From the Artistic Director

By Steven Schick

The great Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that Franz Kafka was so important that he influenced even those who came before him. Certainly in his final story, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” Kafka created an emotional geometry so sharp and exacting that for me personally the story has given leverage to understand such widely various experiences as reading Seneca, listening to Patsy Cline, and, yes, programming a concert of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.

“Our singer is called Josephine and anyone who has not heard her does not know the power of song.”

With that line Kafka begins his account of a mouse diva, who, while “piping” in an annoying and non-musical way, becomes an iconic performer for a downtrodden and not particularly musical population of mouse-folk. The story offers labyrinthine interpretive pathways – including commentary on the pathology of Kafka’s own voice as he was dying of tuberculosis. But for me the principal metaphor has always been that music becomes a point of contact between the real and the imagined, between the world and my world. This happens for me most vividly in communal musical situations, when people actually sit together and listen with each other.

Negotiating between the personal and the collective in music can lead us inward toward small sounds and private thoughts as it seems to in James Tenney’s Critical Band, where micro-perturbations result from the combination of slightly differing pitches. Arriving at a certain critical threshold of difference and complexity, sounds suddenly generate meaning, here in the form of harmony. Or the journey might be outward-bound and move us beyond our personal worlds and into the shared realms of politics and war. We are guided into the purgatory of human conflict by David Lang’s Illumination Rounds, which posits the extreme virtuosity of violin and piano writing as an allegory to the cool violence of long-distance killing, and by Frederic Rzewski’s more directly political appeal to Bring them Home! Even John Cage is less inscrutable than usual and comments directly on the din of popular culture in his Credo in Us.

Martin Bresnick’s Songs of the Mouse People brings us back to Kafka. In this music that might have come directly from Josephine’s songbook the point is not what is being said but that we come together for the saying of it. In very nearly the last words that Franz Kafka wrote, this togetherness resonates as a transitory state of grace.

“The time will soon come when her last notes sound and die into silence. She is a small episode in the eternal history of our people, and the people will get over the loss of her. Not that it will be easy for us; how can our gatherings take place in utter silence?”

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Zone 2: indispensable morphology
Monday, November 14 · 8:00 pm · Herbst Theatre
Preconcert talk with Steven Schick at 7:15 p.m.
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Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation
Sunday, November 13 · 4:30 pm · ODC Studio B
John Cage's Credo in Us · Hosted by Steven Schick
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