Turning The Lessons Of History Into Music
Not yet reaching the midpoint of historians Will and Ariel Durant’s book, The Lessons of History, I thought it’d be intriguing to witness a musical premiere based on the text—a piece that could sonically convey, as the book had with words, the human experience without personal bias. Within a few page turns, my friends from Invoke, a multi-string quartet, asked me to write a piece for their ongoing commissioning project, “American Postcards.” Their instruction was simple, select a time in American history that was personal, inspirational, or important to me and write a piece on it. While I began to realize a musical adaptation of The Lessons of History would be impactful, I didn’t see myself as the composer. But since I had this piece of American literature sitting in my hands at the time of my friends’ request, I found it uncannily appropriate to begin writing and did so before the turn of the last page.
The Durants wrote The Lessons upon completion of the tenth book of their eleven volume book set, The Story of Civilization—a series that covers history in almost 4 million words across nearly 10,000 pages. In 1968, they decided to take the “story” and compress it into a 100 page essay, thus bringing forth The Lessons of History. Making up the book’s structure, the material compiles history through 12 perspectives:
geography
biology
race
character
morals
religion
economics
socialism
government
war
growth and decay
progress
For this, I considered it vital to find a strategy to incorporate the number 12 into the work.
It’s worth mentioning that composing with the number 12 in mind can be western music’s most dangerous cliché. There are 12 pitches which make up standard harmony, two collections of 12 etudes from Chopin. Schoenberg crafted the twelve-tone technique. To make my contribution with the number, I decided to put it to work with a contrapuntal technique that’s near homologous to a fugue, canon, or round. In writing with these traditional techniques, one would write one solo entrance from an instrument, (called the subject), followed by an answer—a second instrument playing the same material, (most commonly a fifth above or fourth below in a fugue). If an ensemble is comprised of four instruments, we’d hear four individual entrances leading to each playing against each other. Saluting the 12 perspectives, for the opening section, I proceeded composing 12 entrances.
Stepping away from the traditional fugue, a similar method was utilized. This method was merely a technique in my previous orchestral work Quaternity, and my Violin Concerto, but for The Lessons of History, it makes up near the entire composition structure. How it differs from traditional fugues, canons, and rounds is that the repeating material—the answers—are seldom written exactly the same. They’re written either in a different octave, for a different instrument, or written for two instruments playing in unison making a new texture. I see this as the same way history has been structured; history recorded differs from history actually lived. Thinking of this, and the fact “The historian always oversimplifies,” I “simplified” the subject’s imitations by shortening them all while ending their phrases with the same cadential material. For example, the first subject is 8 bars before its cadence. Once heard in its entirety from each instrument, we hear it with the first 7 bars until the cadence, then the first 6 until the cadence, then 5, and so on. Representing history’s acceleration of change, the technique builds intensity until its climax. After that climax, a contrasting section is introduced displaying how “The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.” The process repeats until returning to its original material. The Durants may have been in agreement with what Mark Twain has been reputed saying, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”
Bringing an extra-traditional string quartet element, I wrote lyrics based on the book’s text. At the opening of the second section the quartet begins to sing:
“Equality dies at freedom’s feet, retrogrades only to repeat. Economies grow. Industries rise. That’s when my gods will die.”
The Durants state the furtherest point from equality, its “sworn enemy,” is freedom. If a society obtains absolute freedom, natural selection will bring out inequalities in all. “To check the growth of inequality,” the Durants continue, “liberty must be sacrificed.”
In the same manner, as the economics of society play a role in the presence of religion, religion sees its decline during an economy’s rise. “Economies grow. Industries rise. That’s when my gods will die,” are lyrics based on the text, “As long as there is poverty there will be gods.” The rise of one—freedom/equality, economies/religion—is the fall of the other and vice versa.
The last chapter of the book asks, “Is progress real?” It’s the same question the music asks while two sections battle through their own inceptions, developments, and decays only to return to the start of the other. The final section is a hybrid theme comprised of the two preceding themes. It is played 12 times and ends with all instruments playing the same pitch in unison—a sound texture intentionally avoided until this point. All this is an homage to the text, “The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.” Our present is our history rolled into this moment.
My aim with the work, like the Durants’ aim with the book, is not to display favoritism toward certain views but to offer inclusiveness. The piece is dedicated to my late father, Glen, who consistently read, encouraged reading, and possessed a strong interest in history. He, myself, and the Durants would likely agree with the English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley saying, “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
Will and Ariel Durant were presented the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1968 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. The Lessons of History was published under Simon & Schuster and can be purchased here.