The Lord’s Prayer was one of my most pleasurable writing experiences that I can remember. Soprano Samantha Sayar approached me with an idea I found incredibly meaningful and enticing: her grandparents are Lebanese, and she wanted my help in crafting a piece that she could sing in Arabic that they would connect with more than standard operatic repertoire she usually sings. The text she chose was The Lord’s Prayer in Arabic, as her grandparents know it. I am half-Ghanaian and have had little contact with my maternal grandparents in Ghana, so I know all too well the desire to connect with one’s elders. I was inspired to craft a piece that would combine the Arab maqam-infused music I was writing a few years ago with my more current influences. I composed the piece in maqam Kurd, which is roughly equivalent to the Western Phrygian scale. I limited myself to the pitches of this maqam as well as its transposition, Hijazkar Kurd. It was a fun challenge to limit the harmonic dimension to this piece to the pitches of the maqam and craft vertical sonorities around it. I strove to write something that would sound unmistakably Arab, but also genre-fluid—the ending has something of a metal breakdown which I could not help but include. This was a joy to create, and I hope that joy comes through.

Text

ابانا الذى فى السموات
لقدس اسسمك ليائى ملكوتك
لتكن مشيئتك
كما في السماء كذلك على االرض اعطنا خبزنا كفاه يومنا واغفر لنا ذنوبنا گما تغفر للمذنبين النا وال تدخلنا في التجربه لكن نحنا من
الشرير ألن لك الملك والقوة والمجد الى األبد امين

Translation

Our father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven,
give us this day our daily bread
and forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass against us
and lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever
Amen.

Samantha and Samia Sayar

‍

Death comes for us all, but how should we face it? Do we run? Or might some welcome it with a smile? When Susan sent this provocative text to me, I thought immediately of the Germanic literary trope of welcoming death as an old friend, or like entering a warm slumber. It reminded me of one classic Lied in particular, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. I thought about how that song in hindsight is…honestly rather kinky. One gets the sense that the song isn’t really talking about a maiden literally dying. When Death tells the maiden how beautiful she is, that he wants not to punish her but only that she “rest softly in [his] arms”, there is a macabre sense of romance to it. What would it mean to invert that idea, to switch the power dynamic between Death and the maiden? What if instead of the hopeless maiden being seduced by death, the maiden is the seductress herself? What would it be like to be so ready for oblivion as to make Death blush? After all, when it comes to “little deaths”, too, there is an oblivion in giving oneself up wholly to pleasure from another person.

I wanted to depict this state of mind, to be yearning and ready for death—whichever death that may be—and the morbid fascination in looking death straight in the eye. The theme from Death and the Maiden is heard in snippets throughout the piece, but only once the speaker has finally seen the face of Death up close is the Schubert finally quoted in its full glory as the dirge reaches its fever pitch.

Text:

Hello, speck.
I see you, speck.
Why won’t you let me look right at you?
You’re standing so far from me,
too far away to see.
But you are there, always,
in the corner.
Why won’t you let me look right at you?
Hello, shadow.
I see you, shadow.
Why won’t you let me look right at you?
You are facing me, now,
you look at me.
But you will not let me face you,
you always turn away.
Why won’t you let me look right at you?
Hello, friend.
I see you, friend.
Why won’t you let me look right at you?
You sit next to me, now,
on the train.
You are in the car next to mine,
there - isn’t that you?
Why won’t you let me look right at you?
Hello, death.
I see you, death.
Why won’t you let me look right at you?
You make it hard to see, now,
my eyes see only you.
You cloud my vision, dark,
it is only black.
Why won’t you let me look right at you?
I want to see you now.
I want to see.

Susan Bywaters

Pretty Girl was, in some ways, my most difficult piece to write to date. Not musically—the music flowed easily, and it was a joy to create. But crafting the text was challenging, heart-breaking work. The piece was commissioned as part ofThe Cartography Project at the Kennedy Center, which “seeks to create a musical map of racial hate crimes across America and use music as both a source of healing and a way to open dialogue about the future of anti-racism.” Composer-librettist teams were sought from across the country to write pieces responding to high-profile instances of anti-Black violence in their region. When I was approached by the Washington National Opera to write a piece about the murder of Nia Wilson—an 18-year-old girl from Oakland who was, along with her two sisters, assailed by a transient on a BART train in an attack which claimed her life, and forever marred the lives of her surviving sisters—I was already quite familiar with the subject matter, and felt woefully underprepared to write about something so close to home, as a Black man in America. Additionally, the prospect of writing a piece to adequately honor someone’s memory, especially someone who passed in such horrific circumstances, was daunting. I knew I needed a Black woman’s perspective in crafting a text for a piece like this, and instantly knew my twin sister Yasmina would be right for the job. Also, the dynamic of this piece being a product of siblings, telling a story about sisterhood just felt right to me.

From the outset, it was paramount to me that this piece not be a work of “trauma porn”. I wanted the piece to be centered around joy, while still acknowledging the gravity and the tragedy of what occurred, as I believe joy in the face of overwhelming adversity is a truly revolutionary act. Ultimately, I came at it with the perspective of how I might like to be remembered, were I in her stead. Given that I, as a Black man, have a 1 in 1000 chance of dying at the hands of police brutality, this was a viscerally real perspective to me. Yasmina and I did copious research into Nia’s life, and got to know a little about the beautiful, multi-talented person she was: a cheerleader, dancer, rapper, makeup artist, and, at the time of her passing, a prospective student of criminal justice. Nia was deeply concerned about the ways of the world, and specifically the ways in which Black people are continually denied justice. We worked painstakingly to craft a text which acknowledged the multitudes that made up Nia, while also embodying her steadfast commitment to justice that she had in life, and that her loved ones have taken up in her name in death. Similarly, I wanted the music to contain multitudes; it is a synthesis of all the music I love. You can hear everything from R&B, to jazz, to metal and so much in between. Most importantly, it is a story of two sisters singing of their cherished loved one and affirming the strength of the Black spirit in an unjust world which seeks to erase our bodies and our voices.

Lyrics:

Pretty girls don’t suffer no fools
We make ‘em, we don’t follow no rules
One look at you, I knew your heart in an instant
The fire in your voice,
How it glittered like a thousand jewels

You line your eyes like a queen
Highlighting cheekbones God already perfected,
Fixin’ your crown, rockin’ your royal armor
From their gaze to keep yourself protected
and step out into the world

Lazy Sundays freestyling by Lake Merritt
Holding court as you’re composing verses
Catch the haters staring,
‘cause they couldn’t bear it,
You knew those eyes could never make you flinch

Brave and bold, we hold each other
Through the hard times
I will always be there in this life
And the next
You know that everyone called you Pretty Girl
You were born to change our whole world
You never left a single soul behind,
Now that you’re our angel,
We’ll never give up the fight
Shone so bright, they couldn’t handle the light,
For those in need, you’d never miss a chance
To find a way to do what’s right
Those were the steps of your life’s brief dance

Pretty girls don’t suffer no fools
We make ‘em, we don’t follow no rules
It’s up to us to keep our sisters safe
Never let this cruel world our spirits break
Pretty girls don’t suffer no fools
We make ‘em, we don’t follow no rules
We hold each other through the world’s heartbreak
Our joy’s the treasure they will never take

There is power in speaking a name
The eternal life it grants
Our people, a priceless treasure
Diamonds of the motherland
Those who would rob our riches
Will be left grasping at sand

Jens & Yasmina Ibsen

‍

Concrete Sea is about many things: chiefly, the isolation of urban life—the atomized existence it forces upon us all, the sorrows of young millennial adulthood, and the possibility of hope through an increasingly elusive source: true community. On a personal level, this piece was also a chance to reflect on the years I spent in New York. I got my master’s degree at The New School and then spent another year out there doing remote work and freelancing as a singer. During that last year I felt incredibly lonely—I had a partner who was often out of town for business, and it seemed like my friends could hardly give me the time of day. I had three jobs and spent nearly all my time indoors working from home and going to rehearsals and gigs. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I was forced to move back to my family home in the Bay Area, and my isolation merely continued. This time has made it abundantly clear that I am, as we all are, hopelessly dependent on a community of friends and family. It is only through other people that we can face the horrors of life and become greater than ourselves.

I wrote this piece while reading M. Scott Peck’s The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace and was awestruck by the book’s brand of pragmatic optimism, and the concrete ways in which the author proposes community should be built. While Peck was writing during the latter days of the Cold War, the overwhelming sense of danger and division that threatened our way of life back then has arguably only increased. Our problems are increasingly global, and the pandemic has laid bare all the ways in which we are endlessly interconnected as living beings. It is up to us to reach out to each other, to embrace our connectedness, and to build new systems on the ashes of those which are crumbling before our very eyes.

Lyrics:

I am a drop in a concrete sea
Not a sea of tranquility,
But the torrent of life, with its countless terrors
Beating me battered, leaving me lost in the errors
Of my ways

Oh, won’t you hold me through the storm?
Won’t somebody come keep me warm?
Make me forget all that I have been cut off from
I have long forgotten that I could have more.

We all become numb
By a sum
By a total of disparate despairs
Collecting inside the heart
Coronary coffers bursting from the weight
Of all the little losses

What if we turned to each other?
What if we stopped this morbid crawl?
Though we so love our lives, we’re losing them
What if we shared them, what if we could have it all?
‍
Let’s hold each other through the storm
A tender heart is what will keep us warm,
Never forget, we must never be cut off from
The light inside that tells us all that we were meant
For more.

Jens Ibsen

This song was commissioned by Arias Beyond Boundaries, an organization bringing opera and classical music to the incarcerated populations of NYC. The text was written by one of the students of the outreach program. I was drawn to it because of its elegant simplicity, and the satisfying cadence of the words. Most importantly: I knew this piece was to be performed for the students themselves and I felt it was important to write something beautiful and tender to contrast with their stark circumstances. I am thankful to have gotten the opportunity to write for a program doing such wonderful, necessary work, and also for the chance to engage emotionally with a more sensitive side of myself that I have not gotten to draw from as frequently in prior pieces.

Lyrics:‍

My dearest muse, your eyes are like the sun and the moon
Your voice like the angels, when you speak the world ceases to move
And nothing compares to the inspiration
I find in your room
Your Joy is my motivation
When you smile my heart sings
Your devotion to me is the sweetest caress
In your bosom is my bliss
Is our love as dear to you
When I’m away what do you miss?‍

Robert F.

There is a frightening parasitic insect species native to my local park—the tarantula hawk wasp. The females prey upon tarantulas by stinging them between the legs and planting a single egg upon the abdomen. The larva then enters the spider and eats around its vital organs until the very end when it finally emerges, ready to lay further waste to arachnid-kind. Positively grisly. Should a human be stung by one, the sting is among the most painful in the world…

I was struck by the great aesthetic beauty of this species—the kinds native to my area have striking, jet-black bodies and bright orange wings, which signal their poisonous sting—and thought that somehow, the grisliness of their reproductive process might lend itself to song. For whatever reason, my first instinct was to create a sexy, cabaret-style tune. After all, Björk’s remarkable love song, Virus opens with the line, “Like a virus needs a body/As soft tissue feeds on blood/Someday I’ll find you, the urge is here.” In some ways, this piece was a writing exercise for myself to see if I could take the most taboo, objectionable subject matter and turn it into a genuinely alluring piece. However, it was also was an exercise in me facing a deeply ingrained fear, as I have had a morbid fear of parasites since childhood. This tarantula's passionate song is my way of processing the fact that I LOVE how creepy and gross this wasp is and what it does. It's a strange thing to delight in something so horrible, and my inability to understand my own attraction to the horror of the subject matter led to the imagining of this bizarre fantasy. The text should not be read too literally (particularly with regards to gender). My sole intent was for the listener’s experience to mimic the plight of the tarantula: desiring something—or someone—you probably really, really shouldn’t. Surely none of us have eluded this feeling.

Lyrics:

A flicker of wings, a flash of jet-black
I was unprepared for such an attack
Of vicious venom, so sweetly it slides
Into the dark depths of my soft insides.

You cut into me, sliced between my legs
Planted your sole seed, can’t hear as I beg
To be freed from this, my prison of flesh
As I am consumed, down to my last breath.
‍
Could this great pleasure and pain be all mine?
Could this be love that you’ve planted inside?
As my mind withers, my bliss but grows stronger
As your love-spawn grows and tears me asunder.

Jens Ibsen

As a relative of Henrik Ibsen, ever since I began composing, I assumed I would one day set his words to music, as did Grieg and others before me. There is peculiar power in using the words of an ancestor. After receiving a first edition book of Ibsen’s poetry, my father had suggested I set this particular poem, The Miner. Coincidentally, I had encountered the text during my own research and had already planned to use it. It felt like ancestral forces from within and outside my lifetime had been directing me to this endeavor, and thus I heeded the call. During the writing process, it felt as if the piece were being channeled through me, not written by me. I feel my best work emerges from this state of mind.

Ibsen first wrote the text at 23, which is incredibly impressive considering the depth of emotion and pain in the text. It is evident that he had a tumultuous childhood and adolescence—he did not attend either of his parents’ funerals, for instance. He revised it twice, resulting in the 1871 version used here. It is perhaps his most famous poem, after the epic Terje Vigen. Even Ibsen’s gravestone is inscribed with a hammer and a line from Bergmanden: “Bryt mig vejen, tunge hammer, til det dulgtes hjertekammer!”‍

In the vein of Norse epics, I felt this poem, with its austere, mountainous setting, required a tone and scope that was grand and mythical—hence why I consider it a saga in song. As a friend pointed out, Tolkien used mining as a symbol for greed. When read in this manner, the text is not a joyful quest for enlightenment by a spiritual seeker, but an unflinching account of the struggles of seeking fulfillment and ultimate understanding in life without a single “ray of hope”. Alternatively, the text can easily be read autobiographically. For Ibsen, this could have meant answering the poet’s call to go down into the dark depths of human emotion to reveal personal truths, but also, as with much of Ibsen’s body of work, to expose and engage with the darker sides of society. I also have a more personal reading of the text, in light of when I chose to set it—this piece was written during the COVID-19 quarantine. Thus, the topic of humankind’s eternal striving for peace amidst a relentless tide of greed permeating our political and personal lives could not be more reflective of the time of its creation. May we all come to understand our lives’ unending riddle.

‍Translation:

Beetling rock, with roar and smoke
Break before my hammer-stroke!
Deeper I must thrust and lower
Till I hear the ring of ore.

From the mountain's unplumbed night,
Deep amid the gold-veins bright,
Diamonds lure me, rubies beckon,
Treasure-hoard that none may reckon.
‍
There is peace within the deep—
Peace and immemorial sleep;
Heavy hammer, burst as bidden,
To the heart-nook of the hidden!
‍
Once I, too, a careless lad,
Under starry heavens was glad,
Trod the primrose paths of summer,
Child-like knew not care nor cummer.
‍
But I lost the sense of light
In the poring womb of night;
Woodland songs, when earth rejoiced her,
Breathed not down my hollow cloister.
‍
Fondly did I cry, when first
Into the dark place I burst:
"Answer spirits of the middle
Earth, my life's unending riddle!—"
‍
Still the spirits of the deep
Unrevealed their answer keep;
Still no beam from out the gloomy
Cavern rises to illume me.
‍
Have I erred? Does this way lead
Not to clarity indeed?
If above I seek to find it,
By the glare my eyes are blinded.
‍
Downward, then! the depths are best;
There is immemorial rest.
Heavy hammer burst as bidden
To the heart-nook of the hidden—
‍
Hammer-blow on hammer-blow
Till the lamp of life is low.
Not a ray of hope's fore-warning;
Not a glimmer of the morning.

Henrik Ibsen, Digte, 1871

Translated by Fydell Edmund Garrett

‍

Heart’s Haven is my attempt at melding the melodiousness of pop-punk and metalcore into a semi-classical art song. As a metal fan, I’m attracted to all sorts of niches within the genre but I am often so impressed with the way bands like Northlane and Dayseeker combine the most beautiful (and virtuosic) vocal lines with heavy instrumentations and harsh vocals. Additionally, the songs are generally brief in scope, and thus often feel much more pop-adjacent than metal. I wanted to try my hand at writing a song which included these elements, in my own language.

Lyrics:

I used to feel like our love kept me sustained
Thought it was paradise
I used to feel fire coursing through my veins,
But there was poison inside.

I thought that we would be together,
I wouldn’t have to walk alone.
But they say hell is other people,
So I’ll just burn here on my own.

Can’t remember all the times I took up arms
Slept with a knife at my chest
‘Cause when the horrors of the day had gone,
The devils breathed down my neck.

I really wish that I could have slayed them all,
Emerging strong and proud.
But when you left, you set my life ablaze
And now the flame won’t go out.

I thought that we would be together,
I wouldn’t have to walk alone.
But they say hell is other people,
So I’ll just burn here on my own.

If our love was meant to be temporary
Why won’t these embers burn down?
Left in the ash of a smoldering sanctuary
In the husk of my heart’s haven.

I’m done making burnt offerings to you
Slaying my dreams at the altar,
Watching the blood as it gathers around you
Streaming from down the ivory pillars

I sacrifice myself,
To myself alone.
Rending flesh, revealing bone
Layers of suffering long neglected.

These ailing limbs that you infected
I cast off for the wings of the crow.
If our love was meant to be temporary
Why won’t these embers burn down?

Left in the ash of a smoldering sanctuary
In the husk of my heart’s haven.

They say hell is other people,
So I’ll just burn here on my own.

This piece is an elegy to my late grandfather, Nana Kofi Asante, who passed in February of 2016. I never had a real relationship with him as I left Ghana at only 10 months old and did not get a chance to return until his death. Returning to Ghana was a whirlwind of conflicting emotions: feeling like too much of an obroni, a white person, to be Ghanaian due to my mixed heritage, but also feeling a weighty obligation as a Ghanaian to compensate for the years of education in Akan culture and customs I had missed out on. I was thrust from conversation to conversation by family members, many of whom I had only just met, stuttering my way through stock Twi phrases, thinking myself a fool, all while trying to navigate the confusing, terrible feeling of mourning someone whom I never knew. This was a man whom I was too afraid to speak to on the phone due to the language barrier, and on a subconscious level, due to my feelings of being too alien to him. I feared his rejection. The real mourning began in earnest months later, when flashbulb memories of the funeral became triggered in me daily, and I began a year-long battle with crippling anxiety surrounding death. Nana’s death was the fulfillment of my worst fear: never getting to have a final, adult conversation with my grandfather, and the suddenness, the finality of his death was what troubled me for a long time. I began obsessively contemplating my own mortality, how it could happen in an instant. Mörike comes to mind: “So far from dying, ah, how easily one dies!”‍

In the process of my recovery I became heavily interested in heavy metal, particularly the music of veteran J-metal band DIR EN GREY, whom I consider to be the defining artists of their genre, and who remain an enduring inspiration to me as a vocalist and composer. I credit much of my recovery to this genre as it embodies the repression, the anger, and self-hatred I have felt due to this great loss. It has also greatly informed my ideas of musical texture and harmony and has made me explore the absolute limits of the tenor voice, including my own. As a result, this song represents a synthesis of these many components of metal music into a singular work for the first time.

‍Lyrics:

This flesh of mine is caught between one world and the other.
A crimson thread ties me to this turbulent plane.
Impaled, the ecstasy of Avila is denied me, as I am
Buffeted by the tides of this boundary.
They crash over me, like the funerary drums of my homeland
Whose rhythms call spirits to rise.

I came to this land not quite a stranger,
Still I knew not its myriad laws.
I longed for this earth to be mixed into my skin,
But could not help having grown from different soil.
As they shoveled the earth over you,
I could not disguise my envy.

The shrieking crows circle overhead,
Is this your attempt at a sign?
You sold your soul to prolong your breath,
What good’s a halfling’s heart like mine?

No one to play my elegy,
As I decay from a wound unseen.
My voice croaks out a broken song,
The only score to this sullen scene.

‍Jens Ibsen