This composition was written to be considered for pairing alongside Ludwig van Beethoven’s third symphony, the “Eroica” (Heroic), but can stand on its own virtues as an intense and slow meditation on heroism. The music is like a boiling pot on the stove that’s just begun to overflow its bubbles.
The first part of the title, kommos, is a Classical Greek term from Attic dramaturgy, literally meaning “striking” but specifically referring to beating oneself up during lamentation–ripping at the hair, gouging out the eyes (like Oedipus), slapping the forehead, and other acts amid moments of extreme emotional turmoil. For example, from Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon, a character bewails: “Apollo, Apollo! God of the Ways, my destroyer! For you have destroyed me—and utterly […]What is this fresh woe […]what monstrous, monstrous horror, beyond love’s enduring, beyond all remedy? And help stands far away!” We can easily imagine physical accompaniment to the script; rather than bottling up the pain, the hero lets it all explosively come out.
The second part of the title, “When the world moved on,” is an epigraph taken from American author Stephen King’s The Dark Tower epic, a series I recently completed. The primary setting of the novel, a world similar in many ways to our own, is experiencing a Dark Age where the glorious past is all but a distant memory and all good things are referred to wistfully as occurring, “When the world moved on.” Yet, the main protagonist, Roland–the last knight of this world–emphasizes that it is not just a figure of speech, but the literal distances between destinations are increasing, the stars are repositioning, and the fabric of reality is truly unravelling.
Taken together, this piece is a lamentation for when the world moved on. With the writing concluding on Yom Kippur during the Covid-19 Pandemic, being unable to fast or go to synagogue, this is my personal avinu malkeinu.
