Extremely Close: How a long-distance marriage inspired a requiem for loss
The way my husband and I kept close while separated for three years inspired a new classical composition based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Once upon a time, my husband Nick Schwartz — who’s a bass trombonist — and I had to live separately for three years. I was in Slovenia fulfilling my Fulbright scholarship requirement and working for the Slovenian National Opera, and Nick had just won a job as the principal bass trombonist with the New York City Ballet. This meant we could only see each other every few months — once or twice a year.
To help bridge the distance, we created a book club just for two. He would read a novel and send it to me, and I would read something and send it to him. In addition to learning about each other’s tastes, we hoped this book club would connect us in a somewhat old-fashioned way. You know, the one where you still use an actual post office to send a letter? The range of books that we chose was very wide: Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential made the list, and so did Robert M Pirsig’ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. We would send our book along with a simple description, and let the other to come to their own insights, and compare what we found.
That was about six years ago, and I’m happy to say that since 2012, we’ve been living together in New York. But when my husband recently asked me to write a piece of music for him to play, I thought, well, why don’t I write about something that means a lot to both of us?
So I based the composition on one book that really touched and inspired us during our time apart: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close — the 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer about a 9-year-old boy seeking information about a key he finds among his father’s possessions after his death in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I titled the piece Extremely Close.
Extremely Close was not the first time I had composed a piece of music inspired by reading a novel, but all my compositions so far have been inspired by literature! I’ll read a novel, and I’ll see images in my head — then from those images I can attribute a mood or sentiment I would like music to express. Eventually, I decided I’d better explore this.
My first-ever musical composition was for a play adaptation of the famous Bernhard Schlink novel The Reader, retitled The Woman I Used to Read to (in Slovenian, it’s Ženska, ki sem ji bral). It ended up being one of the most popular plays of the National Theater Company in Maribor, Slovenia. The play is still running in their repertoire — in March 2017 we’ll have our 50th revival. I’ve also written pieces inspired by Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, and more recently a piece for trombone choir inspired by Shakespeare’s Sonnet IX, which Lincoln Center Trombones premiered on January 29, 2017, in New York City.
For Extremely Close, I was curious what would it be like if both bass trombone and piano were treated equally. You see, typical trombone compositions don’t represent piano and bass trombone in equal parts; usually bass trombone gets to be a solo line, while piano is just an accompaniment. I’ve played many of these pieces as a pianist, and my idea was to create a dialogue between both instruments and to shape the entire piece as a set of songs.
The first movement starts with “We Will Not Stop Looking,” in which the book’s main character Oskar Schell finds what he thinks is a clue in the New York Times. The second movement is this really rapid, continuous stream of really fast-moving figures, inspired by “Walking Over Bridges Also Makes Me Panicky,” which describes Oskar walking over bridges looking for the key that his dad left him, and finding the lock the key fits.
The third movement, my personal favorite, is based on a letter from Thomas Schell Sr to Thomas Schell Jr, Oskar’s father: “Why I’m not where you are (5/21/63)”. This letter keeps reappearing in the book as a leitmotif. We never really understand why it’s there until one crucial moment when the letter gets printed, and it explains the whole story of the family. The theme I wrote based on the letter comes back three times, as it does in the book, and each time it ends differently, so it becomes a circle that keeps getting bigger, until we finally come to a resolution.
For this movement, I also wanted to explore how sound can change our perception of time. Because 1963 is part of the title, I wanted to create a sound that would imply the 1960s. For this, I used a technique called prepared piano: putting a sheet of paper on the strings to modify the sound. The paper pressing on the strings completely mutates the sound, making it slightly off-key, so it sounds like an old, out-of-tune piano, reminiscent of old LPs. I think the first composer that used it was Maurice Ravel, an early 20th-century French composer, although American composer John Cage was the first to extend this technique.
The fourth movement, a waltz, was inspired by “The Sixth Borough,” which has the sixth borough floating away from Manhattan. Where I grew up, in Novi Sad, Serbia, we enjoy sad, very nostalgic and melancholy songs. That was the sound I wanted to create for “The Sixth Borough” — something that has floated away and is never coming back.
Finally, the last movement is based on “The Falling Man” — the last 30 or so pages of the book, which are devoted to pictures of the man falling from the Twin Towers, but going in reverse. The movement starts with an ostinato line in the piano — a repeated musical phrase. Above that, the trombone starts ascending the melody out of the same notes. Towards the end, it gets faster and faster, implicating the fall to the ground. The last three measures of the piece are just heartbeats stopping — and that’s the end of the piece.
I interpret this novel as a question: What if this had never happened? How would my life be different right now had I not done “X”, or had “Y” not happened? In writing this piece, I wanted to answer those questions for myself and hopefully inspire others. What I’ve found is that things sometimes just are what they are, and they happen for whatever reason. I think we need to accept these reasons, and from that place of acceptance we can make—and grow into—something beautiful.
Forthcoming performances of Extremely Close: On April 14, 2017, Randall Hawes (Bass Trombone, Detroit Symphony) will perform its European premiere in Rotterdam at the Slide Factory; and on June 28, 2017, James Markey (Bass Trombone, Boston Symphony) will perform it at the International Trombone Festival at the University of Redlands, California. For future performances, keep an eye on www.danielacandillari.com.
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