The Wrong Way

an oldie but goodie

I am commissioned to write a libretto for a yet-to-be-composed concerto in memory of Albert Grokeost, an old friend who passed away two years before. Speculum Musicae, a chamber orchestra out of New York City, has proposed creating a piece in Albert’s memory as a way to recognize the emotional and monetary support he provided them over the years. They are in search of new concerto pieces to round out a season of world premieres, and approach Albert’s long-time friend and executor, Ken Browne, with the idea of creating a piece that would feature Albert’s favorite instrument, the viola.

Ken proposes engaging someone that Albert knew personally. The board chooses composer Jon Deak. Ken and Jon hash out the initial ideas for the piece over a couple of breakfasts in Manhattan. When it becomes clear that Jon desires to work with a text—he often works with fairy tales and myths as creative starting-off points—Ken suggests bringing in one of Albert’s many writer friends.

The idea, Ken tells me over the phone, is threefold: to capture Al’s essence in words and music, to honor his life-long dedication to the arts, and to carry forth the message of love and healing he espoused in his life, practice, and essay, “Nature’s Cure.” He and Jon have already extrapolated a basic outline for the piece based on Albert’s philosophy of healing: “Friendship and growing up are nature’s cure.”

I am flattered to be asked. Of course, it doesn’t occur to me, having never before written a libretto, that I might be in over my head. Nor do I pay much attention to the possibility that what I know and have to say about Albert will not translate into music nor satisfy his wide circle of friends, let alone a classical music audience. Rather, I am caught up in the glow of being asked (and paid!) to write about a dear friend and mentor.

A few days after Ken’s first phone call a package arrives in the mail containing the original outline and some notes. The piece is to be in five movements:

Loveless childhood

Rejection of first love

Reenactment

Transforming event

Return to wholeness

Although my childhood was by no means loveless, I feel an immediate sympathy for this structure; it seems to me the quintessential hero’s journey. I see myself as that wounded hero, easily placing my child-of-divorce past into its mold. I picture myself writing a minor, operatic epic that moves these romantic themes around its stage in a storm of emotion. I can hear the music swelling up in the final movement, the bits and pieces of melody that have been shattered and dissonant throughout the early movements coming together and transforming all that pain and disillusionment into a stirring, majestic climax.

Unfortunately, after a few early attempts, I find that I have no words to accompany this fantasy, nor any true sense of the music. I will have to back up and learn more before setting out on this hero’s journey. Some initial questions have to be answered. Where does this outline come from? How, for that matter, does a concerto work? And how does one go about writing a libretto, anyway?

First off I discuss the structural notes with Ken and Jon. They agree that the outline incorporates the steps one takes to get well, as Albert saw it, a path that leads out of fear and anxiety into wholeness. In order to be healthy, “the child” has to find a way to transform his abandonment fears. Jon talks about wanting the third movement, the scherzo, to be frenetic, chaotic, as adolescence can often be. This makes sense to me. “Reenactment,” then, means being stuck in a rut, caught in a cycle learned from childhood. There has to be some transforming event, some lightning bolt, to knock you back on the path to wholeness. I get off the phone confident and eager to start again.

Whenever I attempt to write from, or inside, this structure, however, I become stuck. Everything I write seems either too general or too preachy. It’s a connect-the-dots hero’s journey with a faceless hero and a direction-less pilgrimage. There is no soul to my words. The task of translating such an outline into a musical text appears next to impossible.

It soon becomes clear that I need to reconnect with Albert’s work directly. After some searching, I pull a dog-eared copy of “Nature’s Cure” out of a basement box marked “Sebastian’s stuff” and start to read. The piece, in essence, holds up the twin merits of being an adult and having close friends, illustrating how these two hard fought states of being can help one stay healthy and happy in life. He talks about a “justice” to real friendship, a certain responsibility we have to our loved ones and to ourselves. Coming from a big city orthopedic doctor who went to med school the class behind my grandfather, his words seemed close to revelatory. It seems serendipitous that Albert has also gone to Adult Children of Alcohol meetings and used their 12-steps as a basis for many of his ideas, for I have just spent a year in the program struggling with my demons.

Putting down the essay, I feel as if I have been given a chance to break an old cycle of my own, that maybe writing this piece can turn out to be my own “transforming event.” A brief, enthusiastic period of writing follows, pages filling up mostly with my memories of Albert. But what I write is too personal, and there is no real poetry in the words, no music. I see no way to make the translation. Out of frustration, I decide to return to the outline. However, after two weeks with very few words making it to paper, I once again turn away from both the outline and Albert’s text.

Due to money and time constrictions, Jon and I are unable to meet in person. This is unfortunate, for we never share the back and forth banter, the give and take, inherent in true collaboration. We hold, instead, several lengthy phone conversations in which we attempt to clarify, and re-clarify, the basic structure of the piece. It turns out that Jon and I spoke very different languages when it comes to the creative process, and the phone line serves only to increase our incapability. After some deliberation, I decide to stick with the early ideas, mainly because I don’t have any of my own to offer. Jon has given me a sense of the tone he wants to achieve, it is up to me to come up with some material.

What Jon needs from me is a spark to ignite his creative process. With that initial spark, he will light a strong fire from which to draw creative heat. But I can’t see it that way. I feel, instead, that I have to take into consideration every aspect of music, nuance and production—that my job is not just to light the fire, but to gather the wood and to build a fireplace out of fieldstones. Not surprisingly, I am stuck, blocked, blank.

The breakthrough occurs when I stop trying to write something original for Albert’s libretto and turn—in a despairing, I’ve-given-up frame of mind—to cutting and pasting excerpts from old letters and poems into a file. The best I can do is collect fragments. It is a way to get out of the rut I am in—and though it feels like cheating, there is nothing else I can do. I spend about two days pillaging this way, drawing in large part from old letters to Albert, writing exercises, and journal entries. Like some frantic mother bird, I build up a nest of scraps, dead leaves, and pulled flowers. Phrases like “waking to a startled house” and “walking among hurt trees into the heart of the city” speak, at least, in the cracked voice of raw emotion.

Albert often talked about “the thick layer of cement” you had to fight through in order to reach the unconscious. I feel mine is finally beginning to crack.

There are no criteria to this process, just an instinctual flashlight scanning words and coming to rest when something inside me, some inner bell, goes off. I am looking for immediacy, for spoken truth. What I find is a quick, instinctual cataloging process: this belongs in the “early childhood” section, this in “alienation,” this in “reenactment.” It is cathartic work, emotionally draining, and, not coincidentally, it comes to an abrupt end with the last opened text in my computer files. I have no more energy for the task.

After a weeklong break, I try collaging the pieces together into something artful, but it is a half-hearted effort and dries up quickly. There is no continuity, no inner core to work from. I have gathered fragments, that’s all, have made a burnt offering but have no prayer. Then, one day, I give up my attempts entirely. I stand up from my desk theatrically and tell myself, “That’s it. I give up. No more.” It feels final. I walk out of my study and, in need of immediate distraction, pick up an old New York Times. I sit down, turn to the sports section, and am immediately drawn to an article about the winner of the New York marathon.

It seems the runner ran the wrong way near the end of the race, turning down a side street less than a quarter mile from the finish line. His running partner, who had stayed at his side the whole race, kept on running. If not for members of the crowd gesturing for him to turn back, the runner might have caught his mistake too late. As it turns out, he reversed his direction in time, caught up to his partner, and eventually passed him to win the race. The paper makes a point to say that the partner slowed up for his long time friend (a fact, in my mind, that only makes the story better.)

I put the paper down, close to tears. I am taken completely by surprise by this welling up of emotion. Without thinking twice, I reach for a piece of scrap paper and write: “It is easy to walk the wrong way.” I sit for a restless minute fighting an irrepressible urge to keep on writing. There seems no reason not to continue. The words come freely and without interruption for a few minutes then stop just as abruptly:

It is easy to walk the wrong way.

To avoid the swamp, you take a path through the trees,

hoping to circumvent all the muck and trouble.

But a stone wall checks your progress.

A tangle of underbrush and trees funnels you to this dead-end

and you have to turn back.

Again you start out and, again, you are forced to go back.

You try many different approaches, walk down countless paths,

but, always, the same result: stone wall, dead end.

Then one day, out of the blue, you walk straight into the swamp

and tramp your way through,

arriving on the other side without incident,

dry shards of dirt crusting off your shoulders and arms.

Before you know it, you are walking along a country road.

The sky is high. A hawk floats in loose, concentric circles

over a grove of trees. And it occurs to you: Jesus didn’t walk

on water. He trudged through the mud.

And with these last words, I fall into bed and take a long nap. I wake up refreshed and unburdened from my work on the project. Incredibly, I make no connection between the outpouring and my work on the musical piece. That they might be directly linked simply does not occur to me.

It isn’t until a good time later, after many more hours of struggle with the commissioned poem, that I go back to these quickly jotted down words. And it takes my partner, Ali, to remind me. When she suggests using the poem, a light goes on in the closet of my head, and I see clearly that the spontaneous poem contains the heart and essence of the piece. What a relief!

Next comes an exciting and difficult period of revision in which I become busy refining and deepening the poem, piecing together the fragments that now have a center to swirl around. In a little over a week, I complete the project and send it off to Jon.