A Word

Instrumentation: actor, bass flute, violin, cello

Duration: 7

Written in: 2008

Category: Chamber

In his essay “The Cosmic Prison,” the anthropologist, naturalist, poet, and author Loren Eiseley discusses humankind’s limited understanding of our environment. Using language as an example, Eiseley argues that while it is certainly useful, language is only partially capable of describing and defining the universe we live in since humans are ultimately limited themselves.

A Word takes certain words from “The Cosmic Prison” and translates them from English to German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Swahili so that they lose their meaning for the audience (assuming that they do not speak most of these languages). Additionally, the words are inflected in a variety of ways and coupled with gestures as an abstraction and reinterpretation of Eiseley’s text, whereby the language loses its semantic significance and is instead transformed into more basic forms of communication: sound and body language.

My choice of Eiseley’s text extends beyond an interest in its ideas. In the middle of the 1940s, Eiseley was the director of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. This is where I was born and raised, and coincidentally I lived in the same house as Eiseley, though many years later. I had wanted to incorporate his writings in my music for some time, and having moved to Stuttgart, Germany in 2008 with virtually no knowledge of the language, I was confronted with my own limitations on a daily basis. Thus, for me language was reduced to an even more basic level than what Eiseley discussed in “The Cosmic Prison.” When I did not know the meaning of the word, I did as anyone in such a situation would do: I concentrated on the inflections of the speech and body language in an attempt to decipher some meaning. This experience became one of the main ideas in A Word.