Some matters of the heart transcend all words. Each of my compositions is preceded by a story. “The Words” is an ode to my Great Dane Reo, who helped me become who I am today. I had just moved out to study at art school and the conservatory when I brought home Reo as a puppy. We were all socially isolating to avoid contracting the coronavirus. Reo didn’t just lie at my feet next to my piano; wherever I went, he followed me. His striking presence—a gentle giant—encouraged me to strike up conversations everywhere, on the street, on the bus, and in the park. Reo helped me overcome my shyness and social awkwardness. His completely unexpected death last year caused deep sorrow and intense grief. Now, gratitude prevails; without him, I wouldn’t be who I am today!
Though words fall short in matters of the heart, they also enable us to evoke the intangible. Words help us process, while sounds restore memories—images—to their emotional depth. When I was commissioned to write a piece to be performed by a combination of classical and jazz musicians, I knew immediately that I wanted to pay tribute to Reo and the void he left behind. For me, the connection between jazz and modern (classical) music meant connecting the world without Reo with the fragmented memories of the days after I’d just heard he hadn’t survived the surgery. The piece I wanted to write would bridge the gap between then and now, between whole and broken, life and the afterlife, waking and dreaming and lost and found. While composing, the real healing process began for me; words that had been so important to me at the time became increasingly meaningless; Words became sounds, and in the vocal section, the sounds became words again. At the end of the piece, in the finale of all the fragmented memories, I created and developed a world, only to see it disintegrate or even collapse in the blink of an eye. Consonance and dissonance, jazz and classical, Reo and me. I discovered that as an individual you not only live in a universe that fires events and feelings at you from outside, ranging from hate and jealousy to beauty and love, but that at the same time the entire universe also exists within you. True magic lies in finding yourself, when the outside world ceases to exist for a moment, in your own universe. Letting the listener experience this after the final bar was the goal of the composition. The composition is my process of losing myself and finding that I’m found again.
The composition is atypical for me, with many influences from non-classical music. During my studies at the Minerva Art Academy, I learned to view communication media as technologies that slowly develop and mature. From this perspective, the symphony orchestra, within the context of Western classical music, is one of the most beautiful “instruments” humanity has ever created. It only reached its full maturity in the nineteenth century, after centuries of development. Now we live in an age of transience, in which, for example, many synthetic instruments in pop music come and go. The symphony orchestra itself has achieved a stable standard status. The same is true for the big band in jazz. Precisely because the commission for the composition “The Words” offered me the opportunity to combine both stable—standard—instruments—symphony orchestra and big band—I could experiment with timbres to my heart’s content. A triumph for analog instruments, as digital detox, it opens entirely new sonic possibilities. With this choice, I had to give up many other possibilities (such as combining playing techniques or styles). For this piece, I therefore chose to combine the timbres of jazz and classical music into a more (modern) classical piece. It’s more of a classical piece with new and jazzy timbres than a jazz piece with symphonic orchestral colors. The exciting challenge during the composition was to explore what’s possible today with instruments from the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively…
The piece is bombastic and about a collapsing world, in which a specific melody appears in ever-changing guises and travels through different sections until the penultimate section, where a singer takes over. There, the truth is revealed in a climax where it finally becomes clear that what was, is unsustainable without the right words.
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention