The Gathering Note

Is it ethical for anyone to use a horrible event to create something useful, even beautiful?

Not very tall, with a soft, whisper of a voice, Paul Schoenfield isn’t the sort one would estimate struggles with ethical questions like this. But, in the course of creating three separate pieces based on Holocaust-era poems and stories, the contemporary American composer wrestled with this large question, as he explained during the Premier of one of those pieces, Ghetto Songs, last month in Seattle. “I look at writing as a task. I work just like a carpenter building a kitchen,” he told me, his warm eyes and a periodic sly smile camouflaging a mind always at work thinking about music, the Torah, or math.

For Schoenfield, solving a proof is nearly the same as composing a piece of music. Grabbing a pen, the Detroit native demonstrates this belief by sketching a quadrilateral surrounded by a series of squares on the back of a copy of the score to Ghetto Songs. “I’m a terrible artist as you can tell,” Schoenfield said. The diagram was good enough for his demonstration. After approximating the center of each square and drawing lines across and through the shapes, his eyes light up and the composer announces with delight, “These lines are the same length and perpendicular. To me that’s beautiful. That’s composing.” Years ago, Schoenfield stopped writing music for himself or on the hope that his music might be performed. A self-described “music for use” composer, he writes music when asked and finds fulfillment in the task of completing a request even if asked to write a duo for marimba and piano. “I see It as workable, but difficult,” the composer said, his mind exploring the percussive possibilities.  Schoenfield has personally heard few of his pieces performed live.  Like solving a proof, when the task is done, he would rather move on to the next. Still, he was here to witness the premiere of Ghetto Songs. The first piece in the trilogy, Sparks of Glory, was composed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. Camp Songs, and, most recently, Ghetto Songs were separate pieces commissioned by Seattle-based Music of Remembrance.

Ghetto Songs is just one piece in a series of works commissioned in recent years for Seattle music organizations. The Seattle Symphony commissioned his Sinfonietta for its centenary in 2003. “The piece is based on a tune I heard in synagogue that I absolutely deplored and I made up my mind that I was going to destroy this tune.”

Camp Songs, which precedes Ghetto Songs, was the first piece Music of Remembrance asked the composer to write. It is a setting of five poems by Aleksander Kulisiewicz for mezzo-soprano, baritone, clarinet, violin, cello and bass.

Even though Schoenfield composes quickly, the process for his three Holocaust-based works were a great challenge, imbedded with that nagging question of beauty and horror. Schoenfield said that he wrestled with the appropriateness of using the Holocaust as a source for music. One of the results of this struggle is Ghetto Songs, a piece inspired by poems written by Mordeci Gebirtig, who was killed in the Krakow Ghetto during the second war. The music is deeply affecting, spanning emotions from despair to yearning. Schoenfield may approach composing like a craftsman, but Ghetto Songs demonstrated the power of poetry, music, even hope when circumstances appear bleak. Still, the question remains.

Story reprinted courtesy of Sound Magazine.