pingpong & amnesia: the music

Each of the five movements of the pingpong & amnesia suite is inspired not only by a section of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, but also by a preexisting piece of music.

I. who barreled down the highways of the past

Allen Ginsberg’s Jewish upbringing is not the centerpiece of Howl, but it helped shape his worldview, just as Jewish immigrant culture was part of the New York landscape through which the poem moves. This opening cadence is drawn from “Shalom Chaverim” (“Peace, friends”), a traditional Hebrew song. I chose it as a starting point partly because I wanted something with a klezmer-like feel, but also because the Weavers recorded a version in 1955, the same year Ginsberg first read Howl in public. The keyboards feature a mixture of ringing and percussive textures meant to suggest gamelan and other non-Western sonorities, a nod to Ginsberg’s later embrace of Buddhism.

II. through images juxtaposed, and trapped

The springboard for the second movement is the opening of Franz Joseph Haydn’s The Creation, whose libretto draws in part on Milton’s Paradise Lost—one of the deep literary currents also running beneath Howl.

Random voices chant a litany of words throughout: Moloch, Rockland, night, time, soul, light, last, Denver, naked, streets. These are the ten words that appear most frequently in the poem, excluding articles, prepositions, and other small helper words. There is a very good chance that while you are listening to this movement, at least one of those words will appear on the screen, and it is intriguing how quickly the eye is pulled toward a word that has just been spoken aloud.

III. pushcarts full of onions and bad music

To evoke the Lower East Side, I chose the Russian folk melody “Korobeiniki,” which uses the haggling between a peddler and a customer as a metaphor for romantic negotiation. The basic melody repeats over and over, but as the piece progresses, each instrument transposes the original tune either up or down three semitones until the resulting cacophony is almost too much to bear. The birds heard throughout the movement were recorded in Riverside Park, just steps from where Ginsberg lived as a Columbia student.

IV. they’ve come to drop angelic bombs

While the Jewish symbolism in Howl may be less immediately apparent, the Christian imagery is front and center, from evocations of Golgotha to “eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) to angels and seraphim. To evoke this lament over death and sacrifice, I used a short passage from the end of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, “Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder” (“We sit down in tears”), which returns here as a dolorous clarinet solo.

V. who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey

A few repeating keyboard riffs build toward a meditation on life, death, Buddhist principles, and Ginsberg’s own upbringing in Newark and Paterson, both of which are woven into the world of the poem. The final movement also brings the suite full circle, returning to the first movement’s concern with origins and identity, and mining—as Howl does—the charged material of Ginsberg’s own experience.