Haunted America
Jerome Kitzke
About this work:
The Lakota have in their stories a great Buffalo that stands as a metaphor for the world as we know it. As the story goes, through the vastness of time, the animal intermittently lost a single hair from one of its legs until that leg finally disappeared with the falling away of its last hair. Gradually a second, and then a third leg vanished in like fashion, leaving the world, as some Lakota believe it is now, on its last leg, so-to-speak. No one knows how many hairs remain on that leg, but September 11th and the sad state of human relations around the world could make one wonder. Or, there is the argument that things are really only as they have always been, and that what appears as a world gone madder, is only a manifestation of our global ability to see instantly, in vivid, horrid detail, the suffering we inflict on each other. One could argue strenuously about this, but in the end, the arguing fades and we all find a way to keep moving. That is what I have seen people do. In the numbing early stages of 9/11, I had to put off working on a commission that had subject matter I had temporarily lost feeling for. There were too many things to attend to and consider for me to lift my pencil. I then came to my senses as I was reminded of one of life’s great subtle beauties, namely the unrelenting healing power of the day-to-day. All those mundane little things that keep a human life going helped me to come back to my pencil and paper, which in the long run is the best way for me to fight terrorism. So, Haunted America became a piece about being haunted by, not just the horrific surface events of history, but also by the self examination necessary to seeing our own roles in the stories of those events. It is like a Lakota friend told me, if peace is to be achieved, America must be haunted not only by the actions taken against it but also by those it has taken against others, for they are not disconnected.
As in many of my works, the instrumentalists are asked to vocalize non-verbally or even non-sensically. Amidst all the nonsense, however, they do intermittently say “Hey America! What haunts you? Do you know? When will we end the human war? (Ginsberg) You know we can’t! What can we do? We must just live!”
Special thanks to Sally Wilson, Julia Kamin, and the Ledig House in Ghent, New York
This work was premiered June 1, 2002 in Milwaukee by Present Music.
Year composed: 2002
Duration: 00:18:22
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:Other Combinations, 2-5 players
Instrumentation: 1 Clarinet, 1 Percussion (General), 1 Piano, 1 Violin
Instrumentation notes: Violin/Vocals, Clarinet (Eb, Bb, Bass)/Vocals, Piano/Vocals, Percussion/Vocals