Major Arcana doesn’t operate at this level, and though most tracks have something worthwhile to offer, they won’t whisk you away in a leafblower maelstrom. “Ravenous” is a basic melodeath tune that should run 3-4 minutes, but gets stretched to 6 for no good reason. The back third of the album is significantly less enthralling than the early tracks, and while the songs work in the context of the album, they aren’t especially captivating individually. At 56-plus minutes, it would have been easy to drop 2 or 3 tracks to deliver a leaner, meaner release, but that isn’t the Novembers Doom way. This is a mood piece kind of listen, though, and if you’re in the right state of mind, it will all drift by without much resistance.
As ever, Paul Kuhr is the epicenter of the band’s sound, and he does his usual first-rate job. His singing voice is so perfect for doom that he should run a clinic on it.1 He sounds so desperately hurt and broken on “Mercy” that you can’t help but want to give him a big hug and tell him everything will be OK. At times, his singing reminds me a lot of the late great Eric Wagner of Trouble, and that’s great company to be in. His death roars are also as good as ever, big, booming, nasty, and venomous. His transitions between extremes are smooth and well-timed, and he knows how to wring a song for the maximum emotional impact. Lawrence Roberts and Vito Marchese wield potent riff hammers that often feel like they belong on a caveman death metal platter. When they do lapse into doom and melancholic sadboi mode, they deliver the goods there too. On cuts like the title track, “Mercy,” and “Bleed Static,” you can feel the pathos dripping from their fretboards. I just wish they spread that quality more evenly across the whole record.
Albums like Major Arcana can end up a frustrating experience because you get a few really amazing songs and the remainder ends up looking pale in comparison, even if nothing is bad. Novembers Doom have struggled with this issue over their career, and both 2019s Nephilim Grove and this one are held back by inconsistent songcraft. This is a good release with really high points, but you’re left feeling it could be so much more. I want MOAR leaf doom, dammit!
Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Prophecy Productions
Websites: novembersdoom1989.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/novembersdoom1989 | instagram.com/novembersdoom
Releases Worldwide: September 19th, 2025#2025 #30 #AmericanMetal #DoomMetal #FieldsOfNephilim #MajorArcana #NovembersDoom #ProphecyProductions #Review #Reviews #Sep25 #WoodsOfYpres
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Novembers Doom – Major Arcana Review
By Steel Druhm
Chicago’s Novembers Doom have charted a unique course for themselves over the last 30 years. Their unnatural pairing of beefy, cargo-beshorted death metal and highly emotional doom originally felt unstable and liable to erupt into chaos at any moment, but over time, they became adept at finding the ideal balance between madman and sadboi. Albums like The Pale Haunt Departure and Hamartia were loaded with ripping riffs and plaintive gloom, and at their best, Novembers Doom can tear at the heartstrings even as they snap your neck. The wild swings from hugely emotional, weepy sadboi melancholy and femur-fracturing death could sometimes feel forced, but more often it just fucking worked. 2019s Nephilim Grove had big moments but felt underbaked with too much filler. It’s been almost six years since, but now we get their 12th album, Major Arcana, and hopefully, a rebound for these Autumnal leaf reapers of despair.
Nothing’s really changed in the way Novembers Doom approach their trade. After an ominous and forboding intro piece, they come out swinging on the massive title track and hit you like a runaway battleship with a wide collection of primal feelz. Grinding riffs are coated with Paul Kuhr’s excellent clean and death metal vocals as the intensity builds and Kuhr warns, “This has gone too far.” The way his vocals increase in intensity is gripping, and all the usual melodic tricks Novembers Doom are known for come to the fore. This is really good shit. Another high point comes with “Mercy,” where the band hits gold with an emotionally crushing piece that evokes Woods of Ypres, Pink Floyd, and latter-era Anthema. It will break your fucking heart with its beauty and poignancy. Also quite tasty is album centerpiece “Bleed Static,” which uses its 8-minute runtime to explore a variety of despondent emotions effectively. Elsewhere, “The Dance” sticks out for its very Amorphis-esque airy, melodic guitar work and a chorus that you can easily imagine Tomi Joutsen singing.
Unfortunately, the rest of Major Arcana doesn’t operate at this level, and though most tracks have something worthwhile to offer, they won’t whisk you away in a leafblower maelstrom. “Ravenous” is a basic melodeath tune that should run 3-4 minutes, but gets stretched to 6 for no good reason. The back third of the album is significantly less enthralling than the early tracks, and while the songs work in the context of the album, they aren’t especially captivating individually. At 56-plus minutes, it would have been easy to drop 2 or 3 tracks to deliver a leaner, meaner release, but that isn’t the Novembers Doom way. This is a mood piece kind of listen, though, and if you’re in the right state of mind, it will all drift by without much resistance.
As ever, Paul Kuhr is the epicenter of the band’s sound, and he does his usual first-rate job. His singing voice is so perfect for doom that he should run a clinic on it.1 He sounds so desperately hurt and broken on “Mercy” that you can’t help but want to give him a big hug and tell him everything will be OK. At times, his singing reminds me a lot of the late great Eric Wagner of Trouble, and that’s great company to be in. His death roars are also as good as ever, big, booming, nasty, and venomous. His transitions between extremes are smooth and well-timed, and he knows how to wring a song for the maximum emotional impact. Lawrence Roberts and Vito Marchese wield potent riff hammers that often feel like they belong on a caveman death metal platter. When they do lapse into doom and melancholic sadboi mode, they deliver the goods there too. On cuts like the title track, “Mercy,” and “Bleed Static,” you can feel the pathos dripping from their fretboards. I just wish they spread that quality more evenly across the whole record.
Albums like Major Arcana can end up a frustrating experience because you get a few really amazing songs and the remainder ends up looking pale in comparison, even if nothing is bad. Novembers Doom have struggled with this issue over their career, and both 2019s Nephilim Grove and this one are held back by inconsistent songcraft. This is a good release with really high points, but you’re left feeling it could be so much more. I want MOAR leaf doom, dammit!
Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Prophecy Productions
Websites: novembersdoom1989.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/novembersdoom1989 | instagram.com/novembersdoom
Releases Worldwide: September 19th, 2025#2025 #30 #AmericanMetal #DoomMetal #FieldsOfNephilim #MajorArcana #NovembersDoom #ProphecyProductions #Review #Reviews #Sep25 #WoodsOfYpres
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‘Less is More’ is all about the beauty of simplicity in abstract minimalism art. It may look simple and easy to make, but that is not the case at all. It takes a lot of skill, creativity and a great deal of imagination to make.
My recent blog about abstract minimalism art: https://www.ezeeart.com/less-is-more-the-beauty-of-simplicity-in-abstract-minimalism-art/
#abstractart #abstract #AYearForArt #MastoArt #art #artist #mastodon #painting #ArtCollector #fediart #ArtMatters #MastoArtist #mastoartists #artwork #supportart #supportartists #follow #artnetwork #wallart #HomeDecor #InteriorDesign #artbooster #Joinin #SpringArtShare #writing #blog #blogging #writer #WritingCommunity
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Stillness and Japanese Aesthetics: What Norm Architects’ Book Reveals About the Future of Design
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Quiet is having a moment. Not the quiet of minimalism reduced to a trend board, but a more earned, more philosophical kind — the kind that asks you to slow down and actually look. Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design, published by gestalten in October 2024, arrives at exactly the right time. The book is Norm Architects’ attempt to put language, image, and structure around something most designers feel but rarely articulate: that Japanese spatial thinking changes the way you see everything else afterward.
Norm Architects — the Copenhagen-based studio known for their restrained, material-led approach to interiors, architecture, and product design — spent over a decade traveling to Japan, collaborating with Japanese craftspeople, and sitting with the country’s design philosophy before committing it to print. The result is 304 pages that function simultaneously as a travel memoir, an aesthetic manifesto, and a serious design document. Furthermore, it’s one of the most visually considered design books published in 2024.
The book is available on AmazonThis isn’t a coffee table book that flatters itself with pretty photographs. It’s a book with a thesis. And the thesis matters.
Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design. This book by Norm Architects was published by gestalten. The book is available on AmazonWhat Does Japanese Aesthetics Actually Mean for Contemporary Architecture?
The phrase “Japanese aesthetics” gets used carelessly. It’s become a shorthand for neutral palettes, natural materials, and open floor plans — the visual vocabulary of a thousand boutique hotels. But the tradition Norm Architects engages with in Stillness runs much deeper than surface style.
Japanese spatial philosophy is rooted in concepts like ma (negative space as active presence), wabi-sabi (the beauty of impermanence and imperfection), and mono no aware (a bittersweet sensitivity to transience). These aren’t decorative ideas. They’re structural ones — ways of organizing perception, time, and material experience. Consequently, they reshape how you design a threshold, choose a texture, or decide where light should fall.
Norm Architects understood this early. Their Scandinavian sensibility — already oriented toward craft, restraint, and natural material honesty — gave them a framework for genuine dialogue rather than appropriation. The book makes this cross-cultural conversation legible. It shows how two distinct design traditions, separated by geography and history, arrive at strikingly similar conclusions about what space should feel like and why stillness in design is not emptiness, but precision.
The Scandinavian-Japanese Design Continuum
One of the book’s most compelling arguments is what I’d call the Nordic-Zen Continuum — the observation that Scandinavian and Japanese design share a foundational commitment to functional beauty, material truth, and spatial modesty. Both traditions resist ornament for its own sake. Furthermore, both prioritize the relationship between inside and outside, and both treat craft as a form of philosophy.
This isn’t a coincidence. Both cultures developed design traditions in response to demanding natural environments. Darkness and cold in Scandinavia. Islands, seismic instability, and resource scarcity in Japan. When nature is a constraint, design responds with economy and depth rather than excess. Therefore, the visual affinities between a Danish farmhouse and a Japanese machiya townhouse are structural, not stylistic.
Stillness makes this argument through juxtaposition — placing images from Japan alongside Norm Architects’ built work in Denmark and Sweden. The comparison is generous and precise. You see the same thinking operating across different climates, clients, and construction traditions.
Inside the Book: Structure, Content, and Editorial Vision
At 304 pages, Stillness is a substantial document. It’s also physically imposing — nearly 13 inches tall and weighing close to five pounds. gestalten produced it to a standard that honors the material the book discusses. The paper, the binding, the image reproduction: all of it communicates seriousness.
The book organizes itself around dispatches — richly illustrated accounts of visits to Japanese landscapes, architecture, and cultural sites. These aren’t tourist itineraries. They’re closer to phenomenological field notes: observations about how a specific space affects the body, the eye, and the mind. Additionally, commentary from expert collaborators in both Japan and Scandinavia gives the book intellectual ballast beyond personal observation.
Key Projects Featured in Stillness
The book anchors its arguments in specific built work. Two projects appear as primary case studies for how Japanese aesthetics inform contemporary Scandinavian practice:
Äng Restaurant, Sweden — A dining environment where materiality and restraint create a specific atmospheric quality. The space uses natural materials, careful proportioning, and controlled light in ways that directly reflect the ma principle — treating emptiness as a design element rather than an absence of design.
Heatherhill Beach House, Denmark — A coastal residence that negotiates the relationship between interior shelter and exterior landscape with the same sensitivity found in traditional Japanese architecture. The project demonstrates what Norm calls spatial humility: the idea that a building should defer to its site rather than dominate it.
Both projects demonstrate what I’d define as Calibrated Absence — a design principle in which every element present in a space is justified not just by its function, but by the quality of attention it creates around itself.
The Core Frameworks: How Stillness Structures Its Argument
Good design books don’t just document work. They give readers tools for thinking. Stillness does this through several interlocking ideas worth naming precisely.
1. The Stillness Gradient
Not all quiet is the same. Stillness implicitly identifies what I’d call a Stillness Gradient — a spectrum running from decorative simplicity (spaces that look minimal) through functional restraint (spaces that eliminate unnecessary elements) to perceptual depth (spaces where less creates more conscious experience). Japanese architecture — at its best — operates at the perceptual depth end of this gradient. Norm Architects’ work consistently aims there too.
The distinction matters enormously for contemporary design practice. Much of what passes for minimalism today is decorative simplicity — a white wall and a concrete floor that still feels busy because nothing has been considered at the perceptual level. True stillness, as the book argues, requires active editorial discipline at every scale of the design process.
2. Material Testimony
Another framework the book develops — implicitly, through its images and commentary — is what I’d call Material Testimony: the idea that materials should tell the truth about their own nature, their age, and their place of origin. Japanese craft traditions, particularly those around wood, stone, lacquer, and ceramics, operate on this principle rigorously.
Norm Architects applies the same logic to their Scandinavian projects. The Äng Restaurant, for instance, uses materials that age visibly and honestly. Nothing pretends to be something else. Accordingly, the space develops a patina of authenticity that synthetic or highly processed materials cannot achieve.
3. The Threshold as Philosophical Device
Both Japanese and Scandinavian architecture treat thresholds — doors, engawa corridors, transitional zones between inside and out — as philosophically loaded moments. Stillness returns to this idea repeatedly. The threshold is where the building makes its first argument about what matters: how you arrive, how your body adjusts, how your perception shifts.
In Japanese architecture, the threshold is often drawn out, extended, and made generous. You’re not moved through space; you’re introduced to it. This approach to arrival profoundly influenced Norm Architects’ thinking about how their buildings receive the people who use them.
Why This Book Lands Differently Than Other Japanese Design Books
There’s no shortage of books about Japanese design aesthetics. So what makes Stillness distinct?
First, the authorial position. Norm Architects are not journalists or academics observing Japanese design from the outside. They’re practitioners who have spent a decade in genuine creative dialogue with Japanese makers, architects, and cultural figures. The book carries the authority of lived engagement, not borrowed vocabulary.
Second, the comparative structure. By juxtaposing Japanese source material with their own built work, Norm Architects make the book’s argument visible rather than merely stated. You see the influence operating in real projects, at real scale, with real consequences. This is rare and valuable.
Third, the timing. We’re in a moment when the design conversation has become saturated with digital aesthetics, AI-generated imagery, and trend-cycle acceleration. A book that argues for slowness, depth, and material honesty feels genuinely countercultural right now. Moreover, it makes an implicit argument that resonates beyond design: that quality of attention is itself a form of design.
Japanese Design Principles in a Post-Digital World
Here’s a forward-looking prediction worth stating directly: the principles Stillness documents will become increasingly central to design practice over the next decade — not because Japanese aesthetics are fashionable, but because they address a real problem.
The problem is this: digital environments have trained human perception toward constant stimulation, rapid context-switching, and surface-level engagement. Physical spaces that counteract this — that offer genuine perceptual depth, material presence, and sensory calm — will be experienced as profound relief. Designers who understand how to create this quality will be in significant demand.
The frameworks in Stillness — calibrated absence, material testimony, the extended threshold — are not historical curiosities. They’re practical instruments for designing the kind of spaces people will desperately need.
Who Should Read Stillness?
The obvious answer is architects, interior designers, and design students. But the book speaks usefully to a wider audience. Brand designers interested in spatial identity will find the arguments about material testimony directly applicable to retail and hospitality environments. Photographers will find the book’s visual intelligence instructive. Anyone who cares seriously about the relationship between space and human experience — which is to say, anyone who’s ever felt a room before they thought about it — will find something essential here.
It’s also genuinely one of the most beautiful books published in 2024. The image editing, the sequencing, the relationship between text and photograph: all of it reflects the aesthetic principles the book discusses. This kind of formal coherence is rarer than it should be.
Stillness as a Design Argument for Slowness
What I find most compelling about Stillness is its willingness to be unfashionable. In an era when design publishing often chases novelty, Norm Architects built a book around ideas that are centuries old — and made them feel urgently contemporary. That’s a difficult thing to do. It requires genuine conviction about what design is actually for.
The book’s central argument — that stillness is not absence but a quality of presence, and that achieving it requires discipline, knowledge, and genuine cross-cultural humility — feels important. Not just for architecture. For design thinking broadly. And perhaps for how we organize our lives.
The book is available on AmazonJapanese aesthetics in architecture have always been about more than visual style. They’re about how space shapes consciousness. Stillness makes that argument with rigor, beauty, and earned authority. It belongs on the shelf of anyone who takes space seriously.
Frequently Asked Questions About Stillness by Norm Architects
What is Stillness by Norm Architects about?
Stillness: An Exploration of Japanese Aesthetics in Architecture and Design is a 304-page book published by gestalten in October 2024. It documents Norm Architects’ decade-long engagement with Japanese design culture, exploring how Japanese spatial philosophy — concepts like ma, wabi-sabi, and material honesty — has shaped their contemporary Scandinavian practice. The book combines travel dispatches, architectural photography, expert commentary, and project documentation into a unified design manifesto.
Who are Norm Architects?
Norm Architects is a Copenhagen-based design studio working across architecture, interiors, and product design. They are known for a rigorously restrained aesthetic that emphasizes craft, natural materials, and spatial sensitivity. Their work includes residential architecture, hospitality interiors, and product collaborations across Scandinavia and internationally.
Who published Stillness and when?
gestalten published Stillness on October 8, 2024. It’s a Berlin-based publisher specializing in high-quality design, architecture, and culture books. The book runs to 304 pages with an ISBN of 978-3967041583.
What Japanese design principles does the book explore?
The book engages with several core Japanese aesthetic concepts: ma (the active use of negative space), wabi-sabi (beauty found in impermanence and imperfection), mono no aware (sensitivity to transience), and the philosophical role of craft and material honesty in spatial design. It also explores how these principles manifest in Japanese landscapes, traditional architecture, and contemporary cultural spaces.
Which Norm Architects projects are featured in Stillness?
The book features two primary built projects as case studies: the Äng Restaurant in Sweden and the Heatherhill Beach House in Denmark. Both projects demonstrate how Japanese spatial thinking — particularly around material selection, threshold design, and calibrated restraint — operates within a contemporary Scandinavian architectural practice.
Is Stillness suitable for non-architects?
Yes. While the book engages seriously with architectural thinking, its accessible structure and richly illustrated format make it valuable for anyone interested in design, photography, Japanese culture, or the relationship between space and human experience. Brand designers, interior designers, photographers, and design enthusiasts will all find the book compelling.
How does Japanese aesthetics influence Scandinavian design?
Both traditions share foundational commitments to functional beauty, material integrity, and spatial modesty. Both developed in response to demanding natural environments. The book argues — and demonstrates through comparative imagery — that these shared values create a genuine design continuum between the two cultures, rather than a one-directional influence relationship.
What makes Stillness different from other Japanese design books?
Stillness distinguishes itself through three things: the authorial credibility of a studio with a decade of genuine creative engagement with Japan; its comparative structure, juxtaposing Japanese source material with completed built work; and its forward-looking design argument about why Japanese aesthetic principles matter urgently for contemporary practice.
Discover more of our book reviews here at WE AND THE COLOR.
#architecture #book #design #Gestalten #NormArchitects #StillnessAndJapaneseAesthetics -
I walked through #Florence once and the whole city felt like an argument I couldn't counter.
It's built from sustainable materials. It's still standing after 2,000 years. And it's one of the most beautiful places on earth. Nobody sacrificed comfort or beauty to build it. They just built with what the land could support and what time could hold.
Tom Chi — Google X founding member, inventor of 77 patents, and now a venture capitalist betting on a regenerative economy — had the same experience. It became the seed of his new book, #Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future.
We spent an hour talking about what that means in practice. A few things that stayed with me: 90% of the cost structure of physical businesses already aligns economic and ecological goals. Less material used = lower costs + less extraction. Less energy = lower processing costs + fewer emissions. The economy and the planet are already pointing the same direction. The 5% that isn't aligned is what the lobbyists fight about — which is why that's all we ever hear.
And then the phrase I can't shake: cognitive despoiling. We spent the 20th century strip mining the physical resources of the planet. Tom thinks we're spending the 21st century strip mining the cognitive resources of humanity — burning through attention, trust, and clear thinking the same way we burned through forests and rivers. The damage is invisible. But it compounds.
This is not a doom-and-gloom conversation. It's a design conversation. And the design problem, Tom argues, is solvable.
Episode is live. marcociappelli.com
— Marco
#AnAnalogBrainInADigitalAge #MarcoCiappelli #Podcast #ClimateCapital #TomChi #RegenerativeEconomy #ClimateTech #GoogleX #Sustainability #FourCs #DeepTech #NewBook
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Book Review: Plant Magick: The Library of Esoterica by Taschen
Plant Magick is a collectors item of sublime and exquisite beauty. This is a treasury of art and plant history for lovers of nature, art history, folklore, witchcraft and magic. Psychonauts, spiritual seekers and shamanic explorers will find a lyrical home here as well.
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Genre: Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Spirituality, Esoterica
Publisher: Taschen
Review in one word: Esoteric
Divided into thoughtful sections and chapters, Plant Magick features visionary and universal wisdom from a broad range of scholars, witches, sorcerers and mystics about different aspects of plant magick, lore and practice.
There’s a diverse and broad exploration of magical practices using plants and fungi and how this is reflected in art across all ages and cultures. This is an ambitious ask and Taschen have delivered 100% with this stunning book.
If you or someone you know is a gardener, plant enthusiast, hedge witch or practising pagan or you simply revere and respect nature and plants – then this book will embolden and deepen your love and respect for these other-than-human beings.
The importance of plants as a part of religious and pagan rites, ritual, medicinal and transcendental spiritual purposes is explored through eye-popping and mind-bending art.
Each artwork is tactfully placed to add colour and depth to the informative essays that make up each chapter. The essays rather than being filler or less important than the artworks are a complement to them. The words are not wasted or superfluous but are instead brimming with lush and vivid detail about artists, movements and cultural phenomena throughout the ages. These allow you to understand the artworks in a much more profound way.
The sheer range of historical context explored in this book is exciting. Even if you casually flip through it, I guarantee that the hours will melt away and you will still be sitting on your sofa eyes glued to the pages, carefully turning them savouring every detail.
Bound in high quality hardcover and featuring gold inlay, Plant Magick is a part of a larger four part series by Taschen called the Library of Esoterica. Other books that might tickle your fancy in the series include Tarot, Astrology and Witchcraft. Personally, the only other one I simply had to own was Witchcraft and the review for this one is coming up on Content Catnip very soon.
Would I recommend this book to you? If you love nature, art history, folklore, paganism…then this book is a must for your collection – 5 stars!
Do you have this book or do you plan on getting it? let me know below!
Content Catnip
Follow me on Mastodon Watch my videos Donate to my Ko Fi #art #BookReview #bookTag #BookReview #books #ContentCatnip #esoterica #folklore #History #magic #nature #nonFiction #Philosophy #plant #storytelling #Taschen #witchcraft -
Really interesting post - and quite a rare one! I'm pleased to find it!
Age is a social construction. Discussions or references (they are endless and ever present) are far less often about how many years a person has been alive. What it's nearly all about is how we are expected to be - what is right/wrong at a certain age and it's mostly judgemental or putting others done or ourselves down.
It's nearly all negative... It's that way for people in their later teens and 20s trying to be taken seriously and being judged (and judging) about their appearance against absurd standards based on a model of 'beauty' that is shown continually but, in reality, is rare. It applies to people in our 40s to 60s being classed as having mid-life crises, to older people being seen as old or all right wing.
I'm sick of younger people feeling like they need to say they are older to gain respect and older people feeling pressure to look younger so as not to be treated as ugly or over the hill. There's far more to it than that obviously.
It's all bullshit.
I'm doing a photo project about it https://starshumansnests.com/ages/
I've set out some of these views and, sort of to illustrate them, I'm gradually adding photo sets of participants and their accounts of how/who they are right now. I'm hoping to get representatives of every year of life from 20 to 120.
It's revealing as I've asked people also to show how they present themselves and to show what their naked bodies happen to look like - there's far too few images of what most people actually look like. But it's not just the photos, it's their words too.
Thanks for your post.
#Age #Ageism #BodyPositive #AgePositive #FuckThePatriarchy #Equality #SocialConstruction #SocialConstructionOfAge #NakedProtest #SocialJustice
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ILIA Super Serum Skin Tint offers lightweight, buildable coverage. Pores are less visible. Skintone is more even. It leaves skin with a healthy, dewy appearance.
ILIA Skin Rewind Complexion Stick is lightweight, buildable & has multiple uses. It has a beautiful, natural finish. It leaves skin with a smooth blurred effect. Product feels weightless.
*Received #complimentary from @iliabeauty & @pinchme
#happypincher #ilia #pinchme #beauty #cosmetics #makeup #skincare #selfcare #gifted
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Not Quite Kafkaesque – All Atmosphere, No Gravity, All Symbol, No Substance: On Reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
March 25, 2026There is a peculiar kind of disappointment that arrives not with anger, but with a shrug. That was my experience reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, coming right after Norwegian Wood, which, for all its melancholy excesses, at least held together as a recognizably human story. Here, the seams are not just visible. They are the point. Or perhaps they are meant to dissolve altogether. I am not convinced they do.
The novel disperses itself almost immediately into two narrative streams. One follows Kafka Tamura, fifteen, self-exiled, self-mythologizing, carrying an Oedipal prophecy like a private curse. The other trails Nakata, an old man whose cognitive simplicity masks something like metaphysical permeability. Their paths gesture toward convergence, though not in any way that satisfies the ordinary appetite for causality. This is not negligence. It is design. Still, design does not always translate to engagement. I kept reading, yes. But often out of habit, or perhaps out of a faint hope that coherence would eventually coalesce from the fragments. It rarely did.
Kafka himself, for a protagonist, feels curiously sealed. He speaks with an interiority that seems pre-assembled, as though he has read too many books about alienated boys and decided to become one. That may well be the point. A constructed self, performing its own narrative. Yet even that awareness did not make him more interesting to me. He remains distant, almost airless, even in moments that should carry emotional charge. His flight from home is framed as a coming-of-age, but it is less a transformation than a prolonged suspension. Things happen around him, through him, sometimes to him, but seldom because of him in any psychologically persuasive way.
Nakata, on the other hand, is meant to charm, or at least to disarm. His conversations with cats should have delighted me. I love cats. I wanted to be delighted. Instead, those passages felt oddly inert, as though the whimsy were being insisted upon rather than discovered. And then there is that scene. The grotesque violence inflicted on the cats. It arrives with such lurid intensity that it fractures whatever fragile enchantment the novel had been attempting to build. I did not find it profound. I found it unbearable. Not in a way that deepens the work, but in a way that made me recoil from it. I nearly closed the book. I considered, briefly, not returning to it at all.
And yet I did return. Because Murakami can write. This is the maddening part. The prose is smooth, almost frictionless. Sentences carry you forward with a quiet insistence. Even when the content fails to grip, the texture of the writing persuades you to continue. There is a kind of narrative hypnosis at work. You keep turning the pages, not out of urgency, but out of rhythm. It is like listening to a piece of music that does not move you emotionally, yet is structured so elegantly that you cannot quite stop listening.
Speaking of music, the references scattered throughout the novel were among the few things that genuinely engaged me. Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven. These are not mere ornaments. They function as tonal anchors, moments where the novel briefly aligns with something outside itself, something I could latch onto. There is a certain pleasure in recognizing these names, in recalling the music, in letting it echo against the text. Perhaps that says more about me than about the book. An admission, maybe, that I was searching for footholds wherever I could find them.
Murakami’s narrative logic operates less like a chain and more like a constellation. Events do not follow one another so much as they resonate across distance. A raining of fish, a talking cat, a forest that feels less like a place than a threshold. These are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be accepted. Or, more precisely, they are meant to be lived through as one would live through a dream. The problem, for me, is that dreams are compelling when they carry an emotional truth that persists even after the details dissolve. Here, the details linger, but the emotional truth remains elusive.
Fatalism saturates the novel. Kafka’s prophecy, delivered by his father, hangs over everything with the weight of inevitability. You will kill your father. You will sleep with your mother. You will sleep with your sister. It is an inheritance of doom, a script that Kafka both resists and fulfills. Or believes he fulfills. The ambiguity is deliberate. Did he commit these acts, or did he merely dream them, imagine them, internalize them to the point where the distinction no longer matters? Murakami seems less interested in the factual answer than in the psychological condition of believing oneself bound by fate.
There is also the matter of the title, which invokes Franz Kafka and, with it, a very particular expectation. “Kafkaesque” is not merely a synonym for strange or surreal. It suggests a precise texture of experience: the claustrophobia of opaque systems, the slow suffocation of the individual under incomprehensible authority, a logic that is internally consistent yet fundamentally hostile to human understanding. It is dread sharpened by bureaucracy, anxiety given form through labyrinthine rules that cannot be mastered, only endured. Murakami’s novel, for all its dreamlike qualities, does not quite inhabit that space. Its surrealism is softer, more ambient, less punitive. The world of Kafka on the Shore does not trap its characters in the same merciless machinery; it lets them drift. Even its violence and its omens feel diffused, unmoored from the kind of existential pressure that makes something truly Kafkaesque. The title gestures toward that lineage, but the novel itself never fully delivers on it.
There is something almost Greek about it. Not in structure, but in sensibility. The idea that one cannot escape what has been foretold, that every attempt at avoidance becomes a step toward realization. Yet unlike Greek tragedy, where the machinery of fate is stark and inexorable, here it is diffuse, almost vaporous. Omens appear, but they do not compel. They suggest. They whisper. The characters move as though guided by an unseen current, yet they also drift, hesitate, double back. Fate, in this novel, is not a straight line. It is a fog.
The sexual elements complicate this further. They are not incidental. They are central. Kafka’s encounters with Miss Saeki, with Sakura, are charged not just with desire but with the possibility, or the fear, of incestuous fulfillment. Miss Saeki, in particular, exists in a kind of temporal dislocation. She is both the woman she is and the girl she once was. Kafka’s attraction to her is entangled with memory, with projection, with the spectral presence of a past he never lived. Their relationship resists easy categorization. It is tender, in moments. It is also deeply unsettling.
The age difference cannot be ignored. A fifteen-year-old boy and an older woman. There is a cultural and literary context in which such dynamics are often treated with a certain permissiveness, especially when filtered through a male gaze. But reverse the genders. Imagine Miss Saeki as the minor, Kafka as the adult. The reception would be entirely different. The discomfort would not be aesthetic. It would be immediate, moral, perhaps even outraged. This asymmetry reveals something about how we process narratives of desire, about whose vulnerability is foregrounded and whose is obscured.
Murakami does not sensationalize these scenes. That is to his credit. They are written with a kind of restraint, a quietness that avoids cheapness. But restraint does not neutralize implication. If anything, it intensifies it. The lack of explicit judgment leaves you alone with the material, forced to navigate it without guidance. I did not find clarity there. Only a lingering unease.
And perhaps that is the point. Not clarity, but unease. Not resolution, but suspension. The novel refuses to settle into a single mode. It is part coming-of-age, part metaphysical inquiry, part surrealist exercise. It gestures toward meaning without ever quite delivering it. For some readers, this is precisely its strength. The openness, the interpretive freedom, the invitation to construct one’s own coherence. For me, it felt less like freedom and more like absence. An emptiness where something should have been.
Still, I cannot dismiss it outright. There are passages of real beauty here. Moments where the language, the imagery, the rhythm align in a way that feels almost luminous. A sentence will catch you off guard. A description will linger. Murakami knows how to create atmosphere, how to sustain a mood, how to keep you inside a particular emotional register even when the narrative itself feels diffuse.
So I am left in a peculiar position. Admiring the craft, resisting the content. Turning the pages, yet rarely feeling compelled by what I find on them. It is one of those books where you acknowledge the author’s control, his precision, his ability to orchestrate a complex structure, and yet you remain unmoved by the experience as a whole. A kind of aesthetic respect, divorced from genuine engagement.
Maybe that is enough for some. It was not quite enough for me.
And yet, I read it to the end.
That, perhaps, is its own kind of testament.
#bibliophilia #bookReview #books #fiction #HarukiMurakami #JapaneseLiterature #KafkaOnTheShore #literature #novels #reading -
Not Quite Kafkaesque – All Atmosphere, No Gravity, All Symbol, No Substance: On Reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
March 25, 2026When Surrealism Forgets the Human Center
There is a peculiar kind of disappointment that arrives not with anger, but with a shrug. That was my experience reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, coming right after Norwegian Wood, which, for all its melancholy excesses, at least held together as a recognizably human story. Here, the seams are not just visible. They are the point. Or perhaps they are meant to dissolve altogether. I am not convinced they do.
The novel disperses itself almost immediately into two narrative streams. One follows Kafka Tamura, fifteen, self-exiled, self-mythologizing, carrying an Oedipal prophecy like a private curse. The other trails Nakata, an old man whose cognitive simplicity masks something like metaphysical permeability. Their paths gesture toward convergence, though not in any way that satisfies the ordinary appetite for causality. This is not negligence. It is design. Still, design does not always translate to engagement. I kept reading, yes. But often out of habit, or perhaps out of a faint hope that coherence would eventually coalesce from the fragments. It rarely did.
Kafka himself, for a protagonist, feels curiously sealed. He speaks with an interiority that seems pre-assembled, as though he has read too many books about alienated boys and decided to become one. That may well be the point. A constructed self, performing its own narrative. Yet even that awareness did not make him more interesting to me. He remains distant, almost airless, even in moments that should carry emotional charge. His flight from home is framed as a coming-of-age, but it is less a transformation than a prolonged suspension. Things happen around him, through him, sometimes to him, but seldom because of him in any psychologically persuasive way.
Nakata, on the other hand, is meant to charm, or at least to disarm. His conversations with cats should have delighted me. I love cats. I wanted to be delighted. Instead, those passages felt oddly inert, as though the whimsy were being insisted upon rather than discovered. And then there is that scene. The grotesque violence inflicted on the cats. It arrives with such lurid intensity that it fractures whatever fragile enchantment the novel had been attempting to build. I did not find it profound. I found it unbearable. Not in a way that deepens the work, but in a way that made me recoil from it. I nearly closed the book. I considered, briefly, not returning to it at all.
And yet I did return. Because Murakami can write. This is the maddening part. The prose is smooth, almost frictionless. Sentences carry you forward with a quiet insistence. Even when the content fails to grip, the texture of the writing persuades you to continue. There is a kind of narrative hypnosis at work. You keep turning the pages, not out of urgency, but out of rhythm. It is like listening to a piece of music that does not move you emotionally, yet is structured so elegantly that you cannot quite stop listening.
Speaking of music, the references scattered throughout the novel were among the few things that genuinely engaged me. Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven. These are not mere ornaments. They function as tonal anchors, moments where the novel briefly aligns with something outside itself, something I could latch onto. There is a certain pleasure in recognizing these names, in recalling the music, in letting it echo against the text. Perhaps that says more about me than about the book. An admission, maybe, that I was searching for footholds wherever I could find them.
Murakami’s narrative logic operates less like a chain and more like a constellation. Events do not follow one another so much as they resonate across distance. A raining of fish, a talking cat, a forest that feels less like a place than a threshold. These are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be accepted. Or, more precisely, they are meant to be lived through as one would live through a dream. The problem, for me, is that dreams are compelling when they carry an emotional truth that persists even after the details dissolve. Here, the details linger, but the emotional truth remains elusive.
Fatalism saturates the novel. Kafka’s prophecy, delivered by his father, hangs over everything with the weight of inevitability. You will kill your father. You will sleep with your mother. You will sleep with your sister. It is an inheritance of doom, a script that Kafka both resists and fulfills. Or believes he fulfills. The ambiguity is deliberate. Did he commit these acts, or did he merely dream them, imagine them, internalize them to the point where the distinction no longer matters? Murakami seems less interested in the factual answer than in the psychological condition of believing oneself bound by fate.
There is also the matter of the title, which invokes Franz Kafka and, with it, a very particular expectation. “Kafkaesque” is not merely a synonym for strange or surreal. It suggests a precise texture of experience: the claustrophobia of opaque systems, the slow suffocation of the individual under incomprehensible authority, a logic that is internally consistent yet fundamentally hostile to human understanding. It is dread sharpened by bureaucracy, anxiety given form through labyrinthine rules that cannot be mastered, only endured. Murakami’s novel, for all its dreamlike qualities, does not quite inhabit that space. Its surrealism is softer, more ambient, less punitive. The world of Kafka on the Shore does not trap its characters in the same merciless machinery; it lets them drift. Even its violence and its omens feel diffused, unmoored from the kind of existential pressure that makes something truly Kafkaesque. The title gestures toward that lineage, but the novel itself never fully delivers on it.
There is something almost Greek about it. Not in structure, but in sensibility. The idea that one cannot escape what has been foretold, that every attempt at avoidance becomes a step toward realization. Yet unlike Greek tragedy, where the machinery of fate is stark and inexorable, here it is diffuse, almost vaporous. Omens appear, but they do not compel. They suggest. They whisper. The characters move as though guided by an unseen current, yet they also drift, hesitate, double back. Fate, in this novel, is not a straight line. It is a fog.
The sexual elements complicate this further. They are not incidental. They are central. Kafka’s encounters with Miss Saeki, with Sakura, are charged not just with desire but with the possibility, or the fear, of incestuous fulfillment. Miss Saeki, in particular, exists in a kind of temporal dislocation. She is both the woman she is and the girl she once was. Kafka’s attraction to her is entangled with memory, with projection, with the spectral presence of a past he never lived. Their relationship resists easy categorization. It is tender, in moments. It is also deeply unsettling.
The age difference cannot be ignored. A fifteen-year-old boy and an older woman. There is a cultural and literary context in which such dynamics are often treated with a certain permissiveness, especially when filtered through a male gaze. But reverse the genders. Imagine Miss Saeki as the minor, Kafka as the adult. The reception would be entirely different. The discomfort would not be aesthetic. It would be immediate, moral, perhaps even outraged. This asymmetry reveals something about how we process narratives of desire, about whose vulnerability is foregrounded and whose is obscured.
Murakami does not sensationalize these scenes. That is to his credit. They are written with a kind of restraint, a quietness that avoids cheapness. But restraint does not neutralize implication. If anything, it intensifies it. The lack of explicit judgment leaves you alone with the material, forced to navigate it without guidance. I did not find clarity there. Only a lingering unease.
And perhaps that is the point. Not clarity, but unease. Not resolution, but suspension. The novel refuses to settle into a single mode. It is part coming-of-age, part metaphysical inquiry, part surrealist exercise. It gestures toward meaning without ever quite delivering it. For some readers, this is precisely its strength. The openness, the interpretive freedom, the invitation to construct one’s own coherence. For me, it felt less like freedom and more like absence. An emptiness where something should have been.
Still, I cannot dismiss it outright. There are passages of real beauty here. Moments where the language, the imagery, the rhythm align in a way that feels almost luminous. A sentence will catch you off guard. A description will linger. Murakami knows how to create atmosphere, how to sustain a mood, how to keep you inside a particular emotional register even when the narrative itself feels diffuse.
So I am left in a peculiar position. Admiring the craft, resisting the content. Turning the pages, yet rarely feeling compelled by what I find on them. It is one of those books where you acknowledge the author’s control, his precision, his ability to orchestrate a complex structure, and yet you remain unmoved by the experience as a whole. A kind of aesthetic respect, divorced from genuine engagement.
Maybe that is enough for some. It was not quite enough for me.
And yet, I read it to the end.
That, perhaps, is its own kind of testament.
#bibliophilia #bookReview #books #fiction #HarukiMurakami #JapaneseLiterature #KafkaOnTheShore #literature #novels #reading -
Not Quite Kafkaesque – All Atmosphere, No Gravity, All Symbol, No Substance: On Reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
March 25, 2026When Surrealism Forgets the Human Center
There is a peculiar kind of disappointment that arrives not with anger, but with a shrug. That was my experience reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, coming right after Norwegian Wood, which, for all its melancholy excesses, at least held together as a recognizably human story. Here, the seams are not just visible. They are the point. Or perhaps they are meant to dissolve altogether. I am not convinced they do.
The novel disperses itself almost immediately into two narrative streams. One follows Kafka Tamura, fifteen, self-exiled, self-mythologizing, carrying an Oedipal prophecy like a private curse. The other trails Nakata, an old man whose cognitive simplicity masks something like metaphysical permeability. Their paths gesture toward convergence, though not in any way that satisfies the ordinary appetite for causality. This is not negligence. It is design. Still, design does not always translate to engagement. I kept reading, yes. But often out of habit, or perhaps out of a faint hope that coherence would eventually coalesce from the fragments. It rarely did.
Kafka himself, for a protagonist, feels curiously sealed. He speaks with an interiority that seems pre-assembled, as though he has read too many books about alienated boys and decided to become one. That may well be the point. A constructed self, performing its own narrative. Yet even that awareness did not make him more interesting to me. He remains distant, almost airless, even in moments that should carry emotional charge. His flight from home is framed as a coming-of-age, but it is less a transformation than a prolonged suspension. Things happen around him, through him, sometimes to him, but seldom because of him in any psychologically persuasive way.
Nakata, on the other hand, is meant to charm, or at least to disarm. His conversations with cats should have delighted me. I love cats. I wanted to be delighted. Instead, those passages felt oddly inert, as though the whimsy were being insisted upon rather than discovered. And then there is that scene. The grotesque violence inflicted on the cats. It arrives with such lurid intensity that it fractures whatever fragile enchantment the novel had been attempting to build. I did not find it profound. I found it unbearable. Not in a way that deepens the work, but in a way that made me recoil from it. I nearly closed the book. I considered, briefly, not returning to it at all.
And yet I did return. Because Murakami can write. This is the maddening part. The prose is smooth, almost frictionless. Sentences carry you forward with a quiet insistence. Even when the content fails to grip, the texture of the writing persuades you to continue. There is a kind of narrative hypnosis at work. You keep turning the pages, not out of urgency, but out of rhythm. It is like listening to a piece of music that does not move you emotionally, yet is structured so elegantly that you cannot quite stop listening.
Speaking of music, the references scattered throughout the novel were among the few things that genuinely engaged me. Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven. These are not mere ornaments. They function as tonal anchors, moments where the novel briefly aligns with something outside itself, something I could latch onto. There is a certain pleasure in recognizing these names, in recalling the music, in letting it echo against the text. Perhaps that says more about me than about the book. An admission, maybe, that I was searching for footholds wherever I could find them.
Murakami’s narrative logic operates less like a chain and more like a constellation. Events do not follow one another so much as they resonate across distance. A raining of fish, a talking cat, a forest that feels less like a place than a threshold. These are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be accepted. Or, more precisely, they are meant to be lived through as one would live through a dream. The problem, for me, is that dreams are compelling when they carry an emotional truth that persists even after the details dissolve. Here, the details linger, but the emotional truth remains elusive.
Fatalism saturates the novel. Kafka’s prophecy, delivered by his father, hangs over everything with the weight of inevitability. You will kill your father. You will sleep with your mother. You will sleep with your sister. It is an inheritance of doom, a script that Kafka both resists and fulfills. Or believes he fulfills. The ambiguity is deliberate. Did he commit these acts, or did he merely dream them, imagine them, internalize them to the point where the distinction no longer matters? Murakami seems less interested in the factual answer than in the psychological condition of believing oneself bound by fate.
There is also the matter of the title, which invokes Franz Kafka and, with it, a very particular expectation. “Kafkaesque” is not merely a synonym for strange or surreal. It suggests a precise texture of experience: the claustrophobia of opaque systems, the slow suffocation of the individual under incomprehensible authority, a logic that is internally consistent yet fundamentally hostile to human understanding. It is dread sharpened by bureaucracy, anxiety given form through labyrinthine rules that cannot be mastered, only endured. Murakami’s novel, for all its dreamlike qualities, does not quite inhabit that space. Its surrealism is softer, more ambient, less punitive. The world of Kafka on the Shore does not trap its characters in the same merciless machinery; it lets them drift. Even its violence and its omens feel diffused, unmoored from the kind of existential pressure that makes something truly Kafkaesque. The title gestures toward that lineage, but the novel itself never fully delivers on it.
There is something almost Greek about it. Not in structure, but in sensibility. The idea that one cannot escape what has been foretold, that every attempt at avoidance becomes a step toward realization. Yet unlike Greek tragedy, where the machinery of fate is stark and inexorable, here it is diffuse, almost vaporous. Omens appear, but they do not compel. They suggest. They whisper. The characters move as though guided by an unseen current, yet they also drift, hesitate, double back. Fate, in this novel, is not a straight line. It is a fog.
The sexual elements complicate this further. They are not incidental. They are central. Kafka’s encounters with Miss Saeki, with Sakura, are charged not just with desire but with the possibility, or the fear, of incestuous fulfillment. Miss Saeki, in particular, exists in a kind of temporal dislocation. She is both the woman she is and the girl she once was. Kafka’s attraction to her is entangled with memory, with projection, with the spectral presence of a past he never lived. Their relationship resists easy categorization. It is tender, in moments. It is also deeply unsettling.
The age difference cannot be ignored. A fifteen-year-old boy and an older woman. There is a cultural and literary context in which such dynamics are often treated with a certain permissiveness, especially when filtered through a male gaze. But reverse the genders. Imagine Miss Saeki as the minor, Kafka as the adult. The reception would be entirely different. The discomfort would not be aesthetic. It would be immediate, moral, perhaps even outraged. This asymmetry reveals something about how we process narratives of desire, about whose vulnerability is foregrounded and whose is obscured.
Murakami does not sensationalize these scenes. That is to his credit. They are written with a kind of restraint, a quietness that avoids cheapness. But restraint does not neutralize implication. If anything, it intensifies it. The lack of explicit judgment leaves you alone with the material, forced to navigate it without guidance. I did not find clarity there. Only a lingering unease.
And perhaps that is the point. Not clarity, but unease. Not resolution, but suspension. The novel refuses to settle into a single mode. It is part coming-of-age, part metaphysical inquiry, part surrealist exercise. It gestures toward meaning without ever quite delivering it. For some readers, this is precisely its strength. The openness, the interpretive freedom, the invitation to construct one’s own coherence. For me, it felt less like freedom and more like absence. An emptiness where something should have been.
Still, I cannot dismiss it outright. There are passages of real beauty here. Moments where the language, the imagery, the rhythm align in a way that feels almost luminous. A sentence will catch you off guard. A description will linger. Murakami knows how to create atmosphere, how to sustain a mood, how to keep you inside a particular emotional register even when the narrative itself feels diffuse.
So I am left in a peculiar position. Admiring the craft, resisting the content. Turning the pages, yet rarely feeling compelled by what I find on them. It is one of those books where you acknowledge the author’s control, his precision, his ability to orchestrate a complex structure, and yet you remain unmoved by the experience as a whole. A kind of aesthetic respect, divorced from genuine engagement.
Maybe that is enough for some. It was not quite enough for me.
And yet, I read it to the end.
That, perhaps, is its own kind of testament.
#bibliophilia #bookReview #books #fiction #HarukiMurakami #JapaneseLiterature #KafkaOnTheShore #literature #novels #reading -
Not Quite Kafkaesque – All Atmosphere, No Gravity, All Symbol, No Substance: On Reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
March 25, 2026When Surrealism Forgets the Human Center
There is a peculiar kind of disappointment that arrives not with anger, but with a shrug. That was my experience reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, coming right after Norwegian Wood, which, for all its melancholy excesses, at least held together as a recognizably human story. Here, the seams are not just visible. They are the point. Or perhaps they are meant to dissolve altogether. I am not convinced they do.
The novel disperses itself almost immediately into two narrative streams. One follows Kafka Tamura, fifteen, self-exiled, self-mythologizing, carrying an Oedipal prophecy like a private curse. The other trails Nakata, an old man whose cognitive simplicity masks something like metaphysical permeability. Their paths gesture toward convergence, though not in any way that satisfies the ordinary appetite for causality. This is not negligence. It is design. Still, design does not always translate to engagement. I kept reading, yes. But often out of habit, or perhaps out of a faint hope that coherence would eventually coalesce from the fragments. It rarely did.
Kafka himself, for a protagonist, feels curiously sealed. He speaks with an interiority that seems pre-assembled, as though he has read too many books about alienated boys and decided to become one. That may well be the point. A constructed self, performing its own narrative. Yet even that awareness did not make him more interesting to me. He remains distant, almost airless, even in moments that should carry emotional charge. His flight from home is framed as a coming-of-age, but it is less a transformation than a prolonged suspension. Things happen around him, through him, sometimes to him, but seldom because of him in any psychologically persuasive way.
Nakata, on the other hand, is meant to charm, or at least to disarm. His conversations with cats should have delighted me. I love cats. I wanted to be delighted. Instead, those passages felt oddly inert, as though the whimsy were being insisted upon rather than discovered. And then there is that scene. The grotesque violence inflicted on the cats. It arrives with such lurid intensity that it fractures whatever fragile enchantment the novel had been attempting to build. I did not find it profound. I found it unbearable. Not in a way that deepens the work, but in a way that made me recoil from it. I nearly closed the book. I considered, briefly, not returning to it at all.
And yet I did return. Because Murakami can write. This is the maddening part. The prose is smooth, almost frictionless. Sentences carry you forward with a quiet insistence. Even when the content fails to grip, the texture of the writing persuades you to continue. There is a kind of narrative hypnosis at work. You keep turning the pages, not out of urgency, but out of rhythm. It is like listening to a piece of music that does not move you emotionally, yet is structured so elegantly that you cannot quite stop listening.
Speaking of music, the references scattered throughout the novel were among the few things that genuinely engaged me. Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven. These are not mere ornaments. They function as tonal anchors, moments where the novel briefly aligns with something outside itself, something I could latch onto. There is a certain pleasure in recognizing these names, in recalling the music, in letting it echo against the text. Perhaps that says more about me than about the book. An admission, maybe, that I was searching for footholds wherever I could find them.
Murakami’s narrative logic operates less like a chain and more like a constellation. Events do not follow one another so much as they resonate across distance. A raining of fish, a talking cat, a forest that feels less like a place than a threshold. These are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be accepted. Or, more precisely, they are meant to be lived through as one would live through a dream. The problem, for me, is that dreams are compelling when they carry an emotional truth that persists even after the details dissolve. Here, the details linger, but the emotional truth remains elusive.
Fatalism saturates the novel. Kafka’s prophecy, delivered by his father, hangs over everything with the weight of inevitability. You will kill your father. You will sleep with your mother. You will sleep with your sister. It is an inheritance of doom, a script that Kafka both resists and fulfills. Or believes he fulfills. The ambiguity is deliberate. Did he commit these acts, or did he merely dream them, imagine them, internalize them to the point where the distinction no longer matters? Murakami seems less interested in the factual answer than in the psychological condition of believing oneself bound by fate.
There is also the matter of the title, which invokes Franz Kafka and, with it, a very particular expectation. “Kafkaesque” is not merely a synonym for strange or surreal. It suggests a precise texture of experience: the claustrophobia of opaque systems, the slow suffocation of the individual under incomprehensible authority, a logic that is internally consistent yet fundamentally hostile to human understanding. It is dread sharpened by bureaucracy, anxiety given form through labyrinthine rules that cannot be mastered, only endured. Murakami’s novel, for all its dreamlike qualities, does not quite inhabit that space. Its surrealism is softer, more ambient, less punitive. The world of Kafka on the Shore does not trap its characters in the same merciless machinery; it lets them drift. Even its violence and its omens feel diffused, unmoored from the kind of existential pressure that makes something truly Kafkaesque. The title gestures toward that lineage, but the novel itself never fully delivers on it.
There is something almost Greek about it. Not in structure, but in sensibility. The idea that one cannot escape what has been foretold, that every attempt at avoidance becomes a step toward realization. Yet unlike Greek tragedy, where the machinery of fate is stark and inexorable, here it is diffuse, almost vaporous. Omens appear, but they do not compel. They suggest. They whisper. The characters move as though guided by an unseen current, yet they also drift, hesitate, double back. Fate, in this novel, is not a straight line. It is a fog.
The sexual elements complicate this further. They are not incidental. They are central. Kafka’s encounters with Miss Saeki, with Sakura, are charged not just with desire but with the possibility, or the fear, of incestuous fulfillment. Miss Saeki, in particular, exists in a kind of temporal dislocation. She is both the woman she is and the girl she once was. Kafka’s attraction to her is entangled with memory, with projection, with the spectral presence of a past he never lived. Their relationship resists easy categorization. It is tender, in moments. It is also deeply unsettling.
The age difference cannot be ignored. A fifteen-year-old boy and an older woman. There is a cultural and literary context in which such dynamics are often treated with a certain permissiveness, especially when filtered through a male gaze. But reverse the genders. Imagine Miss Saeki as the minor, Kafka as the adult. The reception would be entirely different. The discomfort would not be aesthetic. It would be immediate, moral, perhaps even outraged. This asymmetry reveals something about how we process narratives of desire, about whose vulnerability is foregrounded and whose is obscured.
Murakami does not sensationalize these scenes. That is to his credit. They are written with a kind of restraint, a quietness that avoids cheapness. But restraint does not neutralize implication. If anything, it intensifies it. The lack of explicit judgment leaves you alone with the material, forced to navigate it without guidance. I did not find clarity there. Only a lingering unease.
And perhaps that is the point. Not clarity, but unease. Not resolution, but suspension. The novel refuses to settle into a single mode. It is part coming-of-age, part metaphysical inquiry, part surrealist exercise. It gestures toward meaning without ever quite delivering it. For some readers, this is precisely its strength. The openness, the interpretive freedom, the invitation to construct one’s own coherence. For me, it felt less like freedom and more like absence. An emptiness where something should have been.
Still, I cannot dismiss it outright. There are passages of real beauty here. Moments where the language, the imagery, the rhythm align in a way that feels almost luminous. A sentence will catch you off guard. A description will linger. Murakami knows how to create atmosphere, how to sustain a mood, how to keep you inside a particular emotional register even when the narrative itself feels diffuse.
So I am left in a peculiar position. Admiring the craft, resisting the content. Turning the pages, yet rarely feeling compelled by what I find on them. It is one of those books where you acknowledge the author’s control, his precision, his ability to orchestrate a complex structure, and yet you remain unmoved by the experience as a whole. A kind of aesthetic respect, divorced from genuine engagement.
Maybe that is enough for some. It was not quite enough for me.
And yet, I read it to the end.
That, perhaps, is its own kind of testament.
#bibliophilia #bookReview #books #fiction #HarukiMurakami #JapaneseLiterature #KafkaOnTheShore #literature #novels #reading -
There is a story, universally known to mathematicians, about Leonhard Euler, Denis Diderot, Catherine the Great, and the epistemological authority of mathematics. It apparently first appeared in English in Augustus De Morgan‘s book A Budget of Paradoxes:
Diderot paid a visit to the Russian Court at the invitation of [Catherine the Great]. He conversed very freely, and gave the younger members of the Court circle a good deal of lively atheism. The Empress was much amused, but some of her councillors suggested that it might be desirable to check these expositions of doctrine. The Empress did not like to put a direct muzzle on her guest’s tongue, so the following plot was contrived. Diderot was informed that a learned mathematician was in possession of an algebraical demonstration of the existence of God, and would give it him before all the Court, if he desired to hear it. Diderot gladly consented: though the name of the mathematician is not given, it was Euler. He advanced towards Diderot, and said gravely, and in a tone of perfect conviction: Monsieur, $\frac{(a + b^n)}{n} = x$, donc Dieu existe; repondez!1 Diderot, to whom algebra was Hebrew, was embarrassed and disconcerted; while peals of laughter rose on all sides. He asked permission to return to France at once, which was granted.2
One interesting thing about this is the fact that De Morgan misrepresents the point of the anecdote he’s quoting. He attributes it to Dieudonné Thiébault, whose version ends quite differently:
…Diderot wanted to explain that this alleged proof was nonsense, but was unable to escape the embarrassment of realizing he was being fooled with and would not be able to escape the jokes with which they were ready to assail him…3
De Morgan’s version, contra Thiébault, paints Diderot as an actual clown, too ignorant of algebra to even understand the mockery. Mathematicians have been fervently repeating De Morgan’s version since he published it. It’s as foundational a myth for mathematicians as the story of George Washington and his dentures made of slaves’ teeth is for the United States. What lessons does it teach its audience? How does it comfort those who share it? Myths reinforce and reproduce social systems — what’s being reinforced here? How does this myth help reproduce the community that relies on it?
There’s a clue in De Morgan’s weirdest and least plausible addition — the claim that to Diderot “algebra was Hebrew.” Diderot, a famously brilliant guy, wrote an entire monograph on mathematics. If algebra to him was Hebrew it would only have been because he was fluent in Hebrew.4 The folk process really latched onto this detail, which shows its significance. One recounter changed “Hebrew” to “Chinese,” while another used “Arabic.”5 Thiebault wrote in 1804, De Morgan in 1872, and the other two in the early 20th Century. What had changed?
For one thing, capitalist domination of the world, still not a done deal in the 18th Century, was essentially complete by the turn of the 20th. This happened over the course of De Morgan’s lifespan.6 By then capital had discovered many of its modern uses for mathematics, and consequently mathematicians were integrated into social power structures in many of the same ways they are now.7 Which means that they were in the market for worldviews that justified their privilege in contrast to the violence necessary to create and maintain it.
This need is reflected in the evolution of the story. On first telling the point was obscure, perhaps because it was close to a description of something that actually happened. De Morgan had an axe that needed grinding, so he punched it up a little by beclowning an old-school renaissance man and natural philosopher of precisely the type that supplied the theoretical foundations of power in the 18th Century, of precisely the type whose role was now filled in part by mathematicians. But by the first decades of the 20th Century much graver threats to peace of mind had surfaced, which therefore called for new mythmaking.
The replacement of Hebrew, in the relevant time a dead language, with Arabic and Chinese, in their relevant times languages spoken by stereotypically subhuman colonised peoples, served to pearl-coat the jagged violence of colonialism, much more apparent in elite white circles by the early 20th Century than had previously been the case. The story justifies white Europe’s colonial violence by framing its intellectual architects as rightfully, due to their unassailable knowledge authority, advising Catherine the Great’s world-ruling counterparts.
Another essential element of De Morgan’s version of the story is the stature of the characters, including his own personal stature. Euler, the greatest mathematician of his time, was responsible for much of the framework of modern mathematics. Carl Gauss, himself the greatest mathematician of his time, said that “The study of Euler’s works will remain the best school for the different fields of mathematics, and nothing else can replace it.”
Diderot’s fame is also essential to the story’s point. Titans clashed and the one with the recognizably, at least to De Morgan, modern worldview won out. Part of the pleasure, part of the community, that the anecdote provides to mathematicians in its recounting lies in vicarious identification with Euler’s triumph and its parallel to their own triumphs. Another part lies in vicariously identifying oneself with a cause championed by the also-eminent De Morgan. Without archetypally famous characters reading the lines the scene misses its mark.
Something all versions from De Morgan’s on have in common is that they’re told by mathematicians to mathematicians. By definition then members of the audience have already claimed a share of power and are looking for a way to feel better about that choice. The narrations must build community, and aggression works against that so the tellers take a respectful tone. It’s different when they’re defending against the non-mathematical world. Here’s De Morgan’s description, from the very same book that has the Euler-Diderot story, of an amateur mathematician who had the nerve not only to disagree publicly with famous mathematicians but doubled down on being told he was wrong:
The behavior of this singular character induces me to pay him the compliment which Achilles paid Hector, to drag him round the walls again and again. He was treated with unusual notice and in the most gentle manner. The unnamed mathematician, E. M. bestowed a volume of mild correspondence upon him; Rowan Hamilton quietly proved him wrong in a way accessible to an ordinary schoolboy; Whewell, as we shall see, gave him the means of seeing himself wrong, even more easily than by Hamilton’s method. Nothing would do ; it was small kick and silly fling at all; and he exposed his conceit by alleging that he, James Smith, had placed Whewell in the stocks. He will therefore be universally pronounced a proper object of the severest literary punishment: but the opinion of all who can put two propositions together will be that of the many strokes I have given, the hardest and most telling are my republications of his own attempts to reason.8
This De Morgan doesn’t gently invite his peers to self-soothe with shared humor and community reaffirmation — this De Morgan repeatedly announces his intention to physically assault a human being. Like many whose continued existence relies on brutal violence directed by others on their behalf De Morgan needs to justify his intention by showing how many have tried nonviolently to convince the heretic. He was given many chances to conform! Clearly he has willingly forfeited the protection of civilization! He is a semi-civilized subhuman! Beat his ass! De Morgan goes so far as to describe his criticisms as “strokes,” a punishment administered to slaves by their masters. The metaphor is striking and striking is the metaphor. Intellect righteously serves power by wielding a pen as an implement of physical torture and subaltern correction.
Which brings us to the next subject of this essay, a self-proclaimed anarchist known as William Gillis.9 Gillis, who seems to be some kind of minor cult figure among left-wing libertarians,10 is a dude with a website, some thoughts about things, and a tsunami of untempered rage. Apparently there are people to whom his work provides comfort and community given that it’s pretty widely published and discussed in certain circles. These people are to Gillis as the mathematicians in his audience were to De Morgan. He supplies conscience-soothing, community-creating myths to his followers. But Gillis lacks an essential tool that De Morgan had a surfeit of — knowledge authority.
Knowledge authority is the ability to have one’s assertions accepted as fact by virtue of one’s social position without adequate supporting argument.11 It’s not a function of the truth or falsity of the claims, which is irrelevant to the authority. Knowledge authority is a relation between knowers and consumers of knowledge rather than a property of the particular knowledge in question. It’s a social fact. Social facts are backed by society, and therefore in a coercive society ultimately backed by violence rather than reason. This situation is colorfully evoked by De Morgan’s putatively hyperbolic threats against a man who refused to accept his putatively rational arguments.
Scientists in modern American society have a great deal of knowledge authority because their work is essential to capitalism, the ultimate source of violence. We know physicists are telling the truth because their bombs explode. Their conclusions are justified by three unassailable social facts: They know stuff we don’t know, if we did know it we’d agree with them, and we will never know it like they do.
Ultimately this kind of authority doesn’t come from the truth values of its claims but from the utility of those claims to people with the power to impose worldviews that serve their purposes. Without power there’s no knowledge authority, but only authoritative knowledge. I am not saying that scientific claims are false, but rather that, true or false, they’re authoritative because they’re backed by force.12
So Gillis has a problem. Anarchists have zero knowledge authority in the world and less than that in anarchist circles. They can’t wield state violence for obvious reasons, and they can’t get other anarchists, hardened skeptics who’ve already rejected violence-backed state agendas, to accept their dogmas through mere amateur violence. Many anarchist writers resolve this dilemma by explaining their ideas clearly and respectfully to their audience to allow them to come to their own conclusions. Gillis chose another path: cosplay. See, for instance, his website bio, where he proclaims publicly for all the world to see that he “…is a second generation anarchist activist who studies high energy theoretical physics.”
What an interesting phrase! He “studies high energy theoretical physics.” In the ordinary denotational meaning of the words this is probably a completely true statement, but connotations can be tricky. The connotational meaning of the verb “to study” conjugated this way, in some kind of ongoing present tense,13 and followed by an academic discipline, changes radically depending on how the discipline is described. If it’s something general, like “physics,” the word “studies” retains its ordinary meaning. If someone asks what my kid does at college I could plausibly answer that she studies physics. But if the discipline is highly qualified, narrow, esoteric, a different meaning becomes available.
It still makes sense to say that a college kid “studies high energy physics”14 if they’re taking a series of classes in that subject, but it also makes sense to say of a working scientist engaged in original research that she or he “studies high energy physics.” It’s a kind of modesty, a way of saying that even though the subject knows more about high energy physics than all but a few hundred or even a few dozen people in all of human history, they’re still humble students. For instance, “Allison Hall studies high energy physics using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.” It’s easy to find plenty of similar examples.
So what is up with Gillis? He doesn’t seem ever to have published anything in any area of physics. He doesn’t have an advanced degree in the subject as far as I can tell, and nothing on his website suggests he’s done original scientific research.15 He may dip into Physics for Dummies to kill time in airports but equivocating on different connotations of the verb “studies” is dishonest — stolen humility rather than stolen valor. On his Twitter bio he calls himself a “lapsed physicist” and on Mastodon unqualifiedly a “physicist.” Without access to genuine authority the guy needs knowledge authority and he’s not shy about grabbing it.
The three social facts that scientific knowledge authority relies on are these: they know stuff we don’t, if we knew it we’d agree with them, and we can never know it. Gillis stakes his claim to such authority in a remarkable essay, the general tenor of which is well-represented by this passage, a sort of Platonic ideal of the first and third pillars:
The qualia of physics and math, the richness, the crystal clarity, the complex humor of someone’s proof, the overwhelming resonance of the revealed relations and their potency at further exploration make sad jokes of all the cheap fragmentary poetic or neural associations one can momentarily garner and perhaps struggle to hold onto from drugs and religions. Trying to explain this kind of experiential depth to those who have never even glimpsed mathematics beyond arithmetic isn’t like explaining sex to a preschooler, it’s like trying to explain the subjectivity of other individuals’ knowledge to a toddler or self-awareness to an newborn. The doors it opens to experiencing reality and the remarkable solidity of the whole affair are not even fathomable beforehand.16
And just like De Morgan, when Gillis is talking to his followers, rather than aggression he uses explanations, examples, arguments, discussion. And just like it did with De Morgan, Gillis’s knowledge authority plays a more tacit role in this context than it would for outsiders. He’s careful to project respect for his followers, a necessary element of any discursive style appropriate for intra-group community strengthening and reaffirmation.17
Although intragroup aggression destroys community rather than building it, extragroup aggression may build community. It’s a dangerous tool, though, and must be handled carefully. Thus the contextually reasonable Gillis, like the contextually reasonable De Morgan before him, can become quite unreasonable, even aggressive, when dealing with external threats to his community:18
We agree to leave you that stupid house you bought in the surburbs, with firm social norms against violating such. You can operate on the market, collect food and basic needs from post-state social services, and we’ll retrain anyone to work in professions without power. But the moment someone organizes a hierarchy or fields an ex-cop gang to spread terror again that gang gets exterminated by every surrounding watchful civilian. We have to be willing to, at the drop of a hat, race out of our houses and confront and stop with violence the predatory gangs the ex-cops will try to form.19
Like I said, though, such talk can be dangerous if not handled carefully. Remember that De Morgan, when fantasizing about the violence with which he’d like to meet the challenge posed to his power by an amateur mathematician, took care to demonstrate to his peers that the aggression was justified, that its target deserved its fate. Such moves supports social stability in the sense that they reassure spectators that as long as they meet relevant community norms they won’t be subject to a violent fate.
Without this reassurance the aggression can’t build community because the intended audience is too anxious to attend to the performance. Gillis is cheerfully planning vigilance committees and community lynchings and at least some of his followers, the ones with any sense, will wonder if they’ll end up lynched. It’s not hard to see proposed impromptu communitarian death squads settling personal scores for Gillis or other wannabe lefty-lib Robespierres. If leaders propose violence to build community they must have effective ways to reassure the community that they themselves won’t become victims.
To this end the criteria for outlawry must be as visible as possible and one way to do this is to perform the determination process as publicly as possible. Insiders must be reassured that they’ll get a fair trial if they’re suspected of being potential targets.20 A tentative approach might be useful, a sort of hand extended to someone who may be a transgressor but who could conceivably still redeem themselves by conforming if offered a chance. If they turn out to be the first Gillis can make an example of them. If the second he may gain a follower.
De Morgan’s litany of evidence justifying his proposed violence is part of this process and we can see the same decision process unfolding in this recent toot thread, which began with Mastodon user Ben Chambers posting the following claim:21
knowledge and economic calculation problems are solved by relational egalitarianism, democracy, and usufructuary commons, not by market transaction, property, and commercial enclosure
This makes a lot of sense to me, but it’s a fairly dense aphorism. I can see how people might fail to understand it if they haven’t been thinking along these lines or aren’t willing to put some thought into deciphering it. But regardless of what you think about the truth or the content of the claim it’s clear that it’s plausible, to be taken seriously, and that it has something to do with left libertarian concerns. Gillis, as some kind of left libertarian leader, must be alert to social-capital-building opportunities. Inducing a heretic to recant is such an opportunity, and violently attacking a heretic, whether metaphorically or literally, is another. Gillis, needing to decide which is appropriate in this case, a few hours later, chimed in with a who-goes-there challenge: “Cool assertion. Now let’s see the proof!”22
There is so much aggression imbedded in just these few small words! The word “cool” followed by a communicational noun, “assertion,” evokes the tagline “cool story, bro,” which, as Wiktionary tells us, is “[u]sed to dismiss a comment perceived as boring or pointless, or refute an anecdote that one considers difficult to believe.” The next word, “assertion,” does more than just connotationally influence the word “cool.” First, it’s an unusual word choice, at least superficially. Compare the n-gram viewer results for it compared to “claim,” “statement,” and “idea,” all of which seem much more natural in the sentence.
This result suggests that the choice was deliberate, and as such likely intended at least to add an air of esoteric technical knowledge to Gillis’s challenge. It’s entirely plausible that Gillis meant to evoke the spirit of proof by assertion, which is an informal fallacy. We’ll see below that Gillis relies heavily on this kind of connotational innuendo, each individual instance of which might be a coincidence but the aggregate weight of the instances is hard to explain other than by intention. So the first two words of Gillis’s toot constitute a rhetorically complex and ideologically loaded challege to Ben Chambers’s aphorism.23
The next sentence, wherein Gillis demands “a proof” of Chambers’s claim, is more straightforward. It’s also an archetypal invocation of scientific knowledge authority, by the way. The word “proof” sounds technical, like there are technical standards that make an argument so good, so foolproof, that it can be called “a proof.” Self-proclaimed physicist Gillis understands this, do you?! Mathematics is the paradigmatic example of a discipline whose claims admit of “proof,” and when people hear the word in even mildly technical contexts they tend to visualize 9th grade geometry and its associated feelings of ignorance and shame. But mathematical ideas of proof, whatever they might be, can’t apply outside of mathematics, so this must not be what Gillis means.24
The general consensus, shared by such mainstream figures as Albert Einstein and Karl Popper, is that scientific truths don’t admit of definitive proof, but can only be definitively disproved. Popper, quoted in Wikipedia’s article on Scientific Evidence, said:
In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by ‘proof’ an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory.
Gillis spends a lot of energy and time pretending to be a scientist, so maybe he’s referring to some kind of scientific but not mathematical proof, something that would establish the truth of the claim not necessarily mathematically but in accordance with the epistemological standards of some accepted scientific community. The consensus is that each scientific discipline is a community of knowers with its own community standards of proof. If someone demands a proof of a non-mathematical statement, then, it’s appropriate, if only for the sake of efficiency, to ask what standards of proof they’ll accept, which I did in my response to Gillis:
What kind of proof do you think statements like that admit? This is a purely good faith question, because it seems like an important issue, and one I don’t know the answer to even after a lot of thought.
Such questions are a staple of trolls, but I wasn’t trolling, so I asserted my good faith. Of course trolls assert their good faith too, so it’s also respectful and pragmatic to offer some evidence that one’s question is thoughtful as a token of commitment to the discussion, which I did. My complete response is here and in the footnote.25 I don’t want to rehash the argument in this essay, but some parts of my response are necessary to understand Gillis’s tactics.
First, I outlined how I use the word “proof,” which is essentially as it’s used in mathematics. Second, to give a motive to my question other than trolling I explained why I don’t think that the word applies in that sense to anything outside of mathematics, which makes it reasonable to ask what he means by the word. Third, I used the word “worldviews” to describe the epistemological frameworks in which proof-admitting truths reside. I mean by this essentially what Thomas Kuhn meant by “paradigms” in a purely scientific context, although the concept has much broader application.
Finally, I proposed that however the problems mentioned by Chambers have been solved in the past it couldn’t have to do with private property, an institution created and maintained at great cost by coercive states, which therefore has only existed for a few centuries. Like I said, I’m not arguing here for the truth of these claims, although I believe they are true, but just describing them enough to make Gillis’s response intelligible:
Naw. You can’t negate the constraints of gravity (() or complexity classes ) by changing worldview.
As to your historical appeal. 1) Almost every hunter-gatherer society recognizes some form of property, indeed the Kung San can even trade land titles! 2) No one is saying you can’t live inefficiently, but pursuit of material freedom involves pursuit of some measure of economic efficiency.
The first sentence is a single word, a negation, denotationally simple but connotationally complex. This word suggests weariness, a speaker worn down by refuting the same tired arguments against the rationality that he, as a physicist and member of the knowledge elite, is required by all he considers sacred to defend. “Sigh,” it says. “Here we go again!” This move is intended to put me in my place, to let me know that I’m not even wrong, as physicists, even the self-proclaimed variety, love to say. My thoughts are long-ago-refuted cliches, and so on. The next sentence is more complex, containing shorthand versions of two purported arguments against my claim that propositional knowledge is only possible inside a worldview. He didn’t address standards of proof at all.26
The rest of his response, about the !Kung, is based on an equivocation between the standard meaning of the phrase “private property” in economic discourse and whatever it means to hunter-gatherers who, whatever they’re doing with land they control, aren’t fencing people out of it in order to enslave them. The existence of private property in this sense relies on the existence of a state. No state, no private property. The !Kung don’t have a state, so they don’t have private property in the only sense the phrase could have meant in context.27
So what does it all mean? De Morgan, writing on behalf of capital’s world-spanning power, to justify his position in it and that of his peers, had to rationalize capital’s actually-existing violence. He was writing after-the-fact justifications for capital’s victory and his role in its maintenance and growth, his reliance on violence. De Morgan is defending the existing order, so has no need to court followers. His socially granted knowledge authority is an essential element of this process.
But Gillis is in a different position. He has no access to state power, no way to impose his individual will on the world by physical force, ultimately the only reliable way for one person to control multiple people. He lacks De Morgan’s legitimized knowledge authority but by hook or by crook has cooked up a functional substitute. It’s backed neither by the socially granted knowledge authority or potential state violence at De Morgan’s disposal, but it works in Gillis’s context. In short, what Gillis lacks is De Morgan’s state-associated political power.
If he wants to get anything done, then, he has to build political power outside the state. One way to do this, as I said, is through respectful discourse. Another is by dividing the world up into the chosen and the unchosen, the lynchers and the lynched. Promising followers a share in the impending violence, whether vicariously as violence-theorizers or directly as members of community lynch squads is a way to build power in the present, and that’s what Gillis is essentially up to. In particular, his unprovoked and untenable attack on an aphorism he didn’t take the time to understand can be fruitfully seen as an abortive political move.
Postscript: Because it’s not clear to me how much of my mental space a minor and fairly inconsequential figure like Gillis is worth it’s also not clear to me if I’ll ever write the second part of this essay, but if I did it would be about the kinds of worlds that might result from Gillis’s tactics. I was joking when I called him a wannabe Robespierre, but it’s not entirely a joke. His utopian visions terrify me, which will be the subject if it ever feels worth writing.
- Therefore God exists! Respond!
- Augustus De Morgan. A Budget of Paradoxes. Pp. 250-1.
- DIDEROT, voulant prouver la nullite et l’ineptie de cette pretendue preuve, mais ressentant malgre lui, l’embarras oil l’on est d’abord lorsqu’on decouvre chez les autres, le dessein de nous jouer, n’avoit pu echapper aux plaisanteries dont on etoit pret a l’assaillir; que cette aventure lui en faisant craindre d’autres encore, il avoit temoigne peu de temps apres le desir de retourner en France… Dieudonne Thiebault. Mes souvenirs de vingt ans de sejour a Berlin ou Frederic Le Grand, sa famille, sa cour, son gouvernement, son academie, ses ecoles, et ses amis litterateurs et philosophes par Dieudonne Thiebault. De Morgan also, less substantially, changes the denominator of the lefthand side of the equation to $n$ where Dieudonne has $z$, but that’s not important. I apologize for my lousy translation, which is a superficial rewrite of Google translate output.
- I have no idea if he was or not.
- For Chinese see The Mathematical Writings of Diderot. Krakeur and Krueger. Isis
Volume 33(2). June, 1941. For Arabic see The So-Called Euler-Diderot Incident. R. J. Gillings. Amer. Math. Monthly. 61(1954). 77-80. - 1806–1871.
- Capital’s modern uses for mathematics are so various, so technical, and so obscured that it’s hard to imagine describing them comprehensively. Piecewise methods like this essay are easier. That being said, mathematics in the service of engineering, e.g. weapons, infrastructure, strength of materials, and so on, is well-understood. For some less familiar aspects, Accounting for Slavery by Caitlin Rosenthal is astonishing. Without mathematical abstractions, she argues — among many, many other things — absentee ownership of plantations wouldn’t have been feasible. Think of how Atlantic history might have changed without this capability.
- In A Budget of Paradoxes pp. 104ff.
- I’m not omitting a link to Gillis’s Wikipedia page out of spite. At press time he didh’t have one. I am, however, noting that fact out of spite.
- I can’t keep track of what these folks like to call themselves. They act like libertarians and say they’re left-wing, so that’s what I call them. Read the first few paragraphs of their Wiki page for examples of their interminable terminologizing.
- This may not be a standard definition. I’m treating this as a technical term here, and defining it only for this discussion.
- Is this controversial? I feel like it might be, but it’s too much to argue for in detail here. The idea is that scientific theories will sometimes conclude that the natural order of the world requires people to allow themselves to starve in the face of abundant food, to die of exposure in the face of abundant housing. No one actually believes this when it’s themselves or their family that has to starve and die, so it can’t actually be true for anyone. Anyone would do anything to feed themselves and their children, and only the threat of a more violent fate than death by starvation can make them stop themselves. So the antihuman conclusions of science must be backed up by violence rather than by reason. But scientists don’t distinguish between kinds of conclusions. They’re all just scientific truths, value-free, they are so quick to remind us. They use the same justificatory tools on all of them, so their authority is backed by violence. Without violence they’d have to convince, and no one can convince someone that it’s not just pragmatic to starve themselves, but actually right and good. This is part of the reason mathematicians and presumably other scientists repeat myths like De Morgan’s. They dampen the contradictions rather than heightening them, they soothe the conscience rather than inspiring right action.
- I’m sorry I don’t know the technical term for this.
- I’m dropping the qualifier “theoretical” because it’s too easy to make fun of.
- I’m not at all claiming that possession of an advanced degree is required for someone to be reasonably called a physicist. All I’m saying is that I’m willing to treat possession of an advanced degree as sufficient to establish one’s status as a scientist. This is clearly overly generous, but in a direction that cuts against my conclusion, so it’s reasonable. Publishing scientific work is also sufficient but not necessary on this account, again being generous.
- Isn’t it fricking convenient that no one can experience whatever it is he’s talking about? How can we deny that it’s like whatever it is he says it’s like? I’ve been a working mathematician for four decades and I have no idea how to explain how deeply false, how deeply deceptive, this statement is. Gillis comes off as a clueless undergraduate suck-up wannabe grade booster trying to buddy-buddy a professor by falsely claiming to share their ultrarefined aesthetic perceptions. Making new science is hard work, much of it incredibly tedious, a fact missing from every one of Gillis’s descriptions. He doesn’t even know enough about science to know how revelatorily wrong his statements are. Gillis also inexplicably ignores the fact that many scientists also teach and almost all of us on the truth-and-beauty side of the business are teachers. One of our major activities is explaining whatever it is Gillis is going on about to a bunch of college kids, many of whom may or may not have glimpsed “mathematics beyond arithmetic,” but they don’t necessarily remember it. We teach those kids something about how to think about mathematics and science also. You shouldn’t take my word for it, though. If you know an actual working scientist ask them what they think of this passage and see if they don’t agree that it’s pure bullshit.
- Examples of the overtly reasonable Gillis abound, and here’s just one:
… under many systems of property-titles if the legal experts cannot reach consensus on who is the legitimate owner of an object nothing is done with the object in the meantime. Those involved in contending differing uses for an object in a propertyless society are directly capable of far more diverse means of negotiation, but so to, if they can’t reach consensus, then nothing is done with the object. Because literally everyone in the world has the capacity to veto.
William Gillis. From Whence do Property Titles Arise?. Appears in Markets Not Capitalism. Chartier and Johnson eds. Minor Compositions, 2011.
- De Morgan was defending the existing community of mathematicians. Gillis, as a revolutionary, defends at least two different communities. The first is the ideal community he and his comrades work towards and the second is the existing community made up of him and the comrades. This may complicate the analysis but I’m not really considering it in this essay.
- Quoted in The Superior Race of Good People —
On William Gillis’ “Bad people”. - Which is as good an explanation for public criminal court trials as anything else I’ve heard.
- This thread, which drew Gillis to my attention, is also a necessary condition for this essay’s existence.
- One possible objection to my line of reasoning here is a claim that Gillis wasn’t actually engaged in either of these activities but was just participating as an equal in the conversation. That he had no ulterior motives for participating, but just wanted to talk. To me this theory is utterly inconsistent with his over-the-top level of aggression. People whose only motive is the pleasure of the conversation aren’t generally so angry.
- It was at this point in the interaction, by the way, that I started to think about responding to Gillis. I had no idea who he was or why he so aggressively inserted himself into the conversation but I had been working intermittently on an essay about De Morgan’s version of the Euler Diderot incident and recognized the same dynamic at play. Learning more about Gillis and his career only solidified the picture.
- I’m applying the principle of charity here. If Gillis actually does mean mathematical proof his request is incoherent and not worthy of a response, so I don’t interpret it that way. I’m not arguing in favor of my claim that mathematical standards of proof can’t apply outside of mathematics, but only because it’s too tangential to this essay. The basic idea is that only problems which admit of acceptably mathematical solutions are part of mathematics. If a problem can’t be solved mathematically it’s not a mathematical problem. Likewise if a truth doesn’t admit of mathematical proof it’s not a mathematical truth. Does this strike you as a tautology? It is, but so is every other true statement. Change my mind about that if you can!
- I tend to think of proving statements as something that’s only possible in a system of propositional knowledge, where truth is established deductively, or at least synthetically in line with community standards. I’d go further and say that proof is only possible in systems of knowledge that have been artificially restricted to the kinds of truths that do admit of proof. Whatever the uses of proof-based knowledge, I don’t see how either of the two positions involved in the assertion could plausibly be seen as living in such an epistemological space.
Instead I think they’re more embedded in worldviews. If you see things one way one version is obviously true and if the other then the other is obviously true. But worldviews aren’t established propositionally. Propositional knowledge exists inside worldviews rather than the other way round.
Or maybe the answer is much more simple than that. In 200,000 years of human history private property and commercial enclosure have only existed for a few hundred. Knowledge and economic calculation problems were solved before private property existed or we wouldn’t be here today. Can they be solved after private property is smashed along with the state? No one knows the future, but obviously I think they can or why do I fight?
- The first argument, that “[y]ou can’t negate the constraints of gravity … by changing worldview,” seems to go like this:
1. By way of contradiction, assume propositional knowledge is only possible inside worldviews.
2. “[T]jhe constraints of gravity” are an example of propositional knowledge.
3. Therefore “the negation of the constraints of gravity” is an example of propositional knowledge.
4. Contradictory propositions can’t exist inside the same worldview.
5. Therefore it’s possible to establish the truth of “the negation of the constraints of gravity” by adopting an appropriate worldview.
6. Statement 5 is false, therefore statement 1 is false.That’s the strongest version of the argument I could come up with, although it’s not strong. I can’t even see how to refute it because it’s not clear what Gillis means by “the constraints of gravity.” If he means that I’ll still die if I jump off the roof no matter how I look at things, well, I agree. If he’s talking about the kind of thing that admits of proof, or does in his mind, maybe he means constraints of gravity as expressed in natural laws? If so, he’s going to have to explain a lot to overcome the historical fact that the constraints of gravity in that sense changed as physicists’ worldview changed from Newtonian to relativistic. Not only that, but he’s guilty of the fallacy of the converse here. I asserted that propositional knowledge exists inside worldviews but certainly not that given any piece of propositional knowledge there’s a worldview inside which it exists. Without this obviously false claim he doesn’t have an argument at all. There’s more to say about this, but not here.
- There’s no way to be sure about what Gillis means. He might not even know himself. But given his left-wing libertarian connections it’s possible he means something like Benjamin Tucker‘s idea of every household having community-granted control over 10 acres, or some fixed amount of land, which is supposed to be as I understand it determined by how much they can use and how much over which the community is willing to cede control. Like most of Tucker’s ideas this one is self-contradictory, false, and uninteresting.
#albert-einstein #augustus-de-morgan #ben-chambers #benjamin-tucker #catherine-the-great #denis-diderot #dieudonne-thiebault #epistemology #existence-of-god #falsifiability #folk-process #individualist-anarchism #jack-of-swords #karl-popper #knowledge-authority #left-wing-libertarianism #leonhard-euler #libertarianism #mastodon #mathematical-proof #paradigms #proof #science #science-worship #scientific-proof #thomas-kuhn #wannabe-lefty-lib-robespierres #william-gillis
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There is a story, universally known to mathematicians, about Leonhard Euler, Denis Diderot, Catherine the Great, and the epistemological authority of mathematics. It apparently first appeared in English in Augustus De Morgan‘s book A Budget of Paradoxes:
Diderot paid a visit to the Russian Court at the invitation of [Catherine the Great]. He conversed very freely, and gave the younger members of the Court circle a good deal of lively atheism. The Empress was much amused, but some of her councillors suggested that it might be desirable to check these expositions of doctrine. The Empress did not like to put a direct muzzle on her guest’s tongue, so the following plot was contrived. Diderot was informed that a learned mathematician was in possession of an algebraical demonstration of the existence of God, and would give it him before all the Court, if he desired to hear it. Diderot gladly consented: though the name of the mathematician is not given, it was Euler. He advanced towards Diderot, and said gravely, and in a tone of perfect conviction: Monsieur, $\frac{(a + b^n)}{n} = x$, donc Dieu existe; repondez!1 Diderot, to whom algebra was Hebrew, was embarrassed and disconcerted; while peals of laughter rose on all sides. He asked permission to return to France at once, which was granted.2
One interesting thing about this is the fact that De Morgan misrepresents the point of the anecdote he’s quoting. He attributes it to Dieudonné Thiébault, whose version ends quite differently:
…Diderot wanted to explain that this alleged proof was nonsense, but was unable to escape the embarrassment of realizing he was being fooled with and would not be able to escape the jokes with which they were ready to assail him…3
De Morgan’s version, contra Thiébault, paints Diderot as an actual clown, too ignorant of algebra to even understand the mockery. Mathematicians have been fervently repeating De Morgan’s version since he published it. It’s as foundational a myth for mathematicians as the story of George Washington and his dentures made of slaves’ teeth is for the United States. What lessons does it teach its audience? How does it comfort those who share it? Myths reinforce and reproduce social systems — what’s being reinforced here? How does this myth help reproduce the community that relies on it?
There’s a clue in De Morgan’s weirdest and least plausible addition — the claim that to Diderot “algebra was Hebrew.” Diderot, a famously brilliant guy, wrote an entire monograph on mathematics. If algebra to him was Hebrew it would only have been because he was fluent in Hebrew.4 The folk process really latched onto this detail, which shows its significance. One recounter changed “Hebrew” to “Chinese,” while another used “Arabic.”5 Thiebault wrote in 1804, De Morgan in 1872, and the other two in the early 20th Century. What had changed?
For one thing, capitalist domination of the world, still not a done deal in the 18th Century, was essentially complete by the turn of the 20th. This happened over the course of De Morgan’s lifespan.6 By then capital had discovered many of its modern uses for mathematics, and consequently mathematicians were integrated into social power structures in many of the same ways they are now.7 Which means that they were in the market for worldviews that justified their privilege in contrast to the violence necessary to create and maintain it.
This need is reflected in the evolution of the story. On first telling the point was obscure, perhaps because it was close to a description of something that actually happened. De Morgan had an axe that needed grinding, so he punched it up a little by beclowning an old-school renaissance man and natural philosopher of precisely the type that supplied the theoretical foundations of power in the 18th Century, of precisely the type whose role was now filled in part by mathematicians. But by the first decades of the 20th Century much graver threats to peace of mind had surfaced, which therefore called for new mythmaking.
The replacement of Hebrew, in the relevant time a dead language, with Arabic and Chinese, in their relevant times languages spoken by stereotypically subhuman colonised peoples, served to pearl-coat the jagged violence of colonialism, much more apparent in elite white circles by the early 20th Century than had previously been the case. The story justifies white Europe’s colonial violence by framing its intellectual architects as rightfully, due to their unassailable knowledge authority, advising Catherine the Great’s world-ruling counterparts.
Another essential element of De Morgan’s version of the story is the stature of the characters, including his own personal stature. Euler, the greatest mathematician of his time, was responsible for much of the framework of modern mathematics. Carl Gauss, himself the greatest mathematician of his time, said that “The study of Euler’s works will remain the best school for the different fields of mathematics, and nothing else can replace it.”
Diderot’s fame is also essential to the story’s point. Titans clashed and the one with the recognizably, at least to De Morgan, modern worldview won out. Part of the pleasure, part of the community, that the anecdote provides to mathematicians in its recounting lies in vicarious identification with Euler’s triumph and its parallel to their own triumphs. Another part lies in vicariously identifying oneself with a cause championed by the also-eminent De Morgan. Without archetypally famous characters reading the lines the scene misses its mark.
Something all versions from De Morgan’s on have in common is that they’re told by mathematicians to mathematicians. By definition then members of the audience have already claimed a share of power and are looking for a way to feel better about that choice. The narrations must build community, and aggression works against that so the tellers take a respectful tone. It’s different when they’re defending against the non-mathematical world. Here’s De Morgan’s description, from the very same book that has the Euler-Diderot story, of an amateur mathematician who had the nerve not only to disagree publicly with famous mathematicians but doubled down on being told he was wrong:
The behavior of this singular character induces me to pay him the compliment which Achilles paid Hector, to drag him round the walls again and again. He was treated with unusual notice and in the most gentle manner. The unnamed mathematician, E. M. bestowed a volume of mild correspondence upon him; Rowan Hamilton quietly proved him wrong in a way accessible to an ordinary schoolboy; Whewell, as we shall see, gave him the means of seeing himself wrong, even more easily than by Hamilton’s method. Nothing would do ; it was small kick and silly fling at all; and he exposed his conceit by alleging that he, James Smith, had placed Whewell in the stocks. He will therefore be universally pronounced a proper object of the severest literary punishment: but the opinion of all who can put two propositions together will be that of the many strokes I have given, the hardest and most telling are my republications of his own attempts to reason.8
This De Morgan doesn’t gently invite his peers to self-soothe with shared humor and community reaffirmation — this De Morgan repeatedly announces his intention to physically assault a human being. Like many whose continued existence relies on brutal violence directed by others on their behalf De Morgan needs to justify his intention by showing how many have tried nonviolently to convince the heretic. He was given many chances to conform! Clearly he has willingly forfeited the protection of civilization! He is a semi-civilized subhuman! Beat his ass! De Morgan goes so far as to describe his criticisms as “strokes,” a punishment administered to slaves by their masters. The metaphor is striking and striking is the metaphor. Intellect righteously serves power by wielding a pen as an implement of physical torture and subaltern correction.
Which brings us to the next subject of this essay, a self-proclaimed anarchist known as William Gillis.9 Gillis, who seems to be some kind of minor cult figure among left-wing libertarians,10 is a dude with a website, some thoughts about things, and a tsunami of untempered rage. Apparently there are people to whom his work provides comfort and community given that it’s pretty widely published and discussed in certain circles. These people are to Gillis as the mathematicians in his audience were to De Morgan. He supplies conscience-soothing, community-creating myths to his followers. But Gillis lacks an essential tool that De Morgan had a surfeit of — knowledge authority.
Knowledge authority is the ability to have one’s assertions accepted as fact by virtue of one’s social position without adequate supporting argument.11 It’s not a function of the truth or falsity of the claims, which is irrelevant to the authority. Knowledge authority is a relation between knowers and consumers of knowledge rather than a property of the particular knowledge in question. It’s a social fact. Social facts are backed by society, and therefore in a coercive society ultimately backed by violence rather than reason. This situation is colorfully evoked by De Morgan’s putatively hyperbolic threats against a man who refused to accept his putatively rational arguments.
Scientists in modern American society have a great deal of knowledge authority because their work is essential to capitalism, the ultimate source of violence. We know physicists are telling the truth because their bombs explode. Their conclusions are justified by three unassailable social facts: They know stuff we don’t know, if we did know it we’d agree with them, and we will never know it like they do.
Ultimately this kind of authority doesn’t come from the truth values of its claims but from the utility of those claims to people with the power to impose worldviews that serve their purposes. Without power there’s no knowledge authority, but only authoritative knowledge. I am not saying that scientific claims are false, but rather that, true or false, they’re authoritative because they’re backed by force.12
So Gillis has a problem. Anarchists have zero knowledge authority in the world and less than that in anarchist circles. They can’t wield state violence for obvious reasons, and they can’t get other anarchists, hardened skeptics who’ve already rejected violence-backed state agendas, to accept their dogmas through mere amateur violence. Many anarchist writers resolve this dilemma by explaining their ideas clearly and respectfully to their audience to allow them to come to their own conclusions. Gillis chose another path: cosplay. See, for instance, his website bio, where he proclaims publicly for all the world to see that he “…is a second generation anarchist activist who studies high energy theoretical physics.”
What an interesting phrase! He “studies high energy theoretical physics.” In the ordinary denotational meaning of the words this is probably a completely true statement, but connotations can be tricky. The connotational meaning of the verb “to study” conjugated this way, in some kind of ongoing present tense,13 and followed by an academic discipline, changes radically depending on how the discipline is described. If it’s something general, like “physics,” the word “studies” retains its ordinary meaning. If someone asks what my kid does at college I could plausibly answer that she studies physics. But if the discipline is highly qualified, narrow, esoteric, a different meaning becomes available.
It still makes sense to say that a college kid “studies high energy physics”14 if they’re taking a series of classes in that subject, but it also makes sense to say of a working scientist engaged in original research that she or he “studies high energy physics.” It’s a kind of modesty, a way of saying that even though the subject knows more about high energy physics than all but a few hundred or even a few dozen people in all of human history, they’re still humble students. For instance, “Allison Hall studies high energy physics using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.” It’s easy to find plenty of similar examples.
So what is up with Gillis? He doesn’t seem ever to have published anything in any area of physics. He doesn’t have an advanced degree in the subject as far as I can tell, and nothing on his website suggests he’s done original scientific research.15 He may dip into Physics for Dummies to kill time in airports but equivocating on different connotations of the verb “studies” is dishonest — stolen humility rather than stolen valor. On his Twitter bio he calls himself a “lapsed physicist” and on Mastodon unqualifiedly a “physicist.” Without access to genuine authority the guy needs knowledge authority and he’s not shy about grabbing it.
The three social facts that scientific knowledge authority relies on are these: they know stuff we don’t, if we knew it we’d agree with them, and we can never know it. Gillis stakes his claim to such authority in a remarkable essay, the general tenor of which is well-represented by this passage, a sort of Platonic ideal of the first and third pillars:
The qualia of physics and math, the richness, the crystal clarity, the complex humor of someone’s proof, the overwhelming resonance of the revealed relations and their potency at further exploration make sad jokes of all the cheap fragmentary poetic or neural associations one can momentarily garner and perhaps struggle to hold onto from drugs and religions. Trying to explain this kind of experiential depth to those who have never even glimpsed mathematics beyond arithmetic isn’t like explaining sex to a preschooler, it’s like trying to explain the subjectivity of other individuals’ knowledge to a toddler or self-awareness to an newborn. The doors it opens to experiencing reality and the remarkable solidity of the whole affair are not even fathomable beforehand.16
And just like De Morgan, when Gillis is talking to his followers, rather than aggression he uses explanations, examples, arguments, discussion. And just like it did with De Morgan, Gillis’s knowledge authority plays a more tacit role in this context than it would for outsiders. He’s careful to project respect for his followers, a necessary element of any discursive style appropriate for intra-group community strengthening and reaffirmation.17
Although intragroup aggression destroys community rather than building it, extragroup aggression may build community. It’s a dangerous tool, though, and must be handled carefully. Thus the contextually reasonable Gillis, like the contextually reasonable De Morgan before him, can become quite unreasonable, even aggressive, when dealing with external threats to his community:18
We agree to leave you that stupid house you bought in the surburbs, with firm social norms against violating such. You can operate on the market, collect food and basic needs from post-state social services, and we’ll retrain anyone to work in professions without power. But the moment someone organizes a hierarchy or fields an ex-cop gang to spread terror again that gang gets exterminated by every surrounding watchful civilian. We have to be willing to, at the drop of a hat, race out of our houses and confront and stop with violence the predatory gangs the ex-cops will try to form.19
Like I said, though, such talk can be dangerous if not handled carefully. Remember that De Morgan, when fantasizing about the violence with which he’d like to meet the challenge posed to his power by an amateur mathematician, took care to demonstrate to his peers that the aggression was justified, that its target deserved its fate. Such moves supports social stability in the sense that they reassure spectators that as long as they meet relevant community norms they won’t be subject to a violent fate.
Without this reassurance the aggression can’t build community because the intended audience is too anxious to attend to the performance. Gillis is cheerfully planning vigilance committees and community lynchings and at least some of his followers, the ones with any sense, will wonder if they’ll end up lynched. It’s not hard to see proposed impromptu communitarian death squads settling personal scores for Gillis or other wannabe lefty-lib Robespierres. If leaders propose violence to build community they must have effective ways to reassure the community that they themselves won’t become victims.
To this end the criteria for outlawry must be as visible as possible and one way to do this is to perform the determination process as publicly as possible. Insiders must be reassured that they’ll get a fair trial if they’re suspected of being potential targets.20 A tentative approach might be useful, a sort of hand extended to someone who may be a transgressor but who could conceivably still redeem themselves by conforming if offered a chance. If they turn out to be the first Gillis can make an example of them. If the second he may gain a follower.
De Morgan’s litany of evidence justifying his proposed violence is part of this process and we can see the same decision process unfolding in this recent toot thread, which began with Mastodon user Ben Chambers posting the following claim:21
knowledge and economic calculation problems are solved by relational egalitarianism, democracy, and usufructuary commons, not by market transaction, property, and commercial enclosure
This makes a lot of sense to me, but it’s a fairly dense aphorism. I can see how people might fail to understand it if they haven’t been thinking along these lines or aren’t willing to put some thought into deciphering it. But regardless of what you think about the truth or the content of the claim it’s clear that it’s plausible, to be taken seriously, and that it has something to do with left libertarian concerns. Gillis, as some kind of left libertarian leader, must be alert to social-capital-building opportunities. Inducing a heretic to recant is such an opportunity, and violently attacking a heretic, whether metaphorically or literally, is another. Gillis, needing to decide which is appropriate in this case, a few hours later, chimed in with a who-goes-there challenge: “Cool assertion. Now let’s see the proof!”22
There is so much aggression imbedded in just these few small words! The word “cool” followed by a communicational noun, “assertion,” evokes the tagline “cool story, bro,” which, as Wiktionary tells us, is “[u]sed to dismiss a comment perceived as boring or pointless, or refute an anecdote that one considers difficult to believe.” The next word, “assertion,” does more than just connotationally influence the word “cool.” First, it’s an unusual word choice, at least superficially. Compare the n-gram viewer results for it compared to “claim,” “statement,” and “idea,” all of which seem much more natural in the sentence.
This result suggests that the choice was deliberate, and as such likely intended at least to add an air of esoteric technical knowledge to Gillis’s challenge. It’s entirely plausible that Gillis meant to evoke the spirit of proof by assertion, which is an informal fallacy. We’ll see below that Gillis relies heavily on this kind of connotational innuendo, each individual instance of which might be a coincidence but the aggregate weight of the instances is hard to explain other than by intention. So the first two words of Gillis’s toot constitute a rhetorically complex and ideologically loaded challege to Ben Chambers’s aphorism.23
The next sentence, wherein Gillis demands “a proof” of Chambers’s claim, is more straightforward. It’s also an archetypal invocation of scientific knowledge authority, by the way. The word “proof” sounds technical, like there are technical standards that make an argument so good, so foolproof, that it can be called “a proof.” Self-proclaimed physicist Gillis understands this, do you?! Mathematics is the paradigmatic example of a discipline whose claims admit of “proof,” and when people hear the word in even mildly technical contexts they tend to visualize 9th grade geometry and its associated feelings of ignorance and shame. But mathematical ideas of proof, whatever they might be, can’t apply outside of mathematics, so this must not be what Gillis means.24
The general consensus, shared by such mainstream figures as Albert Einstein and Karl Popper, is that scientific truths don’t admit of definitive proof, but can only be definitively disproved. Popper, quoted in Wikipedia’s article on Scientific Evidence, said:
In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by ‘proof’ an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory.
Gillis spends a lot of energy and time pretending to be a scientist, so maybe he’s referring to some kind of scientific but not mathematical proof, something that would establish the truth of the claim not necessarily mathematically but in accordance with the epistemological standards of some accepted scientific community. The consensus is that each scientific discipline is a community of knowers with its own community standards of proof. If someone demands a proof of a non-mathematical statement, then, it’s appropriate, if only for the sake of efficiency, to ask what standards of proof they’ll accept, which I did in my response to Gillis:
What kind of proof do you think statements like that admit? This is a purely good faith question, because it seems like an important issue, and one I don’t know the answer to even after a lot of thought.
Such questions are a staple of trolls, but I wasn’t trolling, so I asserted my good faith. Of course trolls assert their good faith too, so it’s also respectful and pragmatic to offer some evidence that one’s question is thoughtful as a token of commitment to the discussion, which I did. My complete response is here and in the footnote.25 I don’t want to rehash the argument in this essay, but some parts of my response are necessary to understand Gillis’s tactics.
First, I outlined how I use the word “proof,” which is essentially as it’s used in mathematics. Second, to give a motive to my question other than trolling I explained why I don’t think that the word applies in that sense to anything outside of mathematics, which makes it reasonable to ask what he means by the word. Third, I used the word “worldviews” to describe the epistemological frameworks in which proof-admitting truths reside. I mean by this essentially what Thomas Kuhn meant by “paradigms” in a purely scientific context, although the concept has much broader application.
Finally, I proposed that however the problems mentioned by Chambers have been solved in the past it couldn’t have to do with private property, an institution created and maintained at great cost by coercive states, which therefore has only existed for a few centuries. Like I said, I’m not arguing here for the truth of these claims, although I believe they are true, but just describing them enough to make Gillis’s response intelligible:
Naw. You can’t negate the constraints of gravity (() or complexity classes ) by changing worldview.
As to your historical appeal. 1) Almost every hunter-gatherer society recognizes some form of property, indeed the Kung San can even trade land titles! 2) No one is saying you can’t live inefficiently, but pursuit of material freedom involves pursuit of some measure of economic efficiency.
The first sentence is a single word, a negation, denotationally simple but connotationally complex. This word suggests weariness, a speaker worn down by refuting the same tired arguments against the rationality that he, as a physicist and member of the knowledge elite, is required by all he considers sacred to defend. “Sigh,” it says. “Here we go again!” This move is intended to put me in my place, to let me know that I’m not even wrong, as physicists, even the self-proclaimed variety, love to say. My thoughts are long-ago-refuted cliches, and so on. The next sentence is more complex, containing shorthand versions of two purported arguments against my claim that propositional knowledge is only possible inside a worldview. He didn’t address standards of proof at all.26
The rest of his response, about the !Kung, is based on an equivocation between the standard meaning of the phrase “private property” in economic discourse and whatever it means to hunter-gatherers who, whatever they’re doing with land they control, aren’t fencing people out of it in order to enslave them. The existence of private property in this sense relies on the existence of a state. No state, no private property. The !Kung don’t have a state, so they don’t have private property in the only sense the phrase could have meant in context.27
So what does it all mean? De Morgan, writing on behalf of capital’s world-spanning power, to justify his position in it and that of his peers, had to rationalize capital’s actually-existing violence. He was writing after-the-fact justifications for capital’s victory and his role in its maintenance and growth, his reliance on violence. De Morgan is defending the existing order, so has no need to court followers. His socially granted knowledge authority is an essential element of this process.
But Gillis is in a different position. He has no access to state power, no way to impose his individual will on the world by physical force, ultimately the only reliable way for one person to control multiple people. He lacks De Morgan’s legitimized knowledge authority but by hook or by crook has cooked up a functional substitute. It’s backed neither by the socially granted knowledge authority or potential state violence at De Morgan’s disposal, but it works in Gillis’s context. In short, what Gillis lacks is De Morgan’s state-associated political power.
If he wants to get anything done, then, he has to build political power outside the state. One way to do this, as I said, is through respectful discourse. Another is by dividing the world up into the chosen and the unchosen, the lynchers and the lynched. Promising followers a share in the impending violence, whether vicariously as violence-theorizers or directly as members of community lynch squads is a way to build power in the present, and that’s what Gillis is essentially up to. In particular, his unprovoked and untenable attack on an aphorism he didn’t take the time to understand can be fruitfully seen as an abortive political move.
Postscript: Because it’s not clear to me how much of my mental space a minor and fairly inconsequential figure like Gillis is worth it’s also not clear to me if I’ll ever write the second part of this essay, but if I did it would be about the kinds of worlds that might result from Gillis’s tactics. I was joking when I called him a wannabe Robespierre, but it’s not entirely a joke. His utopian visions terrify me, which will be the subject if it ever feels worth writing.
- Therefore God exists! Respond!
- Augustus De Morgan. A Budget of Paradoxes. Pp. 250-1.
- DIDEROT, voulant prouver la nullite et l’ineptie de cette pretendue preuve, mais ressentant malgre lui, l’embarras oil l’on est d’abord lorsqu’on decouvre chez les autres, le dessein de nous jouer, n’avoit pu echapper aux plaisanteries dont on etoit pret a l’assaillir; que cette aventure lui en faisant craindre d’autres encore, il avoit temoigne peu de temps apres le desir de retourner en France… Dieudonne Thiebault. Mes souvenirs de vingt ans de sejour a Berlin ou Frederic Le Grand, sa famille, sa cour, son gouvernement, son academie, ses ecoles, et ses amis litterateurs et philosophes par Dieudonne Thiebault. De Morgan also, less substantially, changes the denominator of the lefthand side of the equation to $n$ where Dieudonne has $z$, but that’s not important. I apologize for my lousy translation, which is a superficial rewrite of Google translate output.
- I have no idea if he was or not.
- For Chinese see The Mathematical Writings of Diderot. Krakeur and Krueger. Isis
Volume 33(2). June, 1941. For Arabic see The So-Called Euler-Diderot Incident. R. J. Gillings. Amer. Math. Monthly. 61(1954). 77-80. - 1806–1871.
- Capital’s modern uses for mathematics are so various, so technical, and so obscured that it’s hard to imagine describing them comprehensively. Piecewise methods like this essay are easier. That being said, mathematics in the service of engineering, e.g. weapons, infrastructure, strength of materials, and so on, is well-understood. For some less familiar aspects, Accounting for Slavery by Caitlin Rosenthal is astonishing. Without mathematical abstractions, she argues — among many, many other things — absentee ownership of plantations wouldn’t have been feasible. Think of how Atlantic history might have changed without this capability.
- In A Budget of Paradoxes pp. 104ff.
- I’m not omitting a link to Gillis’s Wikipedia page out of spite. At press time he didh’t have one. I am, however, noting that fact out of spite.
- I can’t keep track of what these folks like to call themselves. They act like libertarians and say they’re left-wing, so that’s what I call them. Read the first few paragraphs of their Wiki page for examples of their interminable terminologizing.
- This may not be a standard definition. I’m treating this as a technical term here, and defining it only for this discussion.
- Is this controversial? I feel like it might be, but it’s too much to argue for in detail here. The idea is that scientific theories will sometimes conclude that the natural order of the world requires people to allow themselves to starve in the face of abundant food, to die of exposure in the face of abundant housing. No one actually believes this when it’s themselves or their family that has to starve and die, so it can’t actually be true for anyone. Anyone would do anything to feed themselves and their children, and only the threat of a more violent fate than death by starvation can make them stop themselves. So the antihuman conclusions of science must be backed up by violence rather than by reason. But scientists don’t distinguish between kinds of conclusions. They’re all just scientific truths, value-free, they are so quick to remind us. They use the same justificatory tools on all of them, so their authority is backed by violence. Without violence they’d have to convince, and no one can convince someone that it’s not just pragmatic to starve themselves, but actually right and good. This is part of the reason mathematicians and presumably other scientists repeat myths like De Morgan’s. They dampen the contradictions rather than heightening them, they soothe the conscience rather than inspiring right action.
- I’m sorry I don’t know the technical term for this.
- I’m dropping the qualifier “theoretical” because it’s too easy to make fun of.
- I’m not at all claiming that possession of an advanced degree is required for someone to be reasonably called a physicist. All I’m saying is that I’m willing to treat possession of an advanced degree as sufficient to establish one’s status as a scientist. This is clearly overly generous, but in a direction that cuts against my conclusion, so it’s reasonable. Publishing scientific work is also sufficient but not necessary on this account, again being generous.
- Isn’t it fricking convenient that no one can experience whatever it is he’s talking about? How can we deny that it’s like whatever it is he says it’s like? I’ve been a working mathematician for four decades and I have no idea how to explain how deeply false, how deeply deceptive, this statement is. Gillis comes off as a clueless undergraduate suck-up wannabe grade booster trying to buddy-buddy a professor by falsely claiming to share their ultrarefined aesthetic perceptions. Making new science is hard work, much of it incredibly tedious, a fact missing from every one of Gillis’s descriptions. He doesn’t even know enough about science to know how revelatorily wrong his statements are. Gillis also inexplicably ignores the fact that many scientists also teach and almost all of us on the truth-and-beauty side of the business are teachers. One of our major activities is explaining whatever it is Gillis is going on about to a bunch of college kids, many of whom may or may not have glimpsed “mathematics beyond arithmetic,” but they don’t necessarily remember it. We teach those kids something about how to think about mathematics and science also. You shouldn’t take my word for it, though. If you know an actual working scientist ask them what they think of this passage and see if they don’t agree that it’s pure bullshit.
- Examples of the overtly reasonable Gillis abound, and here’s just one:
… under many systems of property-titles if the legal experts cannot reach consensus on who is the legitimate owner of an object nothing is done with the object in the meantime. Those involved in contending differing uses for an object in a propertyless society are directly capable of far more diverse means of negotiation, but so to, if they can’t reach consensus, then nothing is done with the object. Because literally everyone in the world has the capacity to veto.
William Gillis. From Whence do Property Titles Arise?. Appears in Markets Not Capitalism. Chartier and Johnson eds. Minor Compositions, 2011.
- De Morgan was defending the existing community of mathematicians. Gillis, as a revolutionary, defends at least two different communities. The first is the ideal community he and his comrades work towards and the second is the existing community made up of him and the comrades. This may complicate the analysis but I’m not really considering it in this essay.
- Quoted in The Superior Race of Good People —
On William Gillis’ “Bad people”. - Which is as good an explanation for public criminal court trials as anything else I’ve heard.
- This thread, which drew Gillis to my attention, is also a necessary condition for this essay’s existence.
- One possible objection to my line of reasoning here is a claim that Gillis wasn’t actually engaged in either of these activities but was just participating as an equal in the conversation. That he had no ulterior motives for participating, but just wanted to talk. To me this theory is utterly inconsistent with his over-the-top level of aggression. People whose only motive is the pleasure of the conversation aren’t generally so angry.
- It was at this point in the interaction, by the way, that I started to think about responding to Gillis. I had no idea who he was or why he so aggressively inserted himself into the conversation but I had been working intermittently on an essay about De Morgan’s version of the Euler Diderot incident and recognized the same dynamic at play. Learning more about Gillis and his career only solidified the picture.
- I’m applying the principle of charity here. If Gillis actually does mean mathematical proof his request is incoherent and not worthy of a response, so I don’t interpret it that way. I’m not arguing in favor of my claim that mathematical standards of proof can’t apply outside of mathematics, but only because it’s too tangential to this essay. The basic idea is that only problems which admit of acceptably mathematical solutions are part of mathematics. If a problem can’t be solved mathematically it’s not a mathematical problem. Likewise if a truth doesn’t admit of mathematical proof it’s not a mathematical truth. Does this strike you as a tautology? It is, but so is every other true statement. Change my mind about that if you can!
- I tend to think of proving statements as something that’s only possible in a system of propositional knowledge, where truth is established deductively, or at least synthetically in line with community standards. I’d go further and say that proof is only possible in systems of knowledge that have been artificially restricted to the kinds of truths that do admit of proof. Whatever the uses of proof-based knowledge, I don’t see how either of the two positions involved in the assertion could plausibly be seen as living in such an epistemological space.
Instead I think they’re more embedded in worldviews. If you see things one way one version is obviously true and if the other then the other is obviously true. But worldviews aren’t established propositionally. Propositional knowledge exists inside worldviews rather than the other way round.
Or maybe the answer is much more simple than that. In 200,000 years of human history private property and commercial enclosure have only existed for a few hundred. Knowledge and economic calculation problems were solved before private property existed or we wouldn’t be here today. Can they be solved after private property is smashed along with the state? No one knows the future, but obviously I think they can or why do I fight?
- The first argument, that “[y]ou can’t negate the constraints of gravity … by changing worldview,” seems to go like this:
1. By way of contradiction, assume propositional knowledge is only possible inside worldviews.
2. “[T]jhe constraints of gravity” are an example of propositional knowledge.
3. Therefore “the negation of the constraints of gravity” is an example of propositional knowledge.
4. Contradictory propositions can’t exist inside the same worldview.
5. Therefore it’s possible to establish the truth of “the negation of the constraints of gravity” by adopting an appropriate worldview.
6. Statement 5 is false, therefore statement 1 is false.That’s the strongest version of the argument I could come up with, although it’s not strong. I can’t even see how to refute it because it’s not clear what Gillis means by “the constraints of gravity.” If he means that I’ll still die if I jump off the roof no matter how I look at things, well, I agree. If he’s talking about the kind of thing that admits of proof, or does in his mind, maybe he means constraints of gravity as expressed in natural laws? If so, he’s going to have to explain a lot to overcome the historical fact that the constraints of gravity in that sense changed as physicists’ worldview changed from Newtonian to relativistic. Not only that, but he’s guilty of the fallacy of the converse here. I asserted that propositional knowledge exists inside worldviews but certainly not that given any piece of propositional knowledge there’s a worldview inside which it exists. Without this obviously false claim he doesn’t have an argument at all. There’s more to say about this, but not here.
- There’s no way to be sure about what Gillis means. He might not even know himself. But given his left-wing libertarian connections it’s possible he means something like Benjamin Tucker‘s idea of every household having community-granted control over 10 acres, or some fixed amount of land, which is supposed to be as I understand it determined by how much they can use and how much over which the community is willing to cede control. Like most of Tucker’s ideas this one is self-contradictory, false, and uninteresting.
#albert-einstein #augustus-de-morgan #ben-chambers #benjamin-tucker #catherine-the-great #denis-diderot #dieudonne-thiebault #epistemology #existence-of-god #falsifiability #folk-process #individualist-anarchism #jack-of-swords #karl-popper #knowledge-authority #left-wing-libertarianism #leonhard-euler #libertarianism #mastodon #mathematical-proof #paradigms #proof #science #science-worship #scientific-proof #thomas-kuhn #wannabe-lefty-lib-robespierres #william-gillis
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There is a story, universally known to mathematicians, about Leonhard Euler, Denis Diderot, Catherine the Great, and the epistemological authority of mathematics. It apparently first appeared in English in Augustus De Morgan‘s book A Budget of Paradoxes:
Diderot paid a visit to the Russian Court at the invitation of [Catherine the Great]. He conversed very freely, and gave the younger members of the Court circle a good deal of lively atheism. The Empress was much amused, but some of her councillors suggested that it might be desirable to check these expositions of doctrine. The Empress did not like to put a direct muzzle on her guest’s tongue, so the following plot was contrived. Diderot was informed that a learned mathematician was in possession of an algebraical demonstration of the existence of God, and would give it him before all the Court, if he desired to hear it. Diderot gladly consented: though the name of the mathematician is not given, it was Euler. He advanced towards Diderot, and said gravely, and in a tone of perfect conviction: Monsieur, $\frac{(a + b^n)}{n} = x$, donc Dieu existe; repondez!1 Diderot, to whom algebra was Hebrew, was embarrassed and disconcerted; while peals of laughter rose on all sides. He asked permission to return to France at once, which was granted.2
One interesting thing about this is the fact that De Morgan misrepresents the point of the anecdote he’s quoting. He attributes it to Dieudonné Thiébault, whose version ends quite differently:
…Diderot wanted to explain that this alleged proof was nonsense, but was unable to escape the embarrassment of realizing he was being fooled with and would not be able to escape the jokes with which they were ready to assail him…3
De Morgan’s version, contra Thiébault, paints Diderot as an actual clown, too ignorant of algebra to even understand the mockery. Mathematicians have been fervently repeating De Morgan’s version since he published it. It’s as foundational a myth for mathematicians as the story of George Washington and his dentures made of slaves’ teeth is for the United States. What lessons does it teach its audience? How does it comfort those who share it? Myths reinforce and reproduce social systems — what’s being reinforced here? How does this myth help reproduce the community that relies on it?
There’s a clue in De Morgan’s weirdest and least plausible addition — the claim that to Diderot “algebra was Hebrew.” Diderot, a famously brilliant guy, wrote an entire monograph on mathematics. If algebra to him was Hebrew it would only have been because he was fluent in Hebrew.4 The folk process really latched onto this detail, which shows its significance. One recounter changed “Hebrew” to “Chinese,” while another used “Arabic.”5 Thiebault wrote in 1804, De Morgan in 1872, and the other two in the early 20th Century. What had changed?
For one thing, capitalist domination of the world, still not a done deal in the 18th Century, was essentially complete by the turn of the 20th. This happened over the course of De Morgan’s lifespan.6 By then capital had discovered many of its modern uses for mathematics, and consequently mathematicians were integrated into social power structures in many of the same ways they are now.7 Which means that they were in the market for worldviews that justified their privilege in contrast to the violence necessary to create and maintain it.
This need is reflected in the evolution of the story. On first telling the point was obscure, perhaps because it was close to a description of something that actually happened. De Morgan had an axe that needed grinding, so he punched it up a little by beclowning an old-school renaissance man and natural philosopher of precisely the type that supplied the theoretical foundations of power in the 18th Century, of precisely the type whose role was now filled in part by mathematicians. But by the first decades of the 20th Century much graver threats to peace of mind had surfaced, which therefore called for new mythmaking.
The replacement of Hebrew, in the relevant time a dead language, with Arabic and Chinese, in their relevant times languages spoken by stereotypically subhuman colonised peoples, served to pearl-coat the jagged violence of colonialism, much more apparent in elite white circles by the early 20th Century than had previously been the case. The story justifies white Europe’s colonial violence by framing its intellectual architects as rightfully, due to their unassailable knowledge authority, advising Catherine the Great’s world-ruling counterparts.
Another essential element of De Morgan’s version of the story is the stature of the characters, including his own personal stature. Euler, the greatest mathematician of his time, was responsible for much of the framework of modern mathematics. Carl Gauss, himself the greatest mathematician of his time, said that “The study of Euler’s works will remain the best school for the different fields of mathematics, and nothing else can replace it.”
Diderot’s fame is also essential to the story’s point. Titans clashed and the one with the recognizably, at least to De Morgan, modern worldview won out. Part of the pleasure, part of the community, that the anecdote provides to mathematicians in its recounting lies in vicarious identification with Euler’s triumph and its parallel to their own triumphs. Another part lies in vicariously identifying oneself with a cause championed by the also-eminent De Morgan. Without archetypally famous characters reading the lines the scene misses its mark.
Something all versions from De Morgan’s on have in common is that they’re told by mathematicians to mathematicians. By definition then members of the audience have already claimed a share of power and are looking for a way to feel better about that choice. The narrations must build community, and aggression works against that so the tellers take a respectful tone. It’s different when they’re defending against the non-mathematical world. Here’s De Morgan’s description, from the very same book that has the Euler-Diderot story, of an amateur mathematician who had the nerve not only to disagree publicly with famous mathematicians but doubled down on being told he was wrong:
The behavior of this singular character induces me to pay him the compliment which Achilles paid Hector, to drag him round the walls again and again. He was treated with unusual notice and in the most gentle manner. The unnamed mathematician, E. M. bestowed a volume of mild correspondence upon him; Rowan Hamilton quietly proved him wrong in a way accessible to an ordinary schoolboy; Whewell, as we shall see, gave him the means of seeing himself wrong, even more easily than by Hamilton’s method. Nothing would do ; it was small kick and silly fling at all; and he exposed his conceit by alleging that he, James Smith, had placed Whewell in the stocks. He will therefore be universally pronounced a proper object of the severest literary punishment: but the opinion of all who can put two propositions together will be that of the many strokes I have given, the hardest and most telling are my republications of his own attempts to reason.8
This De Morgan doesn’t gently invite his peers to self-soothe with shared humor and community reaffirmation — this De Morgan repeatedly announces his intention to physically assault a human being. Like many whose continued existence relies on brutal violence directed by others on their behalf De Morgan needs to justify his intention by showing how many have tried nonviolently to convince the heretic. He was given many chances to conform! Clearly he has willingly forfeited the protection of civilization! He is a semi-civilized subhuman! Beat his ass! De Morgan goes so far as to describe his criticisms as “strokes,” a punishment administered to slaves by their masters. The metaphor is striking and striking is the metaphor. Intellect righteously serves power by wielding a pen as an implement of physical torture and subaltern correction.
Which brings us to the next subject of this essay, a self-proclaimed anarchist known as William Gillis.9 Gillis, who seems to be some kind of minor cult figure among left-wing libertarians,10 is a dude with a website, some thoughts about things, and a tsunami of untempered rage. Apparently there are people to whom his work provides comfort and community given that it’s pretty widely published and discussed in certain circles. These people are to Gillis as the mathematicians in his audience were to De Morgan. He supplies conscience-soothing, community-creating myths to his followers. But Gillis lacks an essential tool that De Morgan had a surfeit of — knowledge authority.
Knowledge authority is the ability to have one’s assertions accepted as fact by virtue of one’s social position without adequate supporting argument.11 It’s not a function of the truth or falsity of the claims, which is irrelevant to the authority. Knowledge authority is a relation between knowers and consumers of knowledge rather than a property of the particular knowledge in question. It’s a social fact. Social facts are backed by society, and therefore in a coercive society ultimately backed by violence rather than reason. This situation is colorfully evoked by De Morgan’s putatively hyperbolic threats against a man who refused to accept his putatively rational arguments.
Scientists in modern American society have a great deal of knowledge authority because their work is essential to capitalism, the ultimate source of violence. We know physicists are telling the truth because their bombs explode. Their conclusions are justified by three unassailable social facts: They know stuff we don’t know, if we did know it we’d agree with them, and we will never know it like they do.
Ultimately this kind of authority doesn’t come from the truth values of its claims but from the utility of those claims to people with the power to impose worldviews that serve their purposes. Without power there’s no knowledge authority, but only authoritative knowledge. I am not saying that scientific claims are false, but rather that, true or false, they’re authoritative because they’re backed by force.12
So Gillis has a problem. Anarchists have zero knowledge authority in the world and less than that in anarchist circles. They can’t wield state violence for obvious reasons, and they can’t get other anarchists, hardened skeptics who’ve already rejected violence-backed state agendas, to accept their dogmas through mere amateur violence. Many anarchist writers resolve this dilemma by explaining their ideas clearly and respectfully to their audience to allow them to come to their own conclusions. Gillis chose another path: cosplay. See, for instance, his website bio, where he proclaims publicly for all the world to see that he “…is a second generation anarchist activist who studies high energy theoretical physics.”
What an interesting phrase! He “studies high energy theoretical physics.” In the ordinary denotational meaning of the words this is probably a completely true statement, but connotations can be tricky. The connotational meaning of the verb “to study” conjugated this way, in some kind of ongoing present tense,13 and followed by an academic discipline, changes radically depending on how the discipline is described. If it’s something general, like “physics,” the word “studies” retains its ordinary meaning. If someone asks what my kid does at college I could plausibly answer that she studies physics. But if the discipline is highly qualified, narrow, esoteric, a different meaning becomes available.
It still makes sense to say that a college kid “studies high energy physics”14 if they’re taking a series of classes in that subject, but it also makes sense to say of a working scientist engaged in original research that she or he “studies high energy physics.” It’s a kind of modesty, a way of saying that even though the subject knows more about high energy physics than all but a few hundred or even a few dozen people in all of human history, they’re still humble students. For instance, “Allison Hall studies high energy physics using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.” It’s easy to find plenty of similar examples.
So what is up with Gillis? He doesn’t seem ever to have published anything in any area of physics. He doesn’t have an advanced degree in the subject as far as I can tell, and nothing on his website suggests he’s done original scientific research.15 He may dip into Physics for Dummies to kill time in airports but equivocating on different connotations of the verb “studies” is dishonest — stolen humility rather than stolen valor. On his Twitter bio he calls himself a “lapsed physicist” and on Mastodon unqualifiedly a “physicist.” Without access to genuine authority the guy needs knowledge authority and he’s not shy about grabbing it.
The three social facts that scientific knowledge authority relies on are these: they know stuff we don’t, if we knew it we’d agree with them, and we can never know it. Gillis stakes his claim to such authority in a remarkable essay, the general tenor of which is well-represented by this passage, a sort of Platonic ideal of the first and third pillars:
The qualia of physics and math, the richness, the crystal clarity, the complex humor of someone’s proof, the overwhelming resonance of the revealed relations and their potency at further exploration make sad jokes of all the cheap fragmentary poetic or neural associations one can momentarily garner and perhaps struggle to hold onto from drugs and religions. Trying to explain this kind of experiential depth to those who have never even glimpsed mathematics beyond arithmetic isn’t like explaining sex to a preschooler, it’s like trying to explain the subjectivity of other individuals’ knowledge to a toddler or self-awareness to an newborn. The doors it opens to experiencing reality and the remarkable solidity of the whole affair are not even fathomable beforehand.16
And just like De Morgan, when Gillis is talking to his followers, rather than aggression he uses explanations, examples, arguments, discussion. And just like it did with De Morgan, Gillis’s knowledge authority plays a more tacit role in this context than it would for outsiders. He’s careful to project respect for his followers, a necessary element of any discursive style appropriate for intra-group community strengthening and reaffirmation.17
Although intragroup aggression destroys community rather than building it, extragroup aggression may build community. It’s a dangerous tool, though, and must be handled carefully. Thus the contextually reasonable Gillis, like the contextually reasonable De Morgan before him, can become quite unreasonable, even aggressive, when dealing with external threats to his community:18
We agree to leave you that stupid house you bought in the surburbs, with firm social norms against violating such. You can operate on the market, collect food and basic needs from post-state social services, and we’ll retrain anyone to work in professions without power. But the moment someone organizes a hierarchy or fields an ex-cop gang to spread terror again that gang gets exterminated by every surrounding watchful civilian. We have to be willing to, at the drop of a hat, race out of our houses and confront and stop with violence the predatory gangs the ex-cops will try to form.19
Like I said, though, such talk can be dangerous if not handled carefully. Remember that De Morgan, when fantasizing about the violence with which he’d like to meet the challenge posed to his power by an amateur mathematician, took care to demonstrate to his peers that the aggression was justified, that its target deserved its fate. Such moves supports social stability in the sense that they reassure spectators that as long as they meet relevant community norms they won’t be subject to a violent fate.
Without this reassurance the aggression can’t build community because the intended audience is too anxious to attend to the performance. Gillis is cheerfully planning vigilance committees and community lynchings and at least some of his followers, the ones with any sense, will wonder if they’ll end up lynched. It’s not hard to see proposed impromptu communitarian death squads settling personal scores for Gillis or other wannabe lefty-lib Robespierres. If leaders propose violence to build community they must have effective ways to reassure the community that they themselves won’t become victims.
To this end the criteria for outlawry must be as visible as possible and one way to do this is to perform the determination process as publicly as possible. Insiders must be reassured that they’ll get a fair trial if they’re suspected of being potential targets.20 A tentative approach might be useful, a sort of hand extended to someone who may be a transgressor but who could conceivably still redeem themselves by conforming if offered a chance. If they turn out to be the first Gillis can make an example of them. If the second he may gain a follower.
De Morgan’s litany of evidence justifying his proposed violence is part of this process and we can see the same decision process unfolding in this recent toot thread, which began with Mastodon user Ben Chambers posting the following claim:21
knowledge and economic calculation problems are solved by relational egalitarianism, democracy, and usufructuary commons, not by market transaction, property, and commercial enclosure
This makes a lot of sense to me, but it’s a fairly dense aphorism. I can see how people might fail to understand it if they haven’t been thinking along these lines or aren’t willing to put some thought into deciphering it. But regardless of what you think about the truth or the content of the claim it’s clear that it’s plausible, to be taken seriously, and that it has something to do with left libertarian concerns. Gillis, as some kind of left libertarian leader, must be alert to social-capital-building opportunities. Inducing a heretic to recant is such an opportunity, and violently attacking a heretic, whether metaphorically or literally, is another. Gillis, needing to decide which is appropriate in this case, a few hours later, chimed in with a who-goes-there challenge: “Cool assertion. Now let’s see the proof!”22
There is so much aggression imbedded in just these few small words! The word “cool” followed by a communicational noun, “assertion,” evokes the tagline “cool story, bro,” which, as Wiktionary tells us, is “[u]sed to dismiss a comment perceived as boring or pointless, or refute an anecdote that one considers difficult to believe.” The next word, “assertion,” does more than just connotationally influence the word “cool.” First, it’s an unusual word choice, at least superficially. Compare the n-gram viewer results for it compared to “claim,” “statement,” and “idea,” all of which seem much more natural in the sentence.
This result suggests that the choice was deliberate, and as such likely intended at least to add an air of esoteric technical knowledge to Gillis’s challenge. It’s entirely plausible that Gillis meant to evoke the spirit of proof by assertion, which is an informal fallacy. We’ll see below that Gillis relies heavily on this kind of connotational innuendo, each individual instance of which might be a coincidence but the aggregate weight of the instances is hard to explain other than by intention. So the first two words of Gillis’s toot constitute a rhetorically complex and ideologically loaded challege to Ben Chambers’s aphorism.23
The next sentence, wherein Gillis demands “a proof” of Chambers’s claim, is more straightforward. It’s also an archetypal invocation of scientific knowledge authority, by the way. The word “proof” sounds technical, like there are technical standards that make an argument so good, so foolproof, that it can be called “a proof.” Self-proclaimed physicist Gillis understands this, do you?! Mathematics is the paradigmatic example of a discipline whose claims admit of “proof,” and when people hear the word in even mildly technical contexts they tend to visualize 9th grade geometry and its associated feelings of ignorance and shame. But mathematical ideas of proof, whatever they might be, can’t apply outside of mathematics, so this must not be what Gillis means.24
The general consensus, shared by such mainstream figures as Albert Einstein and Karl Popper, is that scientific truths don’t admit of definitive proof, but can only be definitively disproved. Popper, quoted in Wikipedia’s article on Scientific Evidence, said:
In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by ‘proof’ an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory.
Gillis spends a lot of energy and time pretending to be a scientist, so maybe he’s referring to some kind of scientific but not mathematical proof, something that would establish the truth of the claim not necessarily mathematically but in accordance with the epistemological standards of some accepted scientific community. The consensus is that each scientific discipline is a community of knowers with its own community standards of proof. If someone demands a proof of a non-mathematical statement, then, it’s appropriate, if only for the sake of efficiency, to ask what standards of proof they’ll accept, which I did in my response to Gillis:
What kind of proof do you think statements like that admit? This is a purely good faith question, because it seems like an important issue, and one I don’t know the answer to even after a lot of thought.
Such questions are a staple of trolls, but I wasn’t trolling, so I asserted my good faith. Of course trolls assert their good faith too, so it’s also respectful and pragmatic to offer some evidence that one’s question is thoughtful as a token of commitment to the discussion, which I did. My complete response is here and in the footnote.25 I don’t want to rehash the argument in this essay, but some parts of my response are necessary to understand Gillis’s tactics.
First, I outlined how I use the word “proof,” which is essentially as it’s used in mathematics. Second, to give a motive to my question other than trolling I explained why I don’t think that the word applies in that sense to anything outside of mathematics, which makes it reasonable to ask what he means by the word. Third, I used the word “worldviews” to describe the epistemological frameworks in which proof-admitting truths reside. I mean by this essentially what Thomas Kuhn meant by “paradigms” in a purely scientific context, although the concept has much broader application.
Finally, I proposed that however the problems mentioned by Chambers have been solved in the past it couldn’t have to do with private property, an institution created and maintained at great cost by coercive states, which therefore has only existed for a few centuries. Like I said, I’m not arguing here for the truth of these claims, although I believe they are true, but just describing them enough to make Gillis’s response intelligible:
Naw. You can’t negate the constraints of gravity (() or complexity classes ) by changing worldview.
As to your historical appeal. 1) Almost every hunter-gatherer society recognizes some form of property, indeed the Kung San can even trade land titles! 2) No one is saying you can’t live inefficiently, but pursuit of material freedom involves pursuit of some measure of economic efficiency.
The first sentence is a single word, a negation, denotationally simple but connotationally complex. This word suggests weariness, a speaker worn down by refuting the same tired arguments against the rationality that he, as a physicist and member of the knowledge elite, is required by all he considers sacred to defend. “Sigh,” it says. “Here we go again!” This move is intended to put me in my place, to let me know that I’m not even wrong, as physicists, even the self-proclaimed variety, love to say. My thoughts are long-ago-refuted cliches, and so on. The next sentence is more complex, containing shorthand versions of two purported arguments against my claim that propositional knowledge is only possible inside a worldview. He didn’t address standards of proof at all.26
The rest of his response, about the !Kung, is based on an equivocation between the standard meaning of the phrase “private property” in economic discourse and whatever it means to hunter-gatherers who, whatever they’re doing with land they control, aren’t fencing people out of it in order to enslave them. The existence of private property in this sense relies on the existence of a state. No state, no private property. The !Kung don’t have a state, so they don’t have private property in the only sense the phrase could have meant in context.27
So what does it all mean? De Morgan, writing on behalf of capital’s world-spanning power, to justify his position in it and that of his peers, had to rationalize capital’s actually-existing violence. He was writing after-the-fact justifications for capital’s victory and his role in its maintenance and growth, his reliance on violence. De Morgan is defending the existing order, so has no need to court followers. His socially granted knowledge authority is an essential element of this process.
But Gillis is in a different position. He has no access to state power, no way to impose his individual will on the world by physical force, ultimately the only reliable way for one person to control multiple people. He lacks De Morgan’s legitimized knowledge authority but by hook or by crook has cooked up a functional substitute. It’s backed neither by the socially granted knowledge authority or potential state violence at De Morgan’s disposal, but it works in Gillis’s context. In short, what Gillis lacks is De Morgan’s state-associated political power.
If he wants to get anything done, then, he has to build political power outside the state. One way to do this, as I said, is through respectful discourse. Another is by dividing the world up into the chosen and the unchosen, the lynchers and the lynched. Promising followers a share in the impending violence, whether vicariously as violence-theorizers or directly as members of community lynch squads is a way to build power in the present, and that’s what Gillis is essentially up to. In particular, his unprovoked and untenable attack on an aphorism he didn’t take the time to understand can be fruitfully seen as an abortive political move.
Postscript: Because it’s not clear to me how much of my mental space a minor and fairly inconsequential figure like Gillis is worth it’s also not clear to me if I’ll ever write the second part of this essay, but if I did it would be about the kinds of worlds that might result from Gillis’s tactics. I was joking when I called him a wannabe Robespierre, but it’s not entirely a joke. His utopian visions terrify me, which will be the subject if it ever feels worth writing.
- Therefore God exists! Respond!
- Augustus De Morgan. A Budget of Paradoxes. Pp. 250-1.
- DIDEROT, voulant prouver la nullite et l’ineptie de cette pretendue preuve, mais ressentant malgre lui, l’embarras oil l’on est d’abord lorsqu’on decouvre chez les autres, le dessein de nous jouer, n’avoit pu echapper aux plaisanteries dont on etoit pret a l’assaillir; que cette aventure lui en faisant craindre d’autres encore, il avoit temoigne peu de temps apres le desir de retourner en France… Dieudonne Thiebault. Mes souvenirs de vingt ans de sejour a Berlin ou Frederic Le Grand, sa famille, sa cour, son gouvernement, son academie, ses ecoles, et ses amis litterateurs et philosophes par Dieudonne Thiebault. De Morgan also, less substantially, changes the denominator of the lefthand side of the equation to $n$ where Dieudonne has $z$, but that’s not important. I apologize for my lousy translation, which is a superficial rewrite of Google translate output.
- I have no idea if he was or not.
- For Chinese see The Mathematical Writings of Diderot. Krakeur and Krueger. Isis
Volume 33(2). June, 1941. For Arabic see The So-Called Euler-Diderot Incident. R. J. Gillings. Amer. Math. Monthly. 61(1954). 77-80. - 1806–1871.
- Capital’s modern uses for mathematics are so various, so technical, and so obscured that it’s hard to imagine describing them comprehensively. Piecewise methods like this essay are easier. That being said, mathematics in the service of engineering, e.g. weapons, infrastructure, strength of materials, and so on, is well-understood. For some less familiar aspects, Accounting for Slavery by Caitlin Rosenthal is astonishing. Without mathematical abstractions, she argues — among many, many other things — absentee ownership of plantations wouldn’t have been feasible. Think of how Atlantic history might have changed without this capability.
- In A Budget of Paradoxes pp. 104ff.
- I’m not omitting a link to Gillis’s Wikipedia page out of spite. At press time he didh’t have one. I am, however, noting that fact out of spite.
- I can’t keep track of what these folks like to call themselves. They act like libertarians and say they’re left-wing, so that’s what I call them. Read the first few paragraphs of their Wiki page for examples of their interminable terminologizing.
- This may not be a standard definition. I’m treating this as a technical term here, and defining it only for this discussion.
- Is this controversial? I feel like it might be, but it’s too much to argue for in detail here. The idea is that scientific theories will sometimes conclude that the natural order of the world requires people to allow themselves to starve in the face of abundant food, to die of exposure in the face of abundant housing. No one actually believes this when it’s themselves or their family that has to starve and die, so it can’t actually be true for anyone. Anyone would do anything to feed themselves and their children, and only the threat of a more violent fate than death by starvation can make them stop themselves. So the antihuman conclusions of science must be backed up by violence rather than by reason. But scientists don’t distinguish between kinds of conclusions. They’re all just scientific truths, value-free, they are so quick to remind us. They use the same justificatory tools on all of them, so their authority is backed by violence. Without violence they’d have to convince, and no one can convince someone that it’s not just pragmatic to starve themselves, but actually right and good. This is part of the reason mathematicians and presumably other scientists repeat myths like De Morgan’s. They dampen the contradictions rather than heightening them, they soothe the conscience rather than inspiring right action.
- I’m sorry I don’t know the technical term for this.
- I’m dropping the qualifier “theoretical” because it’s too easy to make fun of.
- I’m not at all claiming that possession of an advanced degree is required for someone to be reasonably called a physicist. All I’m saying is that I’m willing to treat possession of an advanced degree as sufficient to establish one’s status as a scientist. This is clearly overly generous, but in a direction that cuts against my conclusion, so it’s reasonable. Publishing scientific work is also sufficient but not necessary on this account, again being generous.
- Isn’t it fricking convenient that no one can experience whatever it is he’s talking about? How can we deny that it’s like whatever it is he says it’s like? I’ve been a working mathematician for four decades and I have no idea how to explain how deeply false, how deeply deceptive, this statement is. Gillis comes off as a clueless undergraduate suck-up wannabe grade booster trying to buddy-buddy a professor by falsely claiming to share their ultrarefined aesthetic perceptions. Making new science is hard work, much of it incredibly tedious, a fact missing from every one of Gillis’s descriptions. He doesn’t even know enough about science to know how revelatorily wrong his statements are. Gillis also inexplicably ignores the fact that many scientists also teach and almost all of us on the truth-and-beauty side of the business are teachers. One of our major activities is explaining whatever it is Gillis is going on about to a bunch of college kids, many of whom may or may not have glimpsed “mathematics beyond arithmetic,” but they don’t necessarily remember it. We teach those kids something about how to think about mathematics and science also. You shouldn’t take my word for it, though. If you know an actual working scientist ask them what they think of this passage and see if they don’t agree that it’s pure bullshit.
- Examples of the overtly reasonable Gillis abound, and here’s just one:
… under many systems of property-titles if the legal experts cannot reach consensus on who is the legitimate owner of an object nothing is done with the object in the meantime. Those involved in contending differing uses for an object in a propertyless society are directly capable of far more diverse means of negotiation, but so to, if they can’t reach consensus, then nothing is done with the object. Because literally everyone in the world has the capacity to veto.
William Gillis. From Whence do Property Titles Arise?. Appears in Markets Not Capitalism. Chartier and Johnson eds. Minor Compositions, 2011.
- De Morgan was defending the existing community of mathematicians. Gillis, as a revolutionary, defends at least two different communities. The first is the ideal community he and his comrades work towards and the second is the existing community made up of him and the comrades. This may complicate the analysis but I’m not really considering it in this essay.
- Quoted in The Superior Race of Good People —
On William Gillis’ “Bad people”. - Which is as good an explanation for public criminal court trials as anything else I’ve heard.
- This thread, which drew Gillis to my attention, is also a necessary condition for this essay’s existence.
- One possible objection to my line of reasoning here is a claim that Gillis wasn’t actually engaged in either of these activities but was just participating as an equal in the conversation. That he had no ulterior motives for participating, but just wanted to talk. To me this theory is utterly inconsistent with his over-the-top level of aggression. People whose only motive is the pleasure of the conversation aren’t generally so angry.
- It was at this point in the interaction, by the way, that I started to think about responding to Gillis. I had no idea who he was or why he so aggressively inserted himself into the conversation but I had been working intermittently on an essay about De Morgan’s version of the Euler Diderot incident and recognized the same dynamic at play. Learning more about Gillis and his career only solidified the picture.
- I’m applying the principle of charity here. If Gillis actually does mean mathematical proof his request is incoherent and not worthy of a response, so I don’t interpret it that way. I’m not arguing in favor of my claim that mathematical standards of proof can’t apply outside of mathematics, but only because it’s too tangential to this essay. The basic idea is that only problems which admit of acceptably mathematical solutions are part of mathematics. If a problem can’t be solved mathematically it’s not a mathematical problem. Likewise if a truth doesn’t admit of mathematical proof it’s not a mathematical truth. Does this strike you as a tautology? It is, but so is every other true statement. Change my mind about that if you can!
- I tend to think of proving statements as something that’s only possible in a system of propositional knowledge, where truth is established deductively, or at least synthetically in line with community standards. I’d go further and say that proof is only possible in systems of knowledge that have been artificially restricted to the kinds of truths that do admit of proof. Whatever the uses of proof-based knowledge, I don’t see how either of the two positions involved in the assertion could plausibly be seen as living in such an epistemological space.
Instead I think they’re more embedded in worldviews. If you see things one way one version is obviously true and if the other then the other is obviously true. But worldviews aren’t established propositionally. Propositional knowledge exists inside worldviews rather than the other way round.
Or maybe the answer is much more simple than that. In 200,000 years of human history private property and commercial enclosure have only existed for a few hundred. Knowledge and economic calculation problems were solved before private property existed or we wouldn’t be here today. Can they be solved after private property is smashed along with the state? No one knows the future, but obviously I think they can or why do I fight?
- The first argument, that “[y]ou can’t negate the constraints of gravity … by changing worldview,” seems to go like this:
1. By way of contradiction, assume propositional knowledge is only possible inside worldviews.
2. “[T]jhe constraints of gravity” are an example of propositional knowledge.
3. Therefore “the negation of the constraints of gravity” is an example of propositional knowledge.
4. Contradictory propositions can’t exist inside the same worldview.
5. Therefore it’s possible to establish the truth of “the negation of the constraints of gravity” by adopting an appropriate worldview.
6. Statement 5 is false, therefore statement 1 is false.That’s the strongest version of the argument I could come up with, although it’s not strong. I can’t even see how to refute it because it’s not clear what Gillis means by “the constraints of gravity.” If he means that I’ll still die if I jump off the roof no matter how I look at things, well, I agree. If he’s talking about the kind of thing that admits of proof, or does in his mind, maybe he means constraints of gravity as expressed in natural laws? If so, he’s going to have to explain a lot to overcome the historical fact that the constraints of gravity in that sense changed as physicists’ worldview changed from Newtonian to relativistic. Not only that, but he’s guilty of the fallacy of the converse here. I asserted that propositional knowledge exists inside worldviews but certainly not that given any piece of propositional knowledge there’s a worldview inside which it exists. Without this obviously false claim he doesn’t have an argument at all. There’s more to say about this, but not here.
- There’s no way to be sure about what Gillis means. He might not even know himself. But given his left-wing libertarian connections it’s possible he means something like Benjamin Tucker‘s idea of every household having community-granted control over 10 acres, or some fixed amount of land, which is supposed to be as I understand it determined by how much they can use and how much over which the community is willing to cede control. Like most of Tucker’s ideas this one is self-contradictory, false, and uninteresting.
#albert-einstein #augustus-de-morgan #ben-chambers #benjamin-tucker #catherine-the-great #denis-diderot #dieudonne-thiebault #epistemology #existence-of-god #falsifiability #folk-process #individualist-anarchism #jack-of-swords #karl-popper #knowledge-authority #left-wing-libertarianism #leonhard-euler #libertarianism #mastodon #mathematical-proof #paradigms #proof #science #science-worship #scientific-proof #thomas-kuhn #wannabe-lefty-lib-robespierres #william-gillis
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Cryptworm – Infectious Pathological Waste Review By Steel Druhm
UK disgusting death metal fiends Cryptworm have been quite prolific since 2022. Featuring members of Cryptic Shift and Rothadas, their Spewing Mephitic Putridity debut was a nauseating dose of raw sewagecore that made Autopsy seem hygienic by comparison. They followed that up barely a year later with Oozing Radioactive Vomition, and things felt a bit rushed and less impactful. They wisely took some time off thereafter, and now they return with third outing, Infectious Pathological Waste. While their overall approach hasn’t changed much from album to album, the quality of the writing has varied. This time, it feels like they put a bit more thought into the compositions, and some of the vile charm of the debut resurfaces through the slime and scuzz. Nothing does the heart good quite like seeing a happy Cryptworm!
Opener “Gallons of Molten Hominal Goo” greets you like a decaying old friend, and the gruesome, repulsive sounds contain the distinct aroma of early Carcass. This lump of excrement could have appeared on Symphonies of Sickness and fit like a maggot in a gunshot wound. The riffs are fairly rudimentary but have weight, and the vocals by Hanyi Tibor (Rothadas) are a cross between an industrial garbage disposal and a frat-house beer-belching contest. They are fucking disgusting, purulent, and utterly incomprehensible, but damn if they aren’t entertaining. “Maimed and Gutted” is a standout, going for a frantic thrashy panic attack with Cannibal Corpse-isms buried in the basement. It’s a road-grader of a brutal death song that veers into slam territory at times, and the riffs are greasy, sticky, and bellicose. My favorite macabre ditty is “Embedded with Parasitic Larvae,” where, intentionally or not, Tibor sounds like an undead version of the Swedish Chef from The Muppet Show. I cannot tell you why this enhances my enjoyment as much as it does, but fuck yes, Chef!
Infectious Pathological Waste by Cryptworm
On “Drowning in Purulent Excrementia,” they go extra slammy, and kitman Jamie Wintle starts to hit something that should be the pong snare, but it sounds like he’s beating on a skull or a femur. It’s weird, but I kinda like it, and it’s way better than that godawful PONG-PONG-PONG sound some tech and slam bands foist on you. Not every track is a sure-fire hit though, with “Gastrointestinal Seepage” feeling a bit too leaden and lethargic, though I appreciate Tibor’s extra nasty vocals where he seems to be coughing up a hairball full of razor blades and asbestos. I could complain that this feels like a very one-note album, but what death metal album isn’t really? At a tight 32 minutes, it goes by fast enough, though several tracks do have bloat issues that crimp enjoyment. The style Cryptworm opt to play necessitates keeping things in a 3-4 minute window, and when they push further, things get ropey and dopey.
Tibor does a tremendous, unpleasant job on vocals, sounding completely inhuman at all times. His unbelievably cartoonish subterranean croaks are a thing of hideous beauty, and I can’t get enough of them. His guitarwork is also to be applauded, borrowing the most objectionable bits of gristle from Autopsy, Cannibal Corpse, and Incantation to fuel the Cryptworm diet. Some of the leads are quite hooky, and I especially love the big beefy power chugs that dot the landscape. As on Oozing Radioactive Vomition, however, the songwriting can be inconsistent, and they don’t always know when enough is enough. There are some sick burners here to aggravate the savage altered beast, but a few tracks feel underbaked and deliver weaker tentacle slaps.
Cryptworm are a band I can’t help but root for as I root around in their repellant leavings, but I want them to be MOAR consistently deadly with their offal hammer. There’s plenty of fun stuff on Infectious Pathological Waste to marinate in, and it all reeks of the slaughterhouse. When it’s good, it’s rurl good. When it’s just okay, it’s still pretty fookin’ entertaining. Someday these chaps are gonna get their maggot larvae in a row and then, watch out! Until then, there are worse ways to kill brain cells than these odious odes to the grave.
Rating: 3.0/5.0
#2026 #Autopsy #CannibalCorpse #Carcass #CrypticShift #Cryptworm #DeathMetal #InfectiousPathologicalWaste #Mar26 #MeSacoUnOjoRecords #Review #Reviews #Rothadás #SymphoniesOfSickness #UKMetal
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Me Saco Un Ojo
Websites: cryptworm.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/cryptworm | instagram.com/cryptwormofficial
Releases Worldwide: March 27th, 2026 -
Cryptworm – Infectious Pathological Waste Review By Steel Druhm
UK disgusting death metal fiends Cryptworm have been quite prolific since 2022. Featuring members of Cryptic Shift and Rothadas, their Spewing Mephitic Putridity debut was a nauseating dose of raw sewagecore that made Autopsy seem hygienic by comparison. They followed that up barely a year later with Oozing Radioactive Vomition, and things felt a bit rushed and less impactful. They wisely took some time off thereafter, and now they return with third outing, Infectious Pathological Waste. While their overall approach hasn’t changed much from album to album, the quality of the writing has varied. This time, it feels like they put a bit more thought into the compositions, and some of the vile charm of the debut resurfaces through the slime and scuzz. Nothing does the heart good quite like seeing a happy Cryptworm!
Opener “Gallons of Molten Hominal Goo” greets you like a decaying old friend, and the gruesome, repulsive sounds contain the distinct aroma of early Carcass. This lump of excrement could have appeared on Symphonies of Sickness and fit like a maggot in a gunshot wound. The riffs are fairly rudimentary but have weight, and the vocals by Hanyi Tibor (Rothadas) are a cross between an industrial garbage disposal and a frat-house beer-belching contest. They are fucking disgusting, purulent, and utterly incomprehensible, but damn if they aren’t entertaining. “Maimed and Gutted” is a standout, going for a frantic thrashy panic attack with Cannibal Corpse-isms buried in the basement. It’s a road-grader of a brutal death song that veers into slam territory at times, and the riffs are greasy, sticky, and bellicose. My favorite macabre ditty is “Embedded with Parasitic Larvae,” where, intentionally or not, Tibor sounds like an undead version of the Swedish Chef from The Muppet Show. I cannot tell you why this enhances my enjoyment as much as it does, but fuck yes, Chef!
Infectious Pathological Waste by Cryptworm
On “Drowning in Purulent Excrementia,” they go extra slammy, and kitman Jamie Wintle starts to hit something that should be the pong snare, but it sounds like he’s beating on a skull or a femur. It’s weird, but I kinda like it, and it’s way better than that godawful PONG-PONG-PONG sound some tech and slam bands foist on you. Not every track is a sure-fire hit though, with “Gastrointestinal Seepage” feeling a bit too leaden and lethargic, though I appreciate Tibor’s extra nasty vocals where he seems to be coughing up a hairball full of razor blades and asbestos. I could complain that this feels like a very one-note album, but what death metal album isn’t really? At a tight 32 minutes, it goes by fast enough, though several tracks do have bloat issues that crimp enjoyment. The style Cryptworm opt to play necessitates keeping things in a 3-4 minute window, and when they push further, things get ropey and dopey.
Tibor does a tremendous, unpleasant job on vocals, sounding completely inhuman at all times. His unbelievably cartoonish subterranean croaks are a thing of hideous beauty, and I can’t get enough of them. His guitarwork is also to be applauded, borrowing the most objectionable bits of gristle from Autopsy, Cannibal Corpse, and Incantation to fuel the Cryptworm diet. Some of the leads are quite hooky, and I especially love the big beefy power chugs that dot the landscape. As on Oozing Radioactive Vomition, however, the songwriting can be inconsistent, and they don’t always know when enough is enough. There are some sick burners here to aggravate the savage altered beast, but a few tracks feel underbaked and deliver weaker tentacle slaps.
Cryptworm are a band I can’t help but root for as I root around in their repellant leavings, but I want them to be MOAR consistently deadly with their offal hammer. There’s plenty of fun stuff on Infectious Pathological Waste to marinate in, and it all reeks of the slaughterhouse. When it’s good, it’s rurl good. When it’s just okay, it’s still pretty fookin’ entertaining. Someday these chaps are gonna get their maggot larvae in a row and then, watch out! Until then, there are worse ways to kill brain cells than these odious odes to the grave.
Rating: 3.0/5.0
#2026 #Autopsy #CannibalCorpse #Carcass #CrypticShift #Cryptworm #DeathMetal #InfectiousPathologicalWaste #Mar26 #MeSacoUnOjoRecords #Review #Reviews #Rothadás #SymphoniesOfSickness #UKMetal
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Me Saco Un Ojo
Websites: cryptworm.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/cryptworm | instagram.com/cryptwormofficial
Releases Worldwide: March 27th, 2026 -
Cryptworm – Infectious Pathological Waste Review By Steel Druhm
UK disgusting death metal fiends Cryptworm have been quite prolific since 2022. Featuring members of Cryptic Shift and Rothadas, their Spewing Mephitic Putridity debut was a nauseating dose of raw sewagecore that made Autopsy seem hygienic by comparison. They followed that up barely a year later with Oozing Radioactive Vomition, and things felt a bit rushed and less impactful. They wisely took some time off thereafter, and now they return with third outing, Infectious Pathological Waste. While their overall approach hasn’t changed much from album to album, the quality of the writing has varied. This time, it feels like they put a bit more thought into the compositions, and some of the vile charm of the debut resurfaces through the slime and scuzz. Nothing does the heart good quite like seeing a happy Cryptworm!
Opener “Gallons of Molten Hominal Goo” greets you like a decaying old friend, and the gruesome, repulsive sounds contain the distinct aroma of early Carcass. This lump of excrement could have appeared on Symphonies of Sickness and fit like a maggot in a gunshot wound. The riffs are fairly rudimentary but have weight, and the vocals by Hanyi Tibor (Rothadas) are a cross between an industrial garbage disposal and a frat-house beer-belching contest. They are fucking disgusting, purulent, and utterly incomprehensible, but damn if they aren’t entertaining. “Maimed and Gutted” is a standout, going for a frantic thrashy panic attack with Cannibal Corpse-isms buried in the basement. It’s a road-grader of a brutal death song that veers into slam territory at times, and the riffs are greasy, sticky, and bellicose. My favorite macabre ditty is “Embedded with Parasitic Larvae,” where, intentionally or not, Tibor sounds like an undead version of the Swedish Chef from The Muppet Show. I cannot tell you why this enhances my enjoyment as much as it does, but fuck yes, Chef!
Infectious Pathological Waste by Cryptworm
On “Drowning in Purulent Excrementia,” they go extra slammy, and kitman Jamie Wintle starts to hit something that should be the pong snare, but it sounds like he’s beating on a skull or a femur. It’s weird, but I kinda like it, and it’s way better than that godawful PONG-PONG-PONG sound some tech and slam bands foist on you. Not every track is a sure-fire hit though, with “Gastrointestinal Seepage” feeling a bit too leaden and lethargic, though I appreciate Tibor’s extra nasty vocals where he seems to be coughing up a hairball full of razor blades and asbestos. I could complain that this feels like a very one-note album, but what death metal album isn’t really? At a tight 32 minutes, it goes by fast enough, though several tracks do have bloat issues that crimp enjoyment. The style Cryptworm opt to play necessitates keeping things in a 3-4 minute window, and when they push further, things get ropey and dopey.
Tibor does a tremendous, unpleasant job on vocals, sounding completely inhuman at all times. His unbelievably cartoonish subterranean croaks are a thing of hideous beauty, and I can’t get enough of them. His guitarwork is also to be applauded, borrowing the most objectionable bits of gristle from Autopsy, Cannibal Corpse, and Incantation to fuel the Cryptworm diet. Some of the leads are quite hooky, and I especially love the big beefy power chugs that dot the landscape. As on Oozing Radioactive Vomition, however, the songwriting can be inconsistent, and they don’t always know when enough is enough. There are some sick burners here to aggravate the savage altered beast, but a few tracks feel underbaked and deliver weaker tentacle slaps.
Cryptworm are a band I can’t help but root for as I root around in their repellant leavings, but I want them to be MOAR consistently deadly with their offal hammer. There’s plenty of fun stuff on Infectious Pathological Waste to marinate in, and it all reeks of the slaughterhouse. When it’s good, it’s rurl good. When it’s just okay, it’s still pretty fookin’ entertaining. Someday these chaps are gonna get their maggot larvae in a row and then, watch out! Until then, there are worse ways to kill brain cells than these odious odes to the grave.
Rating: 3.0/5.0
#2026 #Autopsy #CannibalCorpse #Carcass #CrypticShift #Cryptworm #DeathMetal #InfectiousPathologicalWaste #Mar26 #MeSacoUnOjoRecords #Review #Reviews #Rothadás #SymphoniesOfSickness #UKMetal
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Me Saco Un Ojo
Websites: cryptworm.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/cryptworm | instagram.com/cryptwormofficial
Releases Worldwide: March 27th, 2026 -
Cryptworm – Infectious Pathological Waste Review By Steel DruhmUK disgusting death metal fiends Cryptworm have been quite prolific since 2022. Featuring members of Cryptic Shift and Rothadas, their Spewing Mephitic Putridity debut was a nauseating dose of raw sewagecore that made Autopsy seem hygienic by comparison. They followed that up barely a year later with Oozing Radioactive Vomition, and things felt a bit rushed and less impactful. They wisely took some time off thereafter, and now they return with third outing, Infectious Pathological Waste. While their overall approach hasn’t changed much from album to album, the quality of the writing has varied. This time, it feels like they put a bit more thought into the compositions, and some of the vile charm of the debut resurfaces through the slime and scuzz. Nothing does the heart good quite like seeing a happy Cryptworm!
Opener “Gallons of Molten Hominal Goo” greets you like a decaying old friend, and the gruesome, repulsive sounds contain the distinct aroma of early Carcass. This lump of excrement could have appeared on Symphonies of Sickness and fit like a maggot in a gunshot wound. The riffs are fairly rudimentary but have weight, and the vocals by Hanyi Tibor (Rothadas) are a cross between an industrial garbage disposal and a frat-house beer-belching contest. They are fucking disgusting, purulent, and utterly incomprehensible, but damn if they aren’t entertaining. “Maimed and Gutted” is a standout, going for a frantic thrashy panic attack with Cannibal Corpse-isms buried in the basement. It’s a road-grader of a brutal death song that veers into slam territory at times, and the riffs are greasy, sticky, and bellicose. My favorite macabre ditty is “Embedded with Parasitic Larvae,” where, intentionally or not, Tibor sounds like an undead version of the Swedish Chef from The Muppet Show. I cannot tell you why this enhances my enjoyment as much as it does, but fuck yes, Chef!
Infectious Pathological Waste by Cryptworm
On “Drowning in Purulent Excrementia,” they go extra slammy, and kitman Jamie Wintle starts to hit something that should be the pong snare, but it sounds like he’s beating on a skull or a femur. It’s weird, but I kinda like it, and it’s way better than that godawful PONG-PONG-PONG sound some tech and slam bands foist on you. Not every track is a sure-fire hit though, with “Gastrointestinal Seepage” feeling a bit too leaden and lethargic, though I appreciate Tibor’s extra nasty vocals where he seems to be coughing up a hairball full of razor blades and asbestos. I could complain that this feels like a very one-note album, but what death metal album isn’t really? At a tight 32 minutes, it goes by fast enough, though several tracks do have bloat issues that crimp enjoyment. The style Cryptworm opt to play necessitates keeping things in a 3-4 minute window, and when they push further, things get ropey and dopey.
Tibor does a tremendous, unpleasant job on vocals, sounding completely inhuman at all times. His unbelievably cartoonish subterranean croaks are a thing of hideous beauty, and I can’t get enough of them. His guitarwork is also to be applauded, borrowing the most objectionable bits of gristle from Autopsy, Cannibal Corpse, and Incantation to fuel the Cryptworm diet. Some of the leads are quite hooky, and I especially love the big beefy power chugs that dot the landscape. As on Oozing Radioactive Vomition, however, the songwriting can be inconsistent, and they don’t always know when enough is enough. There are some sick burners here to aggravate the savage altered beast, but a few tracks feel underbaked and deliver weaker tentacle slaps.
Cryptworm are a band I can’t help but root for as I root around in their repellant leavings, but I want them to be MOAR consistently deadly with their offal hammer. There’s plenty of fun stuff on Infectious Pathological Waste to marinate in, and it all reeks of the slaughterhouse. When it’s good, it’s rurl good. When it’s just okay, it’s still pretty fookin’ entertaining. Someday these chaps are gonna get their maggot larvae in a row and then, watch out! Until then, there are worse ways to kill brain cells than these odious odes to the grave.
Rating: 3.0/5.0
#2026 #Autopsy #CannibalCorpse #Carcass #CrypticShift #Cryptworm #DeathMetal #InfectiousPathologicalWaste #Mar26 #MeSacoUnOjoRecords #Review #Reviews #Rothadás #SymphoniesOfSickness #UKMetal
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Me Saco Un Ojo
Websites: cryptworm.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/cryptworm | instagram.com/cryptwormofficial
Releases Worldwide: March 27th, 2026 -
Deafheaven – Lonely People with Power Review
By Doom_et_Al
You never forget your first love. The sense of wonder and excitement, a world you had only heard and read about, opening up to you like a flower on a Summer’s day. Deafheaven was my first (in a metal sense). The combination of furious black meal, searing post metal, and fuzzy shoegaze, mixed with a dollop of genuine longing, totally rewired my brain. Which means that if you’re looking for a coldly analytical review of a band’s sixth album, you should probably go elsewhere. Deafheaven is part of my DNA, and a new album will always be a big deal, even if we’ve drifted apart over the years. You see, while I’ve enjoyed the band’s output since the wondrous Sunbather, it’s been clear that Deafheaven and I have been moving in different directions. And this was confirmed with Infinite Granite. I respected the band’s bravery in trying something new; I just didn’t like the result much. Shiny, pretty post-rock is nothing to be ashamed of. But the Deafheaven I loved were all about embracing the fury of black metal to highlight their emotional beats. Without that tension, Infinite Granite felt weightless. And my relationship with Deafheaven almost went from “It’s complicated” to “Splitsville”…
… Except, there was “Mombasa,” the final song on Infinite Granite. Specifically, the final 3 minutes of “Mombasa.” Deafheaven broke the shackles, George Clarke’s shrieks roared forth, and within was a reminder of what the band was capable of. Was that denouement a farewell to a style they were abandoning, or a promise that they had not forgotten their roots? Lonely People with Power answers, and boy does it answer.
After a brief intro, the band kicks off with “Magnolia,” which is one of the meaner cuts of Deafheaven’s oeuvre, and completely devoid of the shininess of anything on Infinite Granite, including the clean vocals. On first listen, I wondered if this was a repudiation of that album; an abandonment of that sound and an acknowledgement that “mistakes were made.” But as “Heathen” hits its chorus, you realize Lonely People with Power is a lot more interesting than that. You see, the post-rock sounds of Infinite Granite have not been abandoned; they’ve just been folded into Deafheaven’s existing aesthetic. Which means that not only is Lonely People with Power their most complete and harmonious record to date, but it also retroactively improves Infinite Granite.
Although Deafheaven have always been comfortable with what they are not – i.e., a “trve kvlt” black metal band, it has sometimes felt that they were less comfortable with what they are. After the stunning Sunbather, the band oscillated between “mean” (New Bermuda), “pretty” (Ordinary Corrupt Human Love), and “post rock” (Infinite Granite). Lonely People with Power somehow finds a way to incorporate all these elements in a cohesive, stunning whole. Its gnarly tracks (“Magnolia,” “Revelator”) are gnarly, it’s pretty tracks (“Heathen,” “Winona”) are downright gorgeous, and the hybrids (“The Garden Route”, “The Marvelous Orange Tree”) feel natural and complementary. What ties all of these together is the emotional core that Deafheaven bring. Among contemporaries, perhaps only Gaerea are anywhere near them in terms of the ability to achieve that ecstatic, cathartic release this music thrives on. Lonely People with Power is brimming with pain and longing and wonder and fury. For the first time, the band has the musical language to convey all of these and then some.
Performances across the board are top-notch. Dan Tracy’s exceptional drumming brings power and force to the harder tracks, and wisely cuts back during the gentler moments. George Clarke’s howls and shrieks have never been the strongest attribute of the band, but he brings a unique intensity and connection that anyone who has attended one of their live shows will attest to. But the real star of the show is lead guitarist Kerry McCoy. McCoy has battled his own demons and writer’s block to create these furious, gorgeous, compelling gems. His guitar soars and dives, and he is able to find beauty in even the ugliest, more twisted compositions.
Sunbather, for all the ridiculous accusations of being “hipster metal,” had that thing. That thing that is impossible to define but is sprinkled liberally on all the best albums. There’s a reason Sunbather remains iconic. It is too early to say whether Lonely People with Power is a match for that masterpiece, but it has that thing, too. It is Deafheaven’s most mature and complete work to date; a synthesis of everything that has come before without being derivative or overly reliant. It plays to the band’s strengths, and wears its unironic heart on its sleeve. If Deafheaven aren’t your vibe, this won’t change your mind – it is, above all, a defiantly Deafheaven album through and through. For everyone else, this is an essential and timeless collection of tracks. It reminds us of the power of metal music to connect and move. But it also fucking reminds us that Deafheaven are not just back; they never left.
Rating: 4.5/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Roadrunner Records
Website: deafheaven.com
Releases Worldwide: March 28th, 2025#2025 #45 #AmericanMetal #BlackMetal #Blackgaze #Deafheaven #LonelyPeopleWithPower #Mar25 #Review #Reviews #RoadrunnerRecords