Heavy Weight for a Requiem

I am preparing to write a Requiem for the dead. Requiem, the word itself haunts. This Requiem is to those dead from the last ten years of violence; sometimes called war, sometimes called terrorism, sometimes called other offensively obfuscating terms like natural and environmental disasters. Remember Katrina? Not just the storm, but the shocking inhumanity that its response belied. And environmental accidents, like the Gulf Oil Spill, Fukishima Daiichi, Japan, and killer tornadoes in Alabama, Joplin, MO, all causing vast human and animal suffering.

In short, there’s plenty of dying going on. To write a large piece, in memory of those lost in these tragedies, to open up the heart to buried feelings – though the dead will never hear it – seems a legitimate use of music. I have the sense that we’re fighting wars with no end in sight, partially, at least, because we don’t acknowledge the pain, guilt and even neuroses we take on while war progresses in our name.

An older friend once told me that when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, the sublime sadness that is Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Opus 11 played on radios all across the country, and it was as if all listeners could feel the unfathomable pain of the Second World War, and even the abyss of sadness from the Great Depression, all in those particularly American tragic tones. My friend opined that, in earlier years, songs like Happy Days Are Here Again were necessary to buck up against the unending misery, but they were also a kind of psychological torture. Then came the moment when it was okay to say, “Death is everywhere and there is great pain from it.” That impetus was FDR’s death, but the real, actual permission, when the tears could flow from life-hardened faces for eight long minutes, was during the inexplicably heart-rending, grievous phrases of Barber’s Adagio.

Above: Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Opus 11. Orquestra Sinfônica de São Paulo, Maestro León Halegua, Memorial da América Latina.

This Requiem is work to be taken seriously, so I’ve been soaking up musical masterpieces with death attached to them and the stories and legends surrounding their creation. I started with Mozart’s paradoxically unfinished Requiem Mass, with its anonymous, possibly duplicitous patron (and the unhappy rumor that the work killed the composer), and Brahms’ German Requiem, which in its time was a brave assertion of the adequacy of the German language to serve in place of Latin, Bach’s supremely Christian B minor Mass, Beethoven’s mystifyingly complex Missa Solemnis and, finally, Stravinsky’s bold, existential Requiem Canticles.

Because I am a child of the 1960’s, I am also searching for inspiration from the music of my generation – in particular, the contemporary pop song and folk song. It’s remarkable to see how an artist can really pay tribute to a fallen brother or sister within the confines of two minutes and thirty seconds. Compare Mozart’s divine Requiem Mass, even a movement from it, with Dion’s 1968 hit Abraham, Martin and John, composed by Dick Holler. By the way, a little research yields the delicious nugget that the B-side of Dion’s hit, no. 4 in the U.S., and no.1 in Canada, was Daddy Rollin’ (In Your Arms). And, composer Dick Holler’s previous success, which presumably got the attention of big star Dion who was looking for something “the kids will like,” was the 1966 novelty smash Snoopy vs. the Red Baron. Thus, it’s completely understandable that while Mozart was first gestating the sublime tragedy sewn into every measure of the almost creepy Lacrimosa from the Requiem, he may still have had ink drying on what I can only describe as the “loveable naughty parrot” aria from The Magic Flute.

Dion, [Dion DiMucci, he of Dion and the Belmonts, with his hits "A Teenager in Love," "Runaround Sue," and "The Wanderer."] had a HUGE hit with “Abraham, Martin and John.” Here it is, sung by the original author- a little differently, more of a 60′s white soul sound.

Mozart: Requiem Mass in D minor, K626 (composed, unfinished in 1791)
Lacrimosa (Conducted by Claudio Abbado, in a memorial service concert for the great conductor Herbert von Karajan)

Most significantly, I was amazed to recover a memory that the towering musical influence of my early life, Jimi Hendrix’s album Band of Gypsies, with its central awe-inspiring masterpiece, the crowning achievement in the tri-generational evolution of the Blues – Machine Gun, was nothing less than a Requiem for the victims of the Masters of War. The lyrics, one of the most overlooked aspects of Hendrix’s genius:

Machine gun tearin’ my body all apart
Evil man make me kill you
Evil man make you kill me
Evil man make me kill you
Even though we’re only families apart

Well, I pick up my axe and fight like a farmer
But your bullets still knock me down to the ground
The same way you shoot me down, baby
You’ll be goin’ just the same
Three times the pain
And your own self to blame

I ain’t afraid of your bullets no more, baby
I ain’t afraid no more
After a while your cheap talk don’t even cause me pain
So let your bullets fly like rain
‘Cause I know all the time you wrong, baby
And you’ll be going just the same

Below: The audio is of Jimi Hendrix’s monumental performance of Machine Gun, live on New Years Eve, the final night of the 1960s.
Listen here to Machine Gun (the first nine minutes…)

Machine Gun was the non plus ultra discovery of my childhood musical life. Only later, did Bach’s Six Sonatas and Partitas for violin solo similarly affect me. Machine Gun unlocked the power of music to make life meaningful. Before Machine Gun, I liked music, and after, I had to be a musician; I had to make music my life. Correspondingly, I also came to believe, with complete conviction, that war is a class-based tool with which the poor are manipulated for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. This, while Hendrix’s portrayal of the horror of Viet Nam had a kind of seductive, intoxicating sensuality to it- revealing the sick attraction man has to the chaos of war.

Here, I’d also like to share that when I steep myself in the great works from either long ago or from just the other day, I feel increasingly intimidated, and even kind of hopeless to my task. All these works overwhelm me with the shear, hyper-mastery of their composition, as if music written to memorialize was somehow expected to exhibit technique equal to the finality of death. Must one write as if to make a final testimony to the world? Who am I to write about these metaphysical, spiritual, historical, even cosmic themes?

One of the ways I dare myself to do it is that, by the very nature of these almost absurdly diverse compositions, I see the infinite possibilities to the sincere expression of emotions through music. I remember having a thought once as a child, listening to some cheap, cheesy instruction LP on playing the guitar, a velvety, masculine, General Motors commercial narrator’s voice intoned:  ”The musical alphabet is made up of only seven tones, or notes. Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti and then back to Do. All the music we make, and enjoy listening to, is made of combinations of these few notes.” I then thought that musicians will certainly run out of possibilities pretty soon, with so few notes. But, that was when I thought of composition as a puzzle, as magically harmonious numbers. And here’s the real trick of imagination: it’s not. Music composition is just pure possibility, a bag full of nothing, a bunch of attractive what ifs, and as Jean Cocteau said, “Art is something ugly which becomes beautiful after a time, fashion is something beautiful which becomes ugly after a time.”

Thus, I am embarking on a journey of discovery, not trying to fill a predefined vessel called Requiem. At its most essential, I am going to make some music with specific instrumentation, specific musicians with their own strengths and weaknesses, and I guess I’ll have to decide on some other aspects as well: Do I want to collaborate with other artists? Do I want a visual element to be present in the performances, or particular texts? Should it be performed at particular events and venues – for audiences who will attach importance to it, or do I just make the music and take it any place I can; play it at a mall, while people are obliviously Christmas shopping?

A Requiem is an attempt to get to the place in the listener’s imagination where the feelings of death live, irresistibly unimpeded by rational thought. Although our perception of ourselves changes with fashion, essential qualities of emotion and reflection remain constant in the human experience. Thus, if we choose to memorialize death and suffering with the 220 year old music of Mozart, evoking architectural magnificence through sounds born of organic woods, horsehair, gut strings, reeds and rosin – it will work; and, if we choose to memorialize death and suffering with the sounds of an electric guitar’s whammy-bar imitating the guns, helicopters and cries of victims and warriors in a surrealistic acid trip – it will also work, but differently.

Simply, a Requiem should make us cry, make us feel angry and hopeless in the face of the enormity of death and loss, make us feel sorrow for the loss of the living and the loss of the dead, maybe even the fear I’ve felt at the immortal words of the great John Lee Hooker (RIP), in his masterful I Hear Them Church Bells Tonin’- “YOU! You got to go!”

Thus, it’s no surprise that classical and modern composers have “pulled out all the stops” to make a Requiem work, used all their craft and artistry to elevate and break down their listeners’ resistance to wrangling with death. Music reminds us that we and the dead are very much entwined. So that’s where I start. No rules, just a lot of connecting with death. It’s heavy.

Igor Stravinsky: Elegy for Solo Viola (The Elegy is a different piece from the Requiem Canticles I mention above. Since Stravinsky lived to his late 80s, and had many friends, he wrote elegies and memorial music for several personalities. Dylan Thomas, Aldous Huxley, and others

Below: John Lee Hooker: “Thought I Heard a Church Bell Tone” from the album, Country Blues 1959