Letters to My Daughters: First Letter

This is the first of five letters that shaped Letters To My Daughters, my new work for cello and piano. I wrote it early in the process of creating the piece, at the same time that the sound world was beginning to come into focus. These letters each say something about the world now, but also something that I hope my daughters will return to one day.

More soon.


First Letter: Ring All the Bells

To my daughters:

There are many things in our personal and collective lives which remain out of reach. Some things, like athletic or musical excellence, are out of our reach because they are notoriously difficult for individuals to achieve. I once wanted to be a professional baseball player, but I am not one because I was not good enough at baseball. I am not a great pianist (although I appreciate that you think I am) because I didn’t practice the piano enough when I was young. Other things, like curing cancer or fusing atoms together or traveling to other stars are beyond our capacity as humans, or at least they are in 2025 as I write this letter to you.

But there is a wide field of action that is possible between these personal and global challenges. In this opening are things which we avoid because nobody has organized the rest of us to do them. So much of the richness and beauty and connectedness in life happens at this overlooked, unloved medium scale.

There is a thought experiment that I think of often, but have never put into action because I do not have the energy or the willpower. Maybe someday I will. I imagine a day on which the citizens of Philadelphia, where we live, agree to ring every bell in the whole city all at once: the bells of the churches and cathedrals, of course, but also the little bells that people have in their homes and the old-fashioned alarm clocks and the decorative sleigh bells for Christmastime and all the rest of them, on and on, large and small. This festival of bells would be spectacularly beautiful, but we haven’t done it. It does not evade us on a technical level: we know how to make and ring bells. It does not evade us on a financial level: the bells already exist and it costs nothing to ring them. It doesn’t require new forms of social or political organization: all of our society’s problems would still be there the day after we rang the bells. It’s just something that would be exquisitely lovely but which we haven’t done because nobody has helped us do it.

Last year, there was a total solar eclipse which passed over some parts of our country. You both watched it at school using these silly cardboard goggles which millions of us bought, used once, and then threw away. My colleagues and I watched it while laying on the lawn behind my office—something which we would never have done under any other circumstances—where you sometimes do cartwheels when you come to visit me at work. We felt the warmth of the sun disappear and saw the stars and heard the animals which usually only come out at dusk. Some people who experienced it described understanding their relationship to the cosmos in a completely new way, a moment where the hidden relationships between things on a vast, inhuman scale were suddenly made visible.

Unexpected, large-scale acts of cooperation do the same thing. They reveal the hidden connections between ourselves and others, they bring us all out in the open, and they give us something to talk to each other about. Think about it: how many bells are hiding out there that you don’t know about? As soon as they started ringing, I know you would feel something about the city around us that you’d never felt before. You would stand on our rooftop and see your surroundings in a new way. Features of the landscape which had always been meaningless to you might now matter in some small way.

These bells are my flight of fancy. What is yours? What else remains undone, for no good reason, at an unexpected scale? What else could we do if someone brought us together and inspired us to do it?

I love you so much,

Dad

On Telling the Truth

In 2008, the English historian Tony Judt was diagnosed with ALS, a deadly neurological condition that would claim his life within the next two years. During the final months of his life, as his condition rapidly worsened and he lost nearly all of his motor function, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder visited him weekly in his New York apartment to discuss the intellectual currents of the 20th century which had provided the material for Judt’s remarkable career as a historian.

Their conversations ranged over Judt’s upbringing in postwar London, his relationship to his cultural heritage, and the interaction between that heritage and the intellectual world in which he would ultimately make his career. Most importantly, though, they discussed the role of intellectuals in a century that was, in many ways, defined by its capacity to produce individuals who read, wrote, and engaged in public critique as a profession. 

As I recently re-read Snyder’s foreword to these conversations (Thinking the Twentieth Century, 2012), one idea stood out with tremendous clarity and spoke directly to the current moment. Snyder articulated the difference between so-called “small truths” and “big truths.” The small truth is the matter-of-fact observation, the description of the world in front of us, the recounting of others’ behavior and actions. It is accurately recalling how things happened yesterday, last month, or last year.

Big truths, on the other hand, are the overarching stories we tell ourselves or which are told to us by others, helping us understand and organize the complexities of the wider world. The 20th century was a time of many large truths: the historical inevitability of Marxism (in some quarters) or liberal democracy (in others), the myth of Aryan racial superiority, the economic infallibility of capitalism, and many others besides.  

In their conversations, Judt and Snyder went on to articulate the many ways in which citizens of the 20th century were willing to tell blatant lies in the service of what they believed to be grand truths. It is through the recognition of these two kinds of “truth” that we can begin to understand why people were willing to participate in such acts of dishonesty—blatantly, shamelessly, consistently, and with profoundly dire consequences—in the last century. 

This tendency to distort or obscure reality for ideological ends is not a phenomenon confined to the twentieth century. As we enter a period where the American intellectual and political project is less stable than it has been in living memory, I see a similar willingness to lie about the world as it exists in front of our very eyes in order to accomplish some kind of greater transformation or in service of what we believe to be a greater truth. 

My concern, however, is not primarily with those who lie to further their own political or personal objectives. This is commonplace and banal. Instead, I am terrified by the fact that so many of are willing to accept these lies, even when they contradict the most basic aspects of observable reality.

I do not know whether our country is on the verge of descent into totalitarianism, illiberal democracy, or some variant thereof, but recent trends in political discourse and behavior give cause for deep concern. No one can say with certainty what the next several years will bring, but I do feel compelled to assert the centrality of simple, everyday truth-telling in the project of resisting whatever is before us.

This is also a time when it is essential for artists and intellectuals to speak publicly on behalf of our values. My values include tolerance as well as conflict, progress as well as an open mind about how that progress might be achieved, integrity even when telling the truth comes into conflict with my strongly held beliefs, the dignity of admitting when I am wrong, and intellectual modesty rather than intellectual certainty. I value kindness, generosity, and openness, even as these things may seem futile or insufficient or naive in the face of profound injustice.

I don’t live these values half as well as I would like to, but they are some of the values which guide me and to which I aspire. I want to hear from more people about what they value and why (and not just what outcomes they desire). I suspect that I share at least some of these values with people whose big truths are very different than mine.

The Ecology of Collaboration

The Ecology of Collaboration

Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do as artists, designers, and creatives. But collaboration as a subject unto itself is rarely taught, examined, or critiqued in art schools, conservatories, and universities. Many activities in these places implicitly require us to collaborate, but we rarely examine the collaborative process itself with the same level of reflection and discipline that we bring to our core artistic skills.

Read More

On Interiors

On Interiors

We are all inside our homes these days, experiencing interiors in ways that most of us have not experienced them in the past. Through a series of new compositions—Interiors—I am creating work that fits these strange circumstances: music that is composed inside and alone, performed inside and alone, and listened to inside and alone. I wrote the first piece in this series for Julia Dawson, a Canadian opera singer with whom I have collaborated closely for several years and whose artistry I respect enormously, to sing with violinist Guillaume Faraut and with me performing as pianist, which is something I do not normally do.

Read More

On Communication

On Communication

It’s the week after Thanksgiving, December 2019. I’ve made the hasty and perhaps ill-conceived decision to restart an old blog and it remains to be seen whether I will find a way to add to it with any regularity. I’m doing this because I have lately felt an absence of a certain type of communication. I am a reasonably social person, and I am reasonably active online. I maintain a number of very close artistic and intellectual relationships, and I speak on the phone with people I respect several times each week. Furthermore, I am a university professor and have the opportunity to discuss subjects that are important to me with very bright students and colleagues on a weekly basis. But despite these different types of communication, I find that I very rarely discuss—or am required to clearly articulate—the ideas that motivate and inspire my current, ongoing creative work. And when I do, it is usually on someone else’s terms. Both the content and register of language are calibrated to a situation beyond my control.

Read More

Book Review: The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt

My review of The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt is now published at MAKE, a Chicago literary magazine.

Arvo Pärt is a paradoxical figure in contemporary music: his work is widely performed, but almost never studied; it presents itself as disarmingly simple, but is fiendishly difficult to perform; it is meant to be heard in concert, though most know it only in recorded form; it is unabashedly sacred in a profoundly secular age.

Click here for the full text. 

Read More

Boston, October 2014

Boston, October 2014

Heading to Boston this weekend for the premiere of North Woods, a new multi-movement work for SSAA chamber choir. After returning from the Detroit performances in Berlin, I spent the remainder of the summer creating this piece. It was commissioned by Beth Willer and the Lorelei Ensemble, Boston's incomparable women's vocal octet, with some key support from a NewMusicUSA Project Grant. More on the piece, including audio excerpts, after the premiere this weekend.

Read More

Berlin, June 2014

I am in Berlin this week for a performance of Detroit, presented in a new staged version by the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler and directed by Alexander Scholz. The performance, which took place last night at Club Gretchen in Kreuzberg, embodied many of the trends which I believe make our time the most exciting period for classical music since the turn of the last century.

The venue, which one enters through an active junkyard / auto body repair shop, is a former carriage house; in it's present incarnation, it is a nightclub with a surprisingly warm, resonant sonic environment for acoustic music. On the surface, we're as far as possible from the ossified ambiance of a city-center flagship concert hall.

Read More

Tunis, June 2014

I am in Tunis this week, working with the Tunisian-Algerian writer Meryem Belkaïd (Slate, Huffington Post) on a new project called Spring. It's in the early stages of development, but will ultimately be an evening-length exploration of the Arab Spring and its ramifications through text and music. We've spent the week meeting with performing artists and other Tunisians who were active during the 2011 revolution and continue to play a vital role in the cultural and political life of the country.

Read More