KAFKAMUSIK Suite

The Poetics of Silence, The Necessity of Form: KAFKAMUSIK

Recorded at First Avenue Sound, Franklin, TN, 2011
Produced by Mark Prince Lee
Recorded by David Hall
Additional Recording by Brad Bass
Mixed by David Hall
Mastered by Benny Quinn
Additional Mastering by Brad Bass

KAFKAMUSIK Suite

Arranged, remixed, and remastered at Ground Level Studios, Nashville, TN, 4-6/2024
Engineered by Brad Bass
Produced by Mark Prince Lee

The texts selected for the Suite are representative of the breadth and range of Kafka’s unique literary style and include works that the writer himself considered his very best. “In the Penal Colony,” “The Judgment,” and “A Hunger Artist” are among these literary masterpieces and are placed at structurally significant points in the arrangement.

In terms of overall form, the cycle alternates between solo cello and ensemble pieces; however, cello is featured as the unifying element appearing in all pieces. Textually KAFKAMUSIK is built around two pairs of works whose stories share a common narrative theme found throughout much of Kafka’s writing.

“The Stoker” opens the Suite in a fast, moto perpetuo movement by solo cello. Kafka wrote the text as the opening chapter of his first novel Amerika. In it, a young man is sent by boat from his home country in Europe to America. The music reflects his initial impressions of the frenetic pace of the New World as the slow-moving ship arrives in New York.

“Investigations of a Dog” and “A Report to an Academy” are the first set of thematically paired works in the cycle in that they are among Kafka’s many ‘animal stories,’ the most well-known of which is “The Metamorphosis.” The term ‘Kafkaesque’ refers to the experience in which the everyday becomes uncanny, strange, or bizarre. In the case of this pair of works the term may be aptly applied.

In the first instance, seven dogs are among a race that are described by a first-person canine narrator as having the ability to conjure music from seemingly nowhere. Also, the music is accompanied by the dogs moving themselves in and out of symmetrically choreographed patterns. However, the sounds they produce are not music in the traditional sense of the word. Rather, the sound they create is a kind of ambient resonance, an encompassing noise at once loud and blaring but distant.

In “A Report to an Academy,” the text centers around a narrator, delivering a lecture to honored members of an academy. The story is a retrospective account of how he was once an ape before he was shot, captured, and caged aboard a ship. While en route from his native Gold Coast to Europe, he believed that his only way out was to mimic humans. Upon his arrival on the continent, he manages to secure instruction from a series of tutors, and over time he becomes successful enough at imitating human behaviors that he is eventually able to pass for the average European. However, the story concludes with the transformed man’s realization that he remains, in part, a primate.

“Description of a Struggle” is one of Kafka’s earliest works. Comprised of three discrete chapters the structure of the story is fragmented. The music follows the broken narrative set in three rapidly alternating sections, differentiated by three types of bowing styles in the cello. In the central section of the piece, these sudden juxtapositions are interrupted by an alternating two-note, static caesura in harmonics. The break is intended to represent a piano performance given by the story’s central character, who does not know how to play and is interrupted before he strikes the first note. The piece concludes with an extended closing recapitulation.

The duets “In the Penal Colony” and “The Judgment” are the second pair of thematically related works in the cycle. Both texts deal with some of Kafka’s most iconic motifs: authority, judgment, and guilt. In the former, the narrative centers on the planned execution of a prisoner whose guilt is automatically assumed. In the latter Kafka uses authority as the subject in exploring the difficulty of father-son relationships.

“In the Penal Colony” is a novella written in 1914. Most of the story is conveyed from the standpoint of a traveler to a remote island penal colony. The number of characters in the story is limited. Other than the traveler, there is only the condemned prisoner who is not allowed to defend himself and whose guilt is assumed, a soldier standing watch, and the officer overseeing the execution. Much of the text revolves around a detailed description of the torture and execution machine designed by a former commandant at the colony. After the prisoner is strapped to a bed covered with cotton wool, an apparatus hanging from above is designed to slowly carve his sentence into the skin over the course of twelve hours. However, the prisoner is unsure of his crime until around the sixth hour when its realization comes in a type of agonizing religious epiphany.

“The Judgment,” written during a single evening in 1912, was considered by Kafka to be one of his best works. The basic structure of the narrative is epistolary, opening with the story’s central character Georg writing to a friend on “a Sunday morning in the very height of spring.” As the text evolves Georg becomes entangled in an argument with his father, which ends with his father’s condemning Georg to death by drowning.  To reflect the biological father-son relationship, the music for guitar and cello is written in the same key. However, their conflict is expressed by the two instruments playing in two separate tempos in two different meters. The concluding coda follows Georg’s leap from a bridge, over which a stream of unending traffic continues after his death.

In the autobiographical “Letter to his Father,” Kafka explores in cathartic detail his lifelong difficulties with his disapproving, emotionally distant father. However, the nearly 45-page manuscript was never delivered. The piece’s melancholy lyricism is intended to reflect these musings.

“A Hunger Artist” is considered one of Kafka’s finest works. The eponymous central character sits alone in his bare cage on display at a circus. His capacity for unremitting fasting is a performance art that only he understands. The music explores the opposing themes of isolation and public spectacle. The artist’s alienation is suggested in the static solo cello ostinato which opens and closes the piece. The fast-paced central section represents his whirlwind career managed by a series of promoters and overseers. 

“A Country Doctor” is one of Kafka’s best-known and most-analyzed works of fiction. Unusual for Kafka, it is written in the first person, conveying a sense of urgency and immediacy to the text, and like “The Metamorphosis” it is also one of Kafka’s most bizarre and surreal. In the story an elderly doctor has been called to a nearby village one winter night to care for a sick boy. Switching back and forth between past and present, events take place rapidly, with no logical connection. From the outset, the doctor’s journey to and return from the sick patient’s village is depicted as so strange and improbable that it calls into question whether what is happening is real, or just imagined by an unreliable narrator.

– Mark Lee