Ghosts of Our Former Selves

The songs comprising my October 2020 release, Ghosts of Our Former Selves, including the two presented here, were deliberately composed in a confessional mode. They form a forty-minute sonic memoir that draws on everything I have spent my six-plus decades learning as a composer of contemporary classical music (especially computer music) with deep roots in jazz and popular music traditions. The vastly different musical worlds I present are not meant to be nostalgic, nor are they intended as recreations of music from our past. They are refracted musical memories, recombined in novel ways and witnessed at a distance, as I experience them now—all these years later.

The songs are my response to the deaths of my parents, followed by the death of my mentor, all converging with the arrival of what—with a bit of luck, given my not-so-distant serious illness—will be a few more decades of life. With “Ghosts of Armageddon,” I have added a generous helping of anger toward humankind's inexplicable willingness to accept hate and to engage in an unwinnable game of chicken with mass extinction.

The project was composed over the past year, but as I was writing and producing the final songs, the pandemic hit, intensifying and reframing the entire project. Artists are always responding to world events in highly personal ways, and since the year 2020 is our apocalypse, how can we turn away? Apocalypse, it turns out, is ancient Greek for “an unveiling.” We know in our hearts, during this dark time full of despair, that unveiling must be the order of the day, that we must seek what is true and at the core of our practice. I am sharing this piece now with that recognition.

Composers cannot predict what it means to send music out into the world. But even in the most fraught times, send it out we must, in the hope that we just might be sharing a perspective that makes some small, meaningful contribution.