December 2007
Essay: Composing "Memory"
(This essay was written for college applications.)
It's a pleasant June afternoon in my backyard: sunlight glimmers on a rippling green creek, a light breeze sways tree leaves, and layers of bird calls resound from all directions while traffic, lawn mowers and construction workers create a rumbling underbelly of distant noise. I'm standing on sticks and grassy dirt with digital recorder in hand, announcing the following words precisely and slowly in a low speaking voice: “Memory preserves in distinct particulars and general categories all the perceptions which have penetrated, each by its own route of entry.”
These are the first words of the passage from St. Augustine's “Confessions” which I am attempting to set to music.
Imagine yourself faced with complete personal commitment to a career doing something that you've never really done before, without the knowledge of how to do it. That was the situation I was in when I decided to become a classical composer last January. I'd had years of experience composing, performing and recording advanced rock music, and a bit of jazz, and had listened to much classical music, but I had never actually sat down with a sheet of manuscript paper and written notes to be performed by classical instruments or voices. Approaching classical composition was like relearning how to walk.
I struggled with writer's block for months, striving to produce music that was in alignment with my newly developing sensibility. During the same period, I found myself entering a new intensity of interest in academic humanities – particularly literature and history. Augustine's “Confessions” found its way onto the silver quasi-baroque shelf above my bed, in the honored position of “favorite book” (alongside Francois Rabelais' “Gargantua and Pantagruel” and Seamus Heaney's translation of “Beowulf”). I found myself, a secular humanist, fascinated by the ruminations of this Catholic bishop from 1,600 years ago, a distant being whose writing seemed as near as a letter from a friend, as present and alive as a whisper in my ear. The book is written as an extended rhetorical question to God, but is essentially an exploration of the mysteries of human experience. He asked questions that are completely familiar and universal, yet often so personal and internal as never to be verbalized from one person to another: why do I act this way? Why do I think this? What is this experience that I'm having? Augustine communicated a complete inner world with clarity and poetry.
Looking at the way Augustine's thinking opened up my own thoughts, one can see why “Confessions” was a perfect source for my musical inspiration. I had long been searching for a text to use in a vocal work, and in a “Eureka!” moment I recalled a vivid passage from “Confessions” about memory and sense. I sat down with my well-worn paperback and copied the words verbatim into the final pages of a spiral-bound notebook. Using a notation of spontaneous devising I charted out the breaks in each phrase, identified the beginnings and endings of thoughts, and scribbled margin notes like “soaring melody”, “polyphony winds into unison”, or “dark shimmering harmonies” to indicate musical moments which I hoped to achieve. During this process I developed a vision of how I could sculpt the text into a musical shape. I recorded myself speaking the words aloud, and began composing using the recording as an approximate reference for rhythm and pitch. The music flowed from there. On that June afternoon, I saw a substantial piece of music emerging from the obscurity of blank staves on my computer screen.
Writing and finishing “Memory”, and eventually having the privilege to hear it recorded by a renowned vocal ensemble, proved to me for the first time that I was actually capable of creating the kind of music I was passionate about. Inspiration is necessary for a composer of any level of accomplishment, and each composer finds it in different places. On this occasion, I found that key to the gateway of my musical creativity in Augustine's writing. The words, the flow and conceptual arc of his ideas, and the content, tone, and power of those ideas gave me a solid structure on which to build, and allowed me to articulate the music which had been bottled up, fermenting within me.
You can hear the finished recording of "Memory", and read the text, at my composition portfolio.
© 2008 Nell Shaw Cohen