As composers, we all live with ghosts. They sit on our shoulders as we write, encouraging us, chastising us, eternally challenging us. Occasionally, we even enter into a direct dialogue with them, just as Raymond Lustig does in his new composition, Compose Thyself, which will be premiered on Metropolis Ensemble’s fall concert Renderings. Compose Thyself begins from a startling departure point: it is built around J.S. Bach’s lost Cantata O angenehme Melodei. Only the soprano soloist’s part to this cantata remains, with the rest lost to time. In lieu of Bach’s lost music, Lustig has imagined an entirely new piece around the extant soprano line, and in doing so, ended up tripping down a musical rabbit’s hole that came to encompass far more than merely him and Bach. References to Copland, Stravinsky, Sibelius and more populate this strange and dazzling new work, creating a meta-composition that will linger in the listener’s memory long after it concludes. Working on a project that has so many different dimensions to it could easily become both mentally and emotionally draining, however Lustig ultimately found the title and the inspiration to complete the work within Bach’s text:
I was using Bach’s original text (translated by Z. Philip Ambrose) and a phrase stuck out to me: “Compose Thyself.” In the Bach, its meaning was “Be at peace.” And for me, it had that kind of meaning: “Be at peace with the piece.” But it went beyond that to mean: “Be at peace with the piece pieceing itself together, being what it will be, and, in a way, composing itself.”
While such a project could seem bewildering to the casual observer, such projects are in fact familiar territory for Lustig. Take for example another recent composition of his:
Unstuck
for orchestra. [wpaudio url=“http://metropolisensemble.org/media/rlustig_unstuck.mp3” text=“Raymond Lustig - Unstuck - Fizzing and Thrashing”] The title
Unstuck
is a reference to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel
Slaughterhouse-Five
, whose characters become “unstuck” in time. The piece takes the listener through a wild and reckless musical landscape that incorporates elements of Gustav Holst’s
The Planets
, Mahler’s symphonies, and even Tomas Luis de Victoria’s motets! Clearly, the way forward through one of Lustig’s compositions is rarely a straight line. By incorporating direct quotations of other music (mostly from the classical canon) into his own, Lustig is tapping into a creative strategy that can be found in the works of composers such as Luciano Berio and Alfred Schnittke. [wpaudio url=“http://metropolisensemble.org/media/rlustig_berio.mp3” text=“Luciano Berio - Sinfonia Mvt. III (excerpt)”] Unlike those composers, however, whose aims were often detached formalist statements, Lustig’s aim is deeply personal:
I have a tendency to quote some of my most beloved music when the spirit comes over me…it’s a compulsion, really. Certain pieces are so much a part of me that my music often feels like it needs to coexist quite directly with them. In this case, already building the entire piece around the single remaining line of one of Bach’s lost cantatas, I began to feel like it invited me to live not just with the spirit of Bach, but with the ghosts of some of my other great musical heroes.
The inclusion of Copland and Stravinsky in
Compose Thyself
is far from haphazard, or impulsive, however.
Bach’s arias, whose text was about the ennobling and uplifting power of music–and, call it corny but being with my pregnant wife who was napping quietly while I composed–it didn’t take long before I noticed myself also singing the melody from Appalachian Spring. And I realized it was because not only do the two pieces share the sublime key of A major, but also the transcendent melody from Appalachian Spring is based on the exact same contrapuntal motive of a 4-note downward scale. A lightbulb went off all of a sudden that there was all this kinship, and it felt like Copland’s ghost needed to be a part of the piece.
The circumstances under which Lustig worked on
Compose Thyself
also left their mark on the work. Written largely while in residence at
(Aaron Copland’s house, now a creative residence for guest composers), the spirit of Aaron Copland’s ghost made himself felt to Lustig in more than one way.
One night during my stay in Copland House, I had a very powerful feeling that Copland had just walked into the room. It was just after dusk, and almost completely silent in the solitary house in the woods. I was alone and suddenly the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, goosebumps, and I stopped breathing. I’m not really a big supernatural person, but it was both eerie and incredibly emotional for me to imagine Copland’s ghost popping back to say hello. Once I’d recovered, I took it as a sign that it was ok to allow a little quote of Copland.
Were it that we all received such clear creative encouragement from our musical ghosts!