2018 Creative Reactions Contest Winners Booklet

j CREATIVE REACTIONS CONTEST 2018

in memory of Vera Sharpe Kohn hosted by the Student Ambassadors of Princeton University Concerts sponsored by Princeton University Concerts

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The Creative Reactions Contest is hosted by the Student Ambassadors of Princeton University Concerts, a small group of classical music-loving students whose mission is to increase student interest and participation in Princeton University Concerts programs. The contest is sponsored by Princeton University Concerts. The Creative Reactions Contest seeks to further Princeton University Concerts’ mission by connecting students to the arts and celebrating classical music’s unique contributions.

The Creative Reactions Contest is dedicated to the memory of Vera Sharpe Kohn, a former member of the Princeton University Concerts Committee whose support and enthusiasm contributed to the health and well-being of Princeton University Concerts.

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A COUPLE OF FIDDLES

By Sang Lee ’18 First Prize - $500

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This poem is inspired by the Emerson String Quartet’s multimedia theatrical performance, ‘Shostakovich and The Black Monk: A Russian Fantasy,’ a show that dares to wed Anton Chekhov’s classic short story ‘The Black Monk’ and the life-story of Dmitri Shostakovich, revivifying age-old truths about genius, madness, and love. Shostakovich dreamed of adapting the Chekhov story into an opera but could and would not finish it for the immense burden of answering to an authoritarian regime, personified by the specter of one Joseph Stalin; the show is a staging of this imagined inner strife.

It opened the Princeton University Concerts 2017–18 season on September 28, 2017.

Philip Setzer, a violinist for the Emerson, said of the piece, “If it works, the reason is that, rather than figure out the action and then put the music to it, this all springs out of the music.” This poem works in the same vein: the words mimic the sound and sense of the Emerson piece, conjuring up the scene where Kovrin first meets the black monk.

In so doing, they also mimic Shostakovich’s lyrical and self-critical impulses­—words in all caps being Stalin’s voice in his head—creating a derailed dialectic best read aloud.

The poem sounds out the triumphs and troubles of a genius who, like many of us, in the end must wrestle with his fiercest critic: himself.

As the poet W. B. Yeats said: “Out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

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A couple of fiddles, what myth can they make?

Borisovka rises, Kovrinka shines with the frost.

Listen: how spacious, open, and free the corona of trees

freestanding out in the air.

Drink the cloudburst of the day breaking,

the rye rustling,

the nightingales trilling, the quails calling at dawn— MUDDLE, NOT MUSIC.

[…]

Listen: but how nigh the kingdom of fatal music,

sighs of a mockery of a god.

Susurrate, you flower beds and bushes,

you bulbous oaks,

you arched, umbrella’d, espaliered fruit trees.

1862 plum trees and a lady, what myth— PRIMITIVE, SPASMODIC SOP.

[…]

Listen: billows of soot-black smoke,

numbing the soil and its fists at the sky.

See now ash-clouds shrouding an orchard,

a maiden full of deep, vile fancies—

MUDDLE, NOT MUSIC.

THIS IS NO SOVIET PROGRESS. BEGIN AGAIN.

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[…]

No, wretched wraith. Listen:

grove grove grove, the rusting of groves.

Soothsaying something about a monk,

among the ripple-rye and the twilight I hear

a crisp black pillar of a man …

what in the world. A whirlwind or a waterspout— A cloak in the sky baring a face with,

oh, an unnerving mirth.

Look with your ears: How mendacious the human sight,

the tyranny of my tired senses …

but hear, how sly but happy his teeth,

how holy but floating his— BRAVO. PETTY BOURGEOIS ‘INNOVATION.’ —feet, the rye bloom

into a blood-orange foliage.

Groves upon groves covered in billows

of soot-black smoke, where I, Shostakovich

or Kovrin, man the maker a maelstrom

of verse, shall put the critic to bed.

[…]

CHEAP CLOWNING, QUEER TICKLING OF FANCIES.

MUDDLE, NOT MUSIC.

WHAT TROUBLE CAN A COUPLE OF— What trouble? What trouble! A couple of fiddles

shall win the battle against the frost.

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I sing the crisp black pillar of man the maker,

like a whirlwind or a waterspout

and not the monk, to resurrect Russian opera,

to put to death the critic in my head.

Feast with your ears: billows of soot-black smoke,

ash-clouds shrouding an orchard, the rusting of groves.

Surge, oh fatal music: draconian dervish of fiddles,

a great pool of blood, a maiden full of deep, vile fancies,

among the ripple-rye and the twilight I hear

a flood: mirage upon mirage upon feverish mirage. […]

CALL A SPADE A BLOODY SHOVEL: CLICHÉ.

CLICHÉ IS DEATH. SING YOUR SONG,

LEFTIST CONTORTIONIST.

MUDDLE OR MUSIC,

IT IS HEMORRHAGES IN THE THROAT.

[…]

May it be so: cliché is death,

but death deals death to the critic.

I’ve sung my song: the rye rustling,

the nightingales trilling, the quails calling

for you at dawn—

how spacious, how open, how free.

A couple of fiddles, what myth they can make.

Now Stalin, I put you to bed on this note:

On with the show.

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Sang Lee is a senior in the German Department, pursuing a Certificate in Creative Writing. He plays many musical instruments—piano, violin, trombone, acoustic guitar, and danso (Korean bamboo flute)—and is also a singer and former member of the Princeton University Glee Club. He could not imagine his life without music, always listening to something— often in the hip hop/jazz/funk genres and usually by Kendrick Lamar.

Putting together a collection of poems as his second thesis, Sang attended ‘Shostakovich and The Black Monk’ in search of new inspiration for his work. Having read Anton Chekhov’s short story, ‘The Black Monk,’ prior to the performance, Sang was awed by the way in which the production synthesized the text with Dmitri Shostakovich’s life story and by the frenzied dialectic between the figures of the genius (embodied by Shostakovich) and the critic (embodied by Joseph Stalin). The structure of his resulting poem was guided by the “music” of the words that stayed with him from the performance.

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GAITA (GAL)EGA

By Diana Chao ’21 Honorable Mention - $100

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This piece was written after gaita player Cristina Pato made her Princeton University Concerts debut on November 16, 2017. The concert was part of the PUC125: Performances Up Close series in which audience members sit very close to the performers and have an unprecedented chance to interact with the performer.

Many years ago I played the Scottish bagpipes in a Celtic band. I did not look the part of a bagpiper, certainly not at fifteen, so the strangeness of the situation wasn’t lost on me. But I learned the Celtic sound because there was something in their story that put even triumph to shame, and I had forgotten, honestly, the power of a bagpipe until I had the immense honor of watching Cristina Pato and her quartet live. The Galician bagpipes (or gaita galega in Galician) isn’t quite the same as the Scottish bagpipe, but in her passion, I found myself transported to worlds I’d long ago buried. She chronicled epics in her sound the way only a bagpipe could, and because of that I knew I had to describe not just her playing but also her presence, for the bagpipe is unique in that because of its tremendous power, it must be tamed with a softness in performance— which Cristina so seamlessly provided. To that, I pay tribute.

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She dances on like a bull, furious in her passion, her leather pants the black of my eyelid backs when her music slams my eyes shut, rips me to Galicia, the whine of her pipes dragging me through her history first roman then visigoth then islamic then christian and now spanish but not quite, sea-born in flight :: the celtic toss of her head surrenders to magnetism. To kaleidoscopic roaring of gaita pipes drenched in black silk black tassels her hair black my eyelids black still. i watch her shadow gallop across iberian lands her hands tapping black chanters the way the sea trills Galician women ruffling their skirts their hair their breath so that the pipes, too, would tremble to the tornado in her lungs.

When my eyes j- e- r- k- ] open [ i see her pipes asleep behind her, she now more breeze than bull swaying to the way the drummer forgives his hands lets them loose paaa pa pa pA PA! Sixeight time “isn’t it time� victor moans, his accordion startles alive he squeezes the yawn out of its wrinkles restores its youth edward slaps his bow across bass tall as tales primal exhaustion exhaled in sound then she, she chapel no longer breeze opens her arms lets the tambourine dangle, bait for silence then echoes jesus on water spasms her middle finger on drum skin so percussion is ridged, crested like the Galician waves - in that moment she is celestial - divine - not bull but sky.

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“Dance,” she murmurs and i rise, a skyscraper in medieval markets cayenne watering my eyes, watch as she reclaims her pipes the black of Galician nights untorn by pollution- “dance!” she yells and i swing, a plane in turbulence scanning the war below, the swords and prayer mats and when her pipes slap me with thunder i shake back to reality she is smiling eyes barely lined in the black of shadows, of dark solo migration scrambling for light i promise. i promise i hear in her pipes that l i g ht.

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Diana Chao, a member of the Class of 2021, intends to concentrate in the Department of Geosciences while also pursuing Certificates in the History and Practice of Diplomacy, as well as East Asian Studies. The scope of her musical pursuits is as impressive: in addition to singing in VTone, an a cappella group, Diana plays several instruments that include the piano, erhu (Chinese fiddle), bagpipes, hulusi (Chinese gourd flute), and guitar. She finds that embracing such an international range of music resonates with her dual Chinese-American identity, allowing her—like Cristina Pato—to both fuse and transcend cultures through sound. Diana wanted to capture that fluidity in Pato’s performance, channeling the music’s simultaneous turbulence, rawness, and subtle femininity through an unconstrained style that similarly defied expectations. Her poem’s structure followed the beat of Pato’s performance, and its content arose from the desire to elicit a ‘sense of wilderness, of proud ocean waves, of Galician history carved into song.’

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INTERLUDE

By Xin Rong Chua, Graduate Student Honorable Mention - $100

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Written after the Emerson String Quartet and an ensemble of 6 actors performed ‘Shostakovich and The Black Monk: A Russian Fantasy.’

I was fascinated by how the characters in ‘Shostakovich and The Black Monk’ do double duty. On one level, they are part of Chekhov’s story; on another, they symbolize aspects of Shostakovich’s struggle to find artistic fulfillment while under the watchful eye of the Soviet regime. I chose to imagine the characters as entities who have an awareness beyond what their creators had prescribed. By exploring how they might grapple with the identities artists impose on them, I hope to convey my impression of how the performance blended music, art, and biography.

As usual, the black monk is the first to arrive.

This is where he and Kovrin reside between rehearsals, when they are not in the minds of their performers. Here, for them, is mostly a blank, white space. The monk has no particular attachment to any specific background. His nomadic wanderings in-character have taken him across plains, oceans, and even the stars. Besides, practically all of his appearances are preceded by a swirling waterspout, so he’s had enough of the spectacular. Mostly, he lets Kovrin decide.

No gardens, insists Kovrin. Of late, he has also shown an aversion to cramped places, where they might be watched. The superimposition

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of Shostakovich on his character is taking its toll. He agrees to a bench, so that is all they have.

The monk sits and waits.

The panther is next. They’ve wondered why the string quartets would manifest as an animal. After all, they have drinks with the characters from Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth. Other than the tendency to burst into glass-shattering histrionics, they are very much regular people.

Shostakovich was the kind of person who wrote many layers into his music, be it laughter through tears, or his signature DSCH motif, Kovrin had suggested after one such round of drinks. Maybe the panther is just a manifestation of this complexity in a manner that we can understand.

The panther crouches next to the monk’s feet. Perhaps, thinks the monk, in the world of music, it is we who are the animals.

This close, the monk can feel the swell of the cello line echo through the large cat like a rumbling purr, warm and full-bodied and menacing at the same time. He pets the beast carefully. He’s still caught off-guard by its bursts of agitation, when it leaps up and brandishes its claws. It is something raw in the music that he does not yet understand.

Kovrin enters in a shuffle, his shoulders hunched. Lying flat on the back for a half-hour long death scene will do that.

“Took you long enough,” the monk says.

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“Well, excuse me if we can’t all drift off into the darkness as you do,” says Kovrin, as he sits down. “They couldn’t end the show until they’ve looked me over and pointed out the smile on my face.

Actually, this time I had to do it twice, once as story-Kovrin, and once as Shostakovich-Kovrin. At least I got to sit on a chair the other time. Something to smile about.”

Suddenly, the Stalin moustache appears on the monk’s face. “At least you only play two roles, not three,” the monk says, as he scratches his chin. “I am not going to miss this itching.”

The movement draws the panther’s attention. Once it sees the moustache, it springs up, nearly knocking the bench over. It then begins prowling around in circles, the rate of rotation increasing as the violins enter a high-pitched frenzy.

“Hey, hey,” says Kovrin, rising into a half crouch. He croons a haunting melody that harmonizes with the music from the panther.

The monk feels it in his navel, a pull that makes him want to laugh and cry at the same time. The panther responds as well, looking at Kovrin and slowing, as the sounds it emits dissolve into the recapitulation section.

“You never used to sing,” the monk observes.

“I know, it’s strange,” Kovrin tilts his head. “I have all this — music — coursing through my head now. Not the carefree tunes I used to whistle, or the rousing folk songs of festivals. Everything feels so sharp, so — jagged.”

The monk puts on his straight face, and intones, “That’s because you’re a genius, one of the chosen.” The solemnity lasts until they both look at each other and crack up simultaneously.

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“That’s my cue to give my trademark smile and die,” says Kovrin.

“Why couldn’t they have given me that happy ending — the one where my hallucinations fade and I become a successful academic?”

The monk pauses, unsure. Perhaps ceasing to exist is worth relieving Kovrin from his suffering. But Chekhov had also made Kovrin the kind of person who delighted in hallucinations of grandeur, despite the cost. “You wouldn’t be you, in that case.”

“Okay, it’d be a successful career spewing Stalin-approved propaganda, but it can’t be worse than dribbling blood from sores in the mouth,” Kovrin looks up from where he’d been petting the exhausted panther sees the morose expression on the monk’s face, and frowns. “You know I don’t blame you— we’ve had this conversation before. Chekhov wanted our suffering to help people understand the depths of human emotion.”

The monk is supposed to make grandiose statements about the glory of suffering for one’s art. But he’s thought about it, and he can’t quite shake the feeling that Chekhov had hardly considered the well-being of his creations in his calculations. “Was it worth it, in the end?”

“Probably not ­— just look at this guy,” Kovrin points towards the panther leaning against him. “But you know what? I don’t think any of our creators knew if it was worth their own time and effort, be it in subterfuge from the authorities or laboring through illness. It’s like that line of yours: it’s for the service we may make to the eternal — no guarantees.”

“I hate it when you turn my words against me,” the monk says.

Kovrin smiles, manic and shining in a way the world does not deserve, and the monk sighs. “Well, if my words have brought you solace, then perhaps there is worth yet in my existence.”

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Amidst the silence, a distant whistle sounds and rattling metal tracks appear. It is time for their opening scene. The panther begins to hum again, rousing, insistent, and the monk feels his torpor fall from him.

“There always is,” Kovrin helps him up, so that they stand side by side. “And in the meantime, we have a train to catch.”

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Xin Rong Chua is a fourth-year PhD candidate from Singapore. As part of the Program of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, she researches the effects of atmospheric heating on tropical rainfall. Having taken piano lessons as a child, Xin now furthers her interest in music by playing the carillon and attending concerts on campus. She was fascinated by how the characters in ‘Shostakovich and The Black Monk’ are both part of Anton Chekhov’s story and emblematic of Dmitri Shostakovich’s struggle to find artistic fulfillment under the scrutiny of the Soviet regime. She was inspired to imagine the characters having an awareness beyond what their creators had prescribed. By exploring how they might grapple with imposed identities, she hoped to convey her impression of how the performance blended music, art, and biography. Xin was the first graduate student to be named a winner of the Creative Reactions Contest when she received an Honorable Mention in the 2016–17 contest. This is her second consecutive win.

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TEMPEST

By Jason Molesky, Graduate Student Honorable Mention - $100

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This piece was written after violinist Jennifer Koh made her Princeton University Concerts debut on February 8, 2018, and was inspired by her performance of Bach Partita No. 2 in D Minor. The concert was part of the PUC125: Performances Up Close series in which audience members sit very close to the performers and have an unprecedented chance to interact with the performer.

During the concert I sat with my pen and pad, quietly writing. This was an experiment designed to record my immediate responses to Koh’s performance, bizarre and associative as they may have been. The setting mattered. The classical mosaics around the Richardson stage entered the writing. It seemed that each note Koh played was a tile floating into an extraordinarily large mosaic, which extended through time as well as through space. Meanwhile, the angle from which I viewed the stage—I was seated behind it on one of the raised seats—allowed me to see that a violin resembles a sailing ship in shape. From these premises, I relaxed and let the music do its work. I felt abstracted from the scene and yet utterly present, absorbed. I watched; I wrote. The music began breaking up solid things within me and washing them out through the ink of my pen. Later, I made a poem from these several pages of writing.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to conduct this experiment, and for your kindness in reading the result.

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The violin heaves, a ship, storm-tossed

its strings, the rigging

its bridge, the mast

and the woman flourishing the bow

becomes

a wind, a sky, a climate entire

shaping for us the notes

she has inscribed into her flesh

over decades

years, so many seconds of love

a love so perfect, so thoughtless, is brutal The notes in the first movements are barrels of color pouring into the cold cold sea

Ballast cast to the waves

(jade, carmine, turquoise, bronze)

falling dispersing bleeding subtly, one into the next

the next moment

the next movement 18

their tireless violence

pierces us sweetly

vivisects us gently, then

erupts

wholly without mercy,

the long fifth movement, relentless as hope

dredges our memories, raises the shards

of forgotten selves,

drives us ruthlessly inward, downward

something awaits us there in the distance,

a shape without shape we once sighted long ago

screaming, plaintive, the passing of lifetimes streams from the strings of the woman’s gleaming violin,

her bow as frayed now as a nine-tailed whip,

dreamily, deathlessly the ship, it sweeps us along evening streets, where

a generous laughter

swells in the dark.

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Jason Molesky, a second-year PhD student in the English Department, is focusing his academic studies on American literature, environmental studies, and race and immigration. Listening to everything from hiphop to folk rock to Zeppelin to Chopin, Jason sometimes plays the rock guitar. Although he did not have ready access to many live classical music performances growing up, Jason found that listening to classical music—the local church organ and particularly solo performances that allow him to focus on a single line of feeling—was helpful to his artistic pursuits as a writer. Responding to Jennifer Koh’s recital was thus a natural fit. Freewriting during her performance, Jason allowed his poem’s structure and focus to develop organically as he listened to the music, taking time afterwards to ‘prune’ his work. He found that listening to the concert with the intention of writing about it greatly deepened his experience of the music and recommends that others give it a try!

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UNTITLED

By Samuel Sebastian Cox ’18 Winner, Visual Arts Category - $500

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This piece was inspired by a performance by the English choir Tenebrae which sang a work by composer Joby Talbot in the Princeton University Chapel on March 15, 2018. The piece is based on the most enduring route of the Catholic pilgrimage, the Camino de Santiago, and the drama unfolds both musically and visually, with the choir singing from all corners of the chapel.

I decided to do a sculpture in response to the performance. Tenebrae's debut performance of Joby Talbot's ‘Path of Miracles’ came directly in the wake of the 7-7 bombings in London back in 2005. I remember where I was when the news of the bombings broke, I was at school, the day of our end-of-year awards. When we got news of the bombings my family were thrown into a panic as my grand-dad had been coming from London for the school prizes. He was late and we hadn't heard from him, but quickly we were able to establish that he was safe, though he had been on the London Underground. The families and friends of the 56 Londoners who died that day were not so lucky. I had heard the story of Tenebrae's performance being in the wake of the bombings and the shadow that it cast on the performance, but it wasn't until hearing the piece that I realized how affecting the work is and what it would have been like to hear it in the wake of the terrible act of terrorism.

My sculpture features 56 pieces of wood, in reference to the 56 lives lost, cut to different heights (from half a foot to eight-foot long) and painted a deep matte black. The pieces of wood are lit from above, casting long,

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thin shadows that at times meet with the bases of other pieces of wood.

The relational segmentation of the work is designed to reflect the way in which Tenebrae works: a group of singers at times separated by hundreds of feet, all responding to the same music and all connected with an invisible sensibility. The way the pieces emerge from the floor and seem to be reaching up toward the light from the depths reflects the rising motif in the first movement of Talbot’s piece and the more general idea of a search for hope and light in times of darkness. ‘Path of Miracles’ is a piece that begins in a minor key and works its way variously into major, reflecting this idea. The sculpture is necessarily dark, as is ‘Path of Miracles,’ and the terrible event the piece seeks to commemorate. And yet there is a sense of peaceful and restrained hope as the gentle lighting from above stretches its way over the monolithic pieces below. I have done my best to record all angles in photographing my submission to translate the effect of being in the space itself.

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Sebastian Cox, a senior in the English Department, has already received much acclaim as a singer—including a Gramophone Award for his solo with the New College Choir at age 12. Perhaps best known to the community through his lead role in the Department of Music’s recent production of Monteverdi’s ‘L’Orfeo,’ Sebastian is also an aspiring filmmaker and a passionate sculptor. Having taken all of the sculpture courses offered by the University, he is fascinated by sculpture’s physical form embodying abstract ideas. He has also been inspired by his teacher Martha Friedman, the Director of Visual Arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts. Joby Talbot’s ‘Path of Miracles’ came directly in the wake of the 7-7 bombings in London, where Sebastian grew up. Sebastian pays tribute to the 56 lives lost in his creative response. His sculpture reaches up toward light, reflecting the rising motif in the music’s first movement and the restrained search for hope and light in times of darkness.

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ABOUT THE CREATIVE REACTIONS CONTEST 2018

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In January 2015, Princeton University Concerts announced a new initiative, the Creative Reactions Contest ­— a writing contest designed to foster reflection on the impact of hearing classical music, as perceived by students on Princeton’s campus. The first contest was a resounding success, and that success has continued. This year, over the course of 6 months, roughly 50 students attended 8 different concerts and were asked to capture the experience of hearing live classical music. The form was flexible, allowing for blank verse, prose, poetry, narrative, even lyrics. From a full field of entries, there were 4 winners ­— one first prize winner (Sang Lee ’18) and three honorable mentions (Diana Chao ’21, Xin Rong Chua and Jason Molesky, both graduate students). Their work is printed in this booklet and posted on our website at princetonuniversityconcerts.org.

The writing entries were judged in three rounds by 11 judges.

This year for the first time we expanded the Creative Reactions contest to the visual arts. We were pleased to receive our first group of submissions in all different medium, including drawing, digital drawing, collage, sculpture, and painting. We had one first-prize winner, Sebastian Cox. His work is pictured in this booklet, and will be displayed in Richardson Auditorium on May 3, 2018. The visual entries were judged in one round by 4 judges.

We are grateful to the many people who put their time and effort towards this important initiative. In particular, we want to thank Dorothy Shrader who served as the Project Manager for this year’s contest.

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WRITING CONTEST JUDGES Round One: Dasha Koltunyuk ’15, Marketing Manager, Princeton University Concerts Kristin Qian ’18, Member of the Student Ambassadors, Princeton University Concerts Marcia Snowden, Member of the Princeton University Concerts Committee Marue Walizer, Past Chair of the Princeton University Concerts Committee Round Two: Olga Hasty, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, Clerk of the Faculty Andrew Lovett, Composer and Professional Specialist in the Department of Music at Princeton University Dorothea von Moltke, Owner of Labyrinth Books William Stowe ’68, Benjamin Waite Professor Emeritus of the English Language at Wesleyan University Round Three: Scott Burnham, William H. Scheide Professor Emeritus of Music History at Princeton University Jeff Dolven, Behrman Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Princeton University Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities, Professor of English at Princeton University VISUAL ARTS CONTEST JUDGES Mary Hamill, Co-Director of Bernstein Gallery, Woodrow Wilson School Marsha Levin-Rojer, Artist, Princeton University Concerts subscriber Helen Lin ’18, Princeton University student artist, designer of the 2016 –­ 17 Princeton University Concerts Student Ambassadors brochure Marna Seltzer, Director of Princeton University Concerts 25

All of the submissions printed in this booklet represent the student’s own work in accordance with University regulations.