Brennan Collins | This WordPress.com site is the cat’s pajamas



The Ballad of Shalom AleikhemBACKGROUND:Originally, I had decided to create a comic book based on a personal experience, though my lack of a drawing ability frustrated me. I thought of taking advantage of my strengths as a composer since I have had experience with creating original work. Although I only have experience with Guitar Pro 5, I have never worked with Logic X Pro. I am working alongside my cousin, Jonathan Ruiz, who has his music software in his basement. This song is not original composition in the traditional sense, but should be recognized as a "splice-and-dice" composition (or a mixing of samples if you will). I have incorporated a variety of other songs, taking bits and pieces from Yiddish folk songs, piano concertos, and orchestral ensembles. This song takes inspiration from two different sources: Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw” and Charles Mingus' "Pithecanthropus Erectus." The first is a musical-narrative piece, which delves into the experience of the Holocaust that creates this eerie chaotic form of escapism—escaping from his present-day living and jumping back into the treacherous hell. The second creates is a bebop jazz piece that is meant to depict the history of man, incorporating horns, percussion, and the bass to communicate the severity of their life style along with the different evolutionary stages. Because of what these songs offer, I tried to create something similar.I chose to write this story in the form of song, because in literature (including comic books) the author is repeatedly telling the viewer where to look, almost forcing you to see the world through the eyes of the author. The narrator only gives descriptions, sometimes whole pages, sometimes bread crumbs, and in the end, the grand scheme is revealed for the reader to exalt the work as enlightening—only seldom does it teach. I am reminded of the Roman poet, Horace, in his Ars Poetica, where he believes the function of poetry is to teach and delight and of the complexity between the functions of literature and the dichotomy between pragmatism and asceticism. Does art exist for art's sake? Is it possible to teach and delight at the same time? The power structure between author and reader, at least to me, reminded me of the relationship between a Nazi officer and a person of Jewish descent. While I acknowledge that that is an extreme analogy, I found this relationship in Joe Sacco's Palestine, forcefully feeding the reader truths that are hard to shallow. This particular project, however, is based on Art Speigelman's Maus. I do not think Speigelman presented his story with the same ferocity, but there are scenes of disconnect, specifically the introduction of Maus:The push and pull between past and present, good and bad, fact and fiction, is all summed up just in the first few pages. The relationship between Art and his father (and questions on what is "good" and "bad" parenting), the past and present (I think of "My Father Bleeds History" quote and Art's yearning to have experience the holocaust), and fact and fiction (the art style's demand for detail) are concepts that interested me while reading Maus. The question of the function of literature (in this case comic books) is apparent in redefining what a comic book can do, and reimagining its place in society as something more than child's play. While the book format is highly dependent on sight and touch, music presents a new way of looking the same topics. Music is interpretative. This is not to say that the book format is not interpretative, and, I will add that music does guide the listener to feel a certain way, but my position is that music gives the audience a more enlightening experience. The musician guides you through a journey, this river of notes that captures the attention of the listener—intoxicating them like Dionysus would—and, most importantly, reaches out to the listener's emotions without the strain of focusing on a screen or page, not to mention that listening to music does not require the same mental capacity as reading. To play devil's advocate, one could say music is manipulative of emotions, but I would argue that music is representative of human emotions in a way that books cannot convey. Words can only convey so much, as the exclamation mark! You do not know whether I am furious or excited. This is where adjectives assist the author in conveying that feeling or tone, but may cause disruptions in the reader not knowing the word (and having to look up its' definition) or even the language. Music is a universal language. To clarify, literature depends on knowing the context of the story/poem for a complete understanding; music is built through the universal emotions—similar to how people around the world can identify a happy, sad, or an anxious face. Music takes advantage of our shared collective experiences (our dreams, hopes, wants, laughs, cries) and rearranges them in an abstract template for the sound to transcend the ear lobes and make neural connections with the brain for a catharsis—a purification and purging of our emotions, and, more importantly, to forget and reflect.ANALYSIS:This piece is called "The Ballad of Shalom Aleikhem." "Shalom Aleikhem," is a Hebrew greeting, meaning "peace be upon you." To personify a greeting as a person conveys the image of a person that is the sole representative of their culture. In addition, this device, if an individual is not familiar with the greeting, would make the listener think that the greeting is the name of a person. Because this song is about the Holocaust and the Jewish experience, the title is supposed to introduce a disconnect, an absurdist world that is built on the juxtaposition of peace and war. "The Ballad" part comes from the song itself, which is built on samples taken from Yiddish folk songs. I rearranged their voices, their lyrics, to create a story about innocence, loss, fear, agony, acceptance, death, fear, and chaos in that order. The song begins with the sounds of a radio changing channels. Someone is changing the channels (perhaps a nod to predestination, religion, free will) and finds the channel of a girl saying, "Tell me a story." The quote is significant, because 1) that is the only spoken English in the entire song, 2) introduces another form of disconnect, 3) introduces the tension of fact and fiction. The rest of the song is in either Yiddish or German, and to hear English is familiarity, a form of hope—a hope that is reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty when Jewish refugees came for asylum. Secondly, the fact that the girl wants a story would remind the listener of a bedtime story, one where the source of fiction is read to them from a book; this, however, is not a book but song. Because the girl wants a story, there is an assumption that what she is about to listen to is fiction, that it never happened and it only exists in imaginations. People born generations after the Holocaust have a hard time trying to relate to the experiences of those that lived the wars and concentration camps (just look at Artie). We are more emphatic toward school shootings and hurricanes; because that is the world we live in. While people acknowledge that the Holocaust did happen, people have only experienced the Holocaust from books, videos, and audio—never experiencing it first-hand; thus creating a disconnect between past and present. Immediately after, we hear the sound of a cassette tape going into a stereo. In short, the song that is about to follow is seen as a story. First VerseThe song proceeds with Theodore Bikel's rendition of "Dort baym breg fun veldl (At the Edge of a Forest)." The first few seconds are played in reverse to, again, remind the reader of the tension between past and present, and reality and fiction. The song takes a solemn guitar melody, giving off a feeling of discontent, as if someone had recently passed. The voice of crisp composure sets the stage of the story, where the end of the forest lies an Ancient Tree whose whispering leaves are scarcely heard. At "Ancient Tree," the Israeli national anthem plays at 0:52-1:00, but is barely heard as its citizens (leaves) fall. I also make the connection between ancient tree and Israel since Israelis see their country as the motherland, the land that was given to them by God or the Tree of Life. Like winds that push leaves to a different direction, the song shifts to talk about a mother and her son. Netania Davrath's "Rozhinkes mit Mandlen (Raisins and Almonds)," plays with yet another piece of reversed music (at around 1:20). The piano gives a melancholic tone, especially since she sings of a widow who sings her son to sleep with a lullaby. I bring back the guitar melody (between 1:20-1:30) from Bikel to make the song pull the audience back into the past (the intro), as if the song does not want you to forget about the lost souls of the Holocaust. The lullaby that follows is another sample says to be silent near the dead, whose flowers are blooming above them. The song splits into Frieda Bursztyn Radasky's ""Treblinke Dort (There Lies Treblinka)" on the left ear, and Chopin's "Nocturne in C Sharp Minor" on the right. The literal division is illustrated further in the simultaneous singing of a mother thinking of her child while walking in the cold (see Harel's "Kalt") and a son crying to find his mother (see " Kaczerginski's "Dos elnte kind.") This is the end of the first verse.Second VerseMiriam Harel sets the stage with her song about the experience of the ?ód? ghetto in 1942. Her voice is the only thing you hear, and immediately shifts to Glezer's "'S'iz Geven a Zumertog' and Rotenberg's "S’iz kaydankes kaytn." At 2:30, listen to the radio static, the signal that marks a shift from the somber atmosphere to the beginnings of a chaotic tone or a pre-chaos. Piano notes play off key while the violin serenates the audience with eerie, uncomfortable sounds. This creepy feeling continues with Harel's "Kalt" singing in the left ear and Rotenberg's "Geto getunya," which acts as if the song is coming to life, talking to you from all sides and, consequently giving the impression of paranoia and chaos. At 3:06, there is a slight sound of thunder, an omen for the foreboding chaos, which repeats again at 3:14. In addition, the last words sung translate to "night is all around us / waiting for us / full of horror and fear," which is representative of the overarching emotion of fear and anxiety during this time, not to mention the agony in his voice— Shpigl's " Makh tsi di eygelekh (Close your eyes)."ChorusAt this point in the song (around 3:36), the listener will be bombarded with a full on catastrophic ensemble of horns, violins, and pianos, that make the music act as an aggressive person, closing in on the audience with fear, doubt, and worry. The songs included here are as follows:"Piano Concerto No.3 in C major, op.26, Adante Allegro & Allegro ma non troppo" by Sergei?Prokofiev and Maurice Ravel"Alpensymphonie, Op.64 - Stille vor dem Sturm" by Richard Strauss"G?tterd?mmerung, WWV 86D / Act 3 - "Zurück vom Ring!" by Richard Wagner"Scythian Suite, Op.20 – 'Ala and Lolly' - 2. The Evil God and Dance of the Pagan Monsters," by Sergei?Prokofiev"Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, Op. 100," by Sergei?Prokofiev"Don Quixote, Op. 35: Variation VIII. Gem?chlich," by Richard Strauss"String Quartet No. 8," by Dmitri Shostakovich"Das Rheingold, Entry of the Gods into Valhalla," by Richard Wagner"Symphony No. 1, Op. 80: III. Andante Sostenuto," by Bruno WalterNazi German AnthemAll of this is sampled on one another with an emphasis on horns first, which includes the Nazi anthem to give a militaristic outlook with Wagner and Strauss leading the charge. At around 5:15, an emphasis on strings that is dominated by Shostakovich and Prokofiev (which sounds as if the two are in a battle, a battle that can be seen as a metaphor for WWII or any of the other binaries I have talked about thus far). The whole purpose of the chorus is to illustrate the chaos and the agony of the Holocaust, of the millions of lives lost and of the impact on survivors. (I had inspiration from Pablo Picasso's Guernica.) The song then ends at 6:16 and has nothing but white noise in the background. There is a minute silence, which acts as a sort of test for the listener. The listener will either 1) be frustrated and impatient with pure silence and end the song or 2) the listener will finish listening to rest of the "story." If the listener chooses to stop listening, then that is analogous to our people not caring about the Holocaust, or at least not devoting their life to humanitarian causes. In the end, the song ends, which, while people pursue their own endeavors, there is this lingering, fleeting feeling of hope that makes us want to change the world—a feeling that Sacco makes us of in Palestine. If the listener chooses to listen, then he or she will hear footsteps. Someone is walking on dirt with what sounds like a shovel hitting the ground. Pause. Then there is the sound of digging, of shoveling. (Perhaps this is to pay respect to the lives that perish.) Notice how there is no end tape sound, suggesting that what the little girl heard is in fact not a story. Works CitedArgerich, Martha, and Abbado, Claudio. "Piano Concerto No.3 in C major, op.26, Adante Allegro & Allegro ma non troppo," by Sergei?Prokofiev and Maurice Ravel. YouTube, uploaded by Falsário Chicote, 4 March 2014, Philharmoniker. "Alpensymphonie, Op.64 - Stille vor dem Sturm," by Richard Strauss. YouTube, uploaded by Herbert von Karajan – Topic, 12 January 2015, , Theodore. "Dort baym breg fun veldl (At the Edge of a Forest), Song performed in Yiddish," by Petr Mamaichuk and Shmerke Kaczerginski. YouTube, uploaded by Григорий Вишневецкий, 13 April 2009, , Frédéric. "The Pianist Soundtrack 01 – Nocturne in C Sharp Minor." YouTube, uploaded by Aleks Bonham, 5 February 2011, , Netania. "Rozhinkes mit Mandlen (Raisins and Almonds)," by Abraham Goldfaden YouTube, uploaded by sziyyet2, 9 April 2008, Shpigl, Isaiah. "Makh tsi di eygelekh (Close your eyes)." Music and the Holocaust, 1946. MP3 file. , Rikle. "'S'iz Geven a Zumertog' (It Was a Summer's Day)." Music and the Holocaust, MP3 file. , Miriam. "Kalt: 'A lidl fin ?ód?er geto, 1945,'" Music and the Holocaust, 1945. MP3 file. , Miriam. "Vinter 1942 - Geto ?ód?," Music and the Holocaust, 1942. MP3 file. übner, Fritz. "G?tterd?mmerung, WWV 86D / Act 3 - "Zurück vom Ring!" by Richard Wagner. YouTube, uploaded by Pierre Boulez – Topic, 11 January 2018, "Israeli National Anthem – 'Hatikvah' (HE/EN)," by Naftali Herz Imber. YouTube, uploaded by jamesblitz90, 13 February 2012, , Shmerke. "Dos elnte kind (The Lonely Child)." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1946. MP3 file. "Nazi German Anthem," by Horst Weseel. YouTube, uploaded by gliango, 16 January 2008, , Alexander. "Scythian Suite, Op.20 – 'Ala and Lolly' - 2. The Evil God and Dance of the Pagan Monsters," by Sergei?Prokofiev. YouTube, uploaded by Valery Gergiev – Topic, 25 January 2017, , Sergei. "Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, Op. 100." YouTube, uploaded by Prok Prok, 19 February 2017, , Frieda Bursztyn. "Treblinke Dort (There Lies Treblinka)." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1943. MP3 file. , Yaakov. "Geto getunya," by Yankele Herskowitz. Music and the Holocaust, 1984. MP3 file. , Yaakov. "S’iz kaydankes kaytn (It’s shackles and chains)," by Yankele Herskowitz. Music and the Holocaust, 1942. MP3 file. , Yaakov. "Vuz zol men tien yidn," by Yankele Herskowitz. Music and the Holocaust. MP3 file. , Arthur. "Nocturne Op. 72, No. 1 in E minor," by Frédéric Chopin. YouTube, uploaded by ArRubMusic, 11 July 2009, , Dmitri. "String Quartet No. 8." YouTube, uploaded by olla-vogala, 14 December 2015, , Richard. "Don Quixote, Op. 35: Variation VIII. Gem?chlich." YouTube, uploaded by Vassil Kazandjiev – Topic, 15 July 2015, , Alexander. "Shtiler, Shtiler (Quiet, Quiet)," by Shmerke?Kaczerginski. Heartstrings, Music of the Holocaust, 1943. MP3 file. , Richard. "Das Rheingold, Entry of the Gods into Valhalla." YouTube, uploaded by TheWickedNorth, 31 December 2008, , Bruno. "Symphony No. 1, Op. 80: III. Andante Sostenuto." YouTube, uploaded by Bruno Walter – Topic, 11 November 2014, ................
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