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For musicians, the phrase “fiddling while Rome burns” must come frequently to mind during dark times. But is making music really trivial or irresponsible, as the phrase indicates, in the midst of suffering? It is perhaps self-centered of me to think not, but to the contrary, I believe the arts – and especially music – takes on an even greater importance when the world seems like it is crashing around us. During 2020, so many things are so dreadfully wrong: the coronavirus pandemic, the dangerous sickness that has soaked into the bones of half of the American electorate, the replacement of certainty in knowledge and facts with fantasy and conspiracy theories, the relentless poison of racism in American society, humanity’s steady march towards environmental catastrophe. And yes, when I write that list, the image of Nero and his fiddle do come to mind. Am I irresponsible for spending so much time composing new music in the midst of all this?

Then, I remind myself of the delight and surprise I felt upon first discovering that an exquisite musical gem by Poulanc, his Trois Mouvements Perpetuel, was composed in 1918, while he was in military service and the flu epidemic was raging. There is nothing in the music to suggest the trauma of the world events swirling around him as he wrote it. It is entirely free of grief or anxiety. As terrible as those events were at the time, I realized he understood something profound. The music would last. The terrors of the time would not. Rather than be swayed by events, he kept the longer game in mind, and remained true to his purpose, creating beauty that would be appreciated by so many people, down through the ages, for whom the “news” of his day would be at best, a distant memory, if remembered at all. While there are many actions I can and do take in response to today’s world, I keep Poulanc’s musical reminder in the forefront of my thoughts and keep to my purpose, writing music that is as beautiful as I have the power in me to create.

Despite coronavirus, I’m very thankful that my musical life, inner and outer, is moving along unimpeded. Since March, I have composed many new (and in some instances, impractically ambitious) works, signed with PARMA to produce a new album in collaboration with the great violist Brett Deubner and pianist Thomas Steigerwald, am in the midst of recording various other pieces for multiple violas with Brett playing all parts (a particularly coronavirus type of activity), had a wonderful collaboration with Suzanne Gilchrest writing a brief flute solo for her which she recorded at home. Several of my new works which are the result of my reflections about the pandemic have either been performed or programmed – my new work “1918” will premiere in May 2022 with Sinfonia Toronto, and my songs for voice and cello “An Incalculable Loss” will be video recorded by Camerata Philadelphia (the first song, “Missing Voices,” to a poem by Richard Leach, was already given a virtual performance back in June). Next week, the Umbria Ensemble will premiere my setting of Guillaume de Machaut’s “le lay de plour” and a new album of string quartets will be released in October.

As I said, very thankful for all of this. Now, to come up with what I’ll be writing next!

Thrilled to learn that the Umbria Ensemble, led by cellist Maria Cecelia Berioli, will be premiering my settings of Guillaume de Machaut’s “Le Lay de Plour” at a concert in Switzerland this coming Saturday, September 12th.

Stunned by the recent NY Times front page acknowledging, as of the date of the issue, the nearly 100,000 Americans killed by the coronavirus, I wanted to do something. Reaching out to the poet Richard Leach, with whom I had collaborated previously, he promptly sent me Missing Voices, which I set to music the following day. Somehow, a duet between voice and cello seemed right for his moving words. These are not statistics but individual humans with all of their connected friends and family – and this must be acknowledged, even as we struggle to fathom the depth of such loss.

Then another poet I had reached out to put me in touch with Norman Fischer, who had posted a series of coronavirus poems on his website. Reaching out to him, I was thrilled when he gave permission for me to use his poems for this cycle of songs.

As I write this, the world in slow steps is attempting to return to normal – but nothing has really changed. The virus remains as transmissible and deadly as before governments attempted to halt its spread by implementing social distancing measures. For those at risk, me included, the time to safely venture out and resume a normal life remains out of reach.

This morning, just as I finished the song cycle, now entitled “An Incalculable Loss” from the NY Times headline, I received a video recording of a performance of the first poem, Missing Voices, by Kyle Engler and Stephen Framil, recorded yesterday in the empty Church of the Holy Trinity in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. Their performance was so beautiful and heartfelt, I wanted to cry while watching it. It will be released as part of Camerata Philadelphia’s upcoming Port City Music Festival, now to be a virtual concert.

Since seeing that devastating NY Times front page a week ago, the world has turned uglier still. Coming of age in the 1960s, I naively imagined that the battles for racial equality which marked the decade would have been largely won by the time I was a senior citizen. It is so terribly depressing to see that so little has changed. Reading the pleas by numerous white governmental officials for calm as protests against the murder of yet another black man by those who are sworn to protect us turn violent, I can only think, where were they for the past several decades? They had the authority and power to do something about it, but did nothing but sustain the status quo. Now, they want everyone to just calm down, so they can wait for this latest incident to age in the news cycle, and then go back to the way things were before. It is exactly the same card politicians play after every mass shooting. Perhaps this time will be different, but given past history, that is depressingly hard to imagine.

Some poignant, pointed lines from Langston Hughes, pertinent as when they were written:

American am I, none can deny:
He who oppresses me, him I defy!
I am Dark Youth
Seeking the truth
Of a free life beneath our great sky.

For two months, while writing my symphonic impressions of Hart Crane’s epic poem of America, The Bridge, I was reading his biography and various critiques of his poem. By and large, it seems to me that he was badly misunderstood, even by the most generous of his critics. The consensus seemed to be that The Bridge failed to achieve the poet’s far-reaching ambitions. Many of the critics compared one poem to another and felt that he was mistaken to include poems which they considered to be weak.

The more I read the poem, the more convinced I became that he was right – and they wrong. The poem seemed to me to be like a great symphony, in which not every moment could be equally ecstatic in its language. For the great moments in a musical work to shine, there also have to be quieter, less profound moments, by comparison with which the stunning moments shine all the brighter. The music must ebb and flow – as does Crane’s poem as it moves from poem to poem.

His critics also seemed to struggle with the surface level incomprehensibility of his language. Certainly, Crane employs language in a way that most intentionally reaches beyond any usual logical framework, but seems more interested in the sound and rhythms of the words. He also is a time traveler. In the middle of a sentence, he can shift his view to incorporate events that in the real world may have taken place hundreds of years apart, but in his mental landscape are brought together by some internal thread of connection. As I read his words, rather than focus on trying to understand them in a normal way, I simply let the words flow past me, like music does, following their own logic, and then they seem to open, like mysterious flowers, evoking innumerable other associations.

Crane evidently was intensely responsive to music and the poem contains numerous musical references. Reading through the poems, they begin to sing. When writing the symphony, it was fascinating to research the various musical references, find the tunes on-line, and incorporate them, mostly but not always disguised, into the score. His survey of the American geographic, historical and cultural landscape is full of sound – folk songs, hymns, Broadway tunes, jazz. In the poems, there are hurdy-gurdies, nickelodeons, grind organs and burlesque theater bands. At least to my understanding, he was carefully writing words that rhythmically arose from these remembered musical references, as they evoke the sounds of America, in its many guises. The voice of America that he captured was multi-faceted, like ancient gods, ranging from the most mundane and crass to the visionary and creative.