I wrote this
#composition in January of 2024 as a meditation on what it’s like to feel comfortable during a genøcide.
I grew up learning about the many times my people experienced attempted exterminations, and learning that my people must never allow another genocide to happen. Throughout its existence, the nation supposedly established to protect my people has carried out campaigns of ethnic cleansing, forced migration, apartheid, and genøcide against those “othered” in the nation-building process.
Efforts to stop the inhumanity of the current war, carried out (variably) in the name of fighting terrorism, expanding settlements, or bloodlust, have been largely ineffective. So many of the same adults who say “Never Again” to the Holocaust have chosen to support or tacitly endorse the bombardment of civilians.
It is in the feelings of disappointment over what seems like an entire generation (boomers) who refuse to see the daily massacres as genocide that this song was born. I believe it brings them comfort to look away. And similarly, I have spent the last 6 months ashamed by my own comfort and how little ability I feel to create change.
Sadness writes the music more easily than any other feeling.
The notes pretty much wrote themselves. The challenge was orchestrating/preparing the piano in such a way to create a different timbre for each part of the song.
I prepared my
#piano using these materials (approx. high to low):
- a tuning fork
- a door hinge
- two rare dreidls I was given last Chanukah
- an upside down china cymbal
- a chunk of crash cymbal (all cymbals curated by
@rstraub52 )
- gaffing tape
- piano mutes
- felt
- a rubber dog brush
- another tuning fork
shot by
@koofibi
engineering assistance from
@art.fungus
🖇️ in bio
#preparedpiano 
