I’m overjoyed to say that at this year’s Sydney Chamber Music Festival, the wonderful Australian pianist Benjamin Martin will be playing two brief excerpts from my work Solo Piano. The concert happens to be on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I explain the relevance of this to Forever #1 and Forever #13 in the essay below. (And in case you’re interested, ticket information is here.)
[Update Oct 22, 2010: this wonderful performance by Ben is now shown in the video on the right]
Forever #1 from Solo Piano (2003)
Forever #13 from Solo Piano (2005)
In September 2003 I had two reasons to write a solo piano piece.
Firstly, I was to compose one minute of music for a DVD video project called Swoon, an extension of the legendary Swoon series of CDs of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
This project was a ‘soundscape’ video – no spoken word, just peaceful music married to sumptuous imagery, largely from Australia – sweeping aerial views of the Kimberley mountain ranges offset by Bach’s Vergnügte Ruh, for instance, or Handel’s Ombra mai fù underscoring the spectacular waterfalls inside the rainforests of Mount Warning.
There was a proven audience for Swoon; as producer and composer my responsibility was to deliver the soothing experience they wanted but to maintain a cut above the merely opiate.
I decided to provide a new composition for the final video clip, which was of dusk shots of the memorial dome in Hiroshima. The purpose of this unexpected choice was to introduce a subtly deeper suggestion, to lead the viewer-listener inductively to their own conclusion by asking the question – is there a greater experience of peace that can be had?
The Hiroshima dome, with its exposed prickly scaffolding looking like a skeleton, is an arresting sight. Previously the city’s Prefectural Hall, it was the only structure left standing in the area following the detonation of the first atomic bomb almost directly above it on August 6, 1945. Instead of tearing it down, the Japanese preserved the dome in its wrecked state as a memorial symbolising the desire for the elimination of nuclear arms and for world peace. Fifty years later the United Nations inscribed the dome on its list of world heritage monuments, implicitly concurring with this desire.
My second reason for writing a solo piano piece was that I had made up my mind to compose something on the day of the second anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.
On September 11, 2001 I was in Melbourne with soprano Yvonne Kenny, conductor Guy Noble and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. The project was a recording of famous songs from the great Broadway musicals. We had a splendid day of rehearsals, then retired to our various hotels. I had chosen to stay at a cheery bed-and-breakfast run by a friend.
After dinner I stayed up late to watch my favorite television show, The West Wing. It started at 10.30 pm. During a commercial break I went to brush my teeth, only to come back to a live CNN report of an aeroplane having flown into 1 World Trade Center. I remember being in two minds. Part of me wishfully thought I was watching the most realistic West Wing episode ever, yet part of me knew my regular show had been interrupted by actual footage of events occurring right that moment in New York City. Then, as I watched, an aeroplane flew into the other twin tower, 2 World Trade Center. It was 11.03 pm in eastern Australia, 9.03 am in the eastern United States. My phone started ringing and filling up with text messages; until then, it could still have been just a well-made fictional TV drama.
No irony was lost on any of us the next morning. We were recording the sunny songs of Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter – all from the great Broadway tradition of New York, the very city now gripped by mass confusion. Yvonne, Guy, the orchestra and myself didn’t say much beyond soothing platitudes to each other. I don’t think anyone knew what to think or how to feel. I went about my job, as did they, because that’s something you can still do when you’re numb.
The 9/11 event brought up a feeling I couldn’t name. I thought it was homesickness. It was a curious feeling. I don’t recall ever feeling homesick for my childhood homes of Malaysia and Singapore, places that I had better reason to call home. But 9/11 immediately aroused a desire to go back to Wisconsin. A few months later I did. In May 2002 I went to Madison and then New York.
In Madison I sought out old friends who hadn’t left and old places which hadn’t changed. I went back to my old church where the caretaker Bob greeted me with genuine delight and as if the intervening 12 years were 12 months, offering to unlock the basement for me so I could play my old upright piano where it still stood in the practice room. I sat on the shore of Lake Mendota and ate a taco salad with a flaky pastry shell; I went to the dairy store where I used to work and ate cheese curds for old times’ sake, because that’s what used to be my lunch. I bought used paperbacks at Avol’s Bookstore, whose slogan – “I’d Rather Be Reading Bukowski” – hasn’t changed to this day and still makes me laugh. And I had a drink at a bar called The Shamrock where there used to be a young bartender who took a shine to me and let me do my college homework at the booth tables while he brought me liquor (but that’s another story).
Homesickness is, quite literally, nostalgia. It comes from the Greek ‘nóstos álgos’, meaning ‘the pain of [not] going home’. In returning to a place I would call home, I was able to suppress that little ache – to the point of realising there was another feeling underneath, one that had been masked by the homesickness. And this was a completely different feeling, a wholly self-centered, even ignoble one.
I felt left out, so I was hurt. The people of America were going through an important process and I wasn’t part of it. I wasn’t there contributing to the soul-searching, chest-beating, accusation-throwing, the grieving, the healing. So how was that a problem for me? Because being left out meant I wasn’t important, or at least that important things could happen without me. I wasn’t grieving for America. I felt true compassion and empathy, but it wasn’t the death and loss that I was upset at. It wasn’t the destruction that I was insulted by. It wasn’t the terrorism or religious conflict that concerned me. I just felt hurt at being left out. It was, I admit, a bizarre form of envy, being envious of another’s suffering. If there were a converse to schadenfreude, this would be it.
It took me several years to achieve sufficient clarity to put this into words. So in the meantime I wrote music. The first anniversary, I wrote God Mend Thy Ev’ry Flaw, a choral work using the poem of Katherine Lee Bates ‘America The Beautiful’. The second anniversary I wrote Forever #1, which I meticulously constructed to last an exact minute as a meditation akin to the silence observed at a public grieving. Interesting, I wrote nothing on the third anniversary. It wasn’t until I composed Forever #13, by this time the fourth anniversary, that the overhanging murkiness started to lift. And then I sensed the feelings going away. This may seem unfairly contrary of the human mind but it’s actually the mind in exquisite balance: for as long as you can’t name a feeling, you will continue to experience it; the moment you can, you will receive the learnings you were meant to from that feeling, and you can choose to have it leave you, because you have mastery over that which you can name.
Both God Mend Thy Ev’ry Flaw and Forever #1, I see now, are utterances of a sincere compassion, without a trace of the matted confusion of envy that was underneath. Such is art, a chrysopoeia that sublimates the baser motivations of an artist. I’ll always be grateful for that. By the time I wrote Forever #13, I was clearly saying goodbye to the old feelings. Forever #13 was written at first light of the learnings. It both is and is not a 9/11 piece.
And the learnings? I wasn’t envious of the hurt someone else was going through. I was envious of the lessons that came from dealing with the hurt. And thus I learned a lesson anyway: that it would be awful if I always needed a cataclysmic event to produce an opportunity to make myself feel important. And what’s importance, anyway? I learned that there’s no such thing as being important, but instead that anything done with love as its motivation is important.
In New York in May 2002 at Ground Zero I saw makeshift memorials with photos and messages, especially on the walls of the ramp leading up to the official viewing platform; some of these used to be appeals for information about the missing, but which defaulted into memorials when hope faded. From the platform I saw an assortment of rubble on dirt being tackled by cranes, earth-movers, grapplers, bucket loaders. It was disorienting. I had no idea what I was looking at. Later I learned that Laura Kurgan, an architect, had voluntarily drawn up a map of the disaster zone and given copies away to visitors so they could at least make head or tail if not sense out of what they saw. On the evening of May 28, 2002 workers cut down and cleared away the last debris, a 36-foot corner beam from 2 World Trade Center that had stayed standing after the rest of the building collapsed. I didn’t know I’d be there that day. Column 1001-B, as it’s now called, will be preserved in a memorial at Ground Zero, in the tradition of surviving structures.
‘Ground zero’ was originally a term used in atomic bombing. The Manhattan Project, the inventors of the atomic bomb, distinguished between a ‘zero point’ and a ‘ground zero’ – the former being the point in the air of an atomic explosion, and the latter the hypocenter, the point on the ground immediately beneath the bomb. Where the Hiroshima memorial dome stands is also – is, in fact, the first – Ground Zero.
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I have always enjoyed Ben Martin’s playing and have loved working with him. It was a joy to hear your lovely works played by him and played with such affection. Keep it up!
As ever
Dobbs
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