The seed of this musical project was sown at a 2002 encounter between Osvaldo Golijov and Yitzhak Frankenthal, founder of The Parents Circle, an organization of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost family members to the ongoing conflict. Mr. Frankenthal shared the story of a bereaved father who could not reconcile himself to leaving his dead son and reentering the world of time. For many days he remained at his son’s side, at night sleeping upon the grave. Narrating with his actions a story of madness and truth.

The seed found soil 12 years later, when Osvaldo read David Grossman’s brilliant, almost unbearable novel about a man who walks, a father who describes with his feet impossible, ever-widening circles, driven to go to his dead son.

The notion of losing one’s child conjures, in Osvaldo’s words, the utmost pain imaginable, a supernova of pain. Is it madness to try to translate such experience into words, into music? Perhaps. A supernova is very big. But as one of the characters says, there is “Great, definitive death” – boundless, eternal, immortal – and then there is “Your single, little death, / inside it.”

In a sense, it is the “single, little death” that both David Grossman and Osvaldo take for their starting points. They enter the fathomless through the particular, the palpable, the present. One foot placed in front of the other. One heartbeat at a time. Ka-thunk. Ka-thunk. We are very much in time – music is nothing if not an organization of time – and in motion. The father is joined by other townsfolk, each having lost a child; each railing against circumstance; each compelled on a relentless walk of resistance at once mad and true. The heartbeat and the walking, the walking and the heartbeat. The body’s humble metronomes – the very movements that separate the living from the dead – allow the journey.

We find a crucial counterpoint to these rhythms in the questions that erupt from the walkers. Osvaldo, for whom the novel is “a book of questions,” has distilled from it three, which we hear again and again. At times a cry to pierce the sky, at times an echo swollen with tenderness: Where are you? Who are you there? How are you there? To ask, a form of madness. To refrain from asking, another.

And the questions themselves contain echoes of the sorely missed children – indeed, of all children: their lovely doggedness, their lively insistence on asking the unanswerable. We all go in circles, children with their hunger to know why? where? who? how? and grownups who in suffering find we have not lost the appetite: “teach me – as I not long ago / taught you – / the world and all its secrets.” All of us circling, circling, until in time we come to perceive that perhaps the “walk itself is both / the answer and the question.”

*

“Great, definitive death” touches us all, yet grief is always isolating. Each “single, little death” inflicts its separate suffering, a unique exile. Even parents mourning the same child do not share the same grief.

A coda to the story about the bereaved father who could not bear to leave his son’s grave: When Mr. Frankenthal heard about this man, he went to the cemetery. And remained there. Day and night he kept company with this man, until he was able to rise back up and reenter the world and time.

Perhaps more than an act of making art, the joining of Osvaldo’s musical voice to David Grossman’s literary one is an act of accompaniment. And by collaborating with the Silkroad Ensemble in the creation of this piece, Osvaldo widens the circle of accompaniment. Accompaniment is not a cure for grief. But it may be the opposite of madness.

Sitting shiva, the Jewish custom of gathering around the bereaved for seven days after a death, is a ritualized form of accompaniment. Falling Out of Time, with its ever-expanding circles of community – from the townsfolk in the novel to the musicians bringing it to the stage – might be thought of as a walking shiva, an act of accompaniment that remains, like the breath of the living, in motion.

There is
breath
there
is breath
inside the pain
there is breath

After 30 years of life and music adventures together, I feel that there is a quality of “everyourness” to the friendship between the St Lawrence String Quartet and me. Especially with Geoff Nuttall, to whom I am dedicating this piece, I feel a sense of brotherhood. I think he also lives in that state of everyourness, with the yourness part of the idea being his immense love for Haydn and his attention to, and delight in, every one of the extraordinary turns that Haydn’s quartets gift us; and Geoff’s love for, and attention to California’s native vegetation, and to each of his thousands of records, and, especially, to the extraordinary friends and musicians who play together with him in the St Lawrence String Quartet.

Vitality, Love and Attention. Somebody said that true love is attention. “Love-is-Attention” is what connects Haydn and Van Gogh. That concentrated attention that unveils new and new dimensions in what we all see and hear, but, many times, we fail to notice until they notice and they invite us to notice too.

Vitality, Love, Attention. In short, those are the qualities that I hope pervade this new work.

The octet is in four movements. Each of them focuses on some striking figure of the corresponding movements in Haydn’s Quartet Op. 76, Number 2 and takes those figures to places different than the ones Haydn took them.

The first movement, “Sowing Fifths” is, like Haydn’s, based on a pair of fifths. It’s all about the possibilities latent in that pair of fifths. I think that what Haydn did was to let music speak about music itself, unfolding according to its own laws. In my own way, I tried to do the same. But there is something in my first movement that turned out to be more Janacek than Haydn. Janacek is a place I also love!

The second movement is all built on the first four measures of Haydn’s second movement. It takes that innocent tune for a trip to the stars. Hence its name: “Starbound”.

The third movement, “You reap what you sow”, based on a figure in Haydn’s third movement, is the first minuet I ever wrote in my life and, I hope, not the last. How much fun I had writing that peacocky dance!

The last movement, “Papa”, is a barking dance where the quartets become the many dogs that my uncle had at his home, and the wild way in which they greeted everyone who dared to visit him. Musically, it amplifies the Hungarian Roma influence in the fourth movement of Haydn’s quartet. “Papa”, because that is how Haydn was affectionately called, and also because Geoff is such a great papa to his boys.

Back to that Vincent walk on the seashore that I mentioned earlier. He writes to Theo: “It was not happy, but neither was it sad. It was beautiful”. I hope that whatever beauty and emotion that arise from this octet, is also the consequence of pure patterns and composition. Most of all, I hope that I’ll also continue to develop an everyourness with the musicians of the fantastic Telegraph Quartet who are premiering the piece with my friends in the St Lawrence. I cherished every moment in our rehearsals and am grateful and happy to both quartets for the work and joy we had while working together on it.

It’s an experience perfectly described by Borges in The Aleph, and illustrated in the bullet scene in The Matrix. Two of my favorite soccer players, Andres Iniesta and Zinedine Zidane, also have that superpower. And Mozart’s music, too, happens always in that ‘bubble of no time’, as does Chick Corea’s, whose presence I felt while writing Um Dia Bom. It is a quality to which I’ve always aspired in my music, and rarely achieved. Sooner or later, pathos takes over. No complaints; as the scorpion would say, “it’s in my nature”.

But I was diligent about getting there in Um Dia Bom. I wrote with thick marker on the large whiteboard next to my piano a list of guiding principles for this piece: Clarity. Line. Light. Elegance. Grace. Delight. Rhythm. Air in the Harmonies. Counterpoint. Make Believe (Representation). Child Wonder. I like to think they are all here, with the exception perhaps of counterpoint, which remains highest on my bucket list of things I want to learn.

Um Dia Bom is just that, A Good Day. Its five movements depict a life from morning to midnight and beyond, but as if told to children. Hovering in the Cradle, the opening movement tries to paint the infinite potential in the eyes of a newborn child. There might be a fairy hovering, or it’s simply the child’s eyes wondering. The second movement, …while the rain… started as a blessing I wrote for the marriage of my oldest daughter, Talia, to Yevgeni, her husband. It takes off from the poem that Vivaldi wrote to accompany the second movement of Winter in the Four Seasons: “To spend content and quiet days near the fire, while, outside, the rain soaks hundreds” You can hear the rain throughout this movement, while a dancing couple glides on the marble floors of an Italian palazzo. Around the Fire, the third movement, is a traditional Yiddish song that also talks about the bliss of being together around a small fire. In my version, the song appears and disappears, as a ghost, in the midst of a slow processional and restrained tears. Schubert’s motif of the slow movement of Death and the Maiden is in the background throughout that first section. A different manifestation of Death interrupts the processional in a short and furiously baroque appearance that opens the door to three funny and mischievous dance variations on the B section of the Yiddish song. The movement closes with the reemergence of the opening processional. I wrote this movement in memory of Guillermo Limonic, who loved singing in Yiddish, and died of Covid in the early days of the pandemic. Riding with Death, the fourth movement, is based on the late Basquiat painting of the same name. It is a sparse painting, in which the horse carrying the Death Rider is represented only by its essential bones, like an X-Ray drawn by a child. The music is a gallop in the viola and cello, over which the violins “X-Ray” the melody of Willie Blind Johnson’s Dark was the Night, playing just filaments and short echoes of the song. Feather, the closing movement, describes a graceful, endless fall of a feather from the sky. Here is where I felt the spirit of Chick Corea more present than ever. He died while I was writing this quartet and at the same time studying his Children Songs.