Premonition of The Hunter Gracchus (Live, 2011)

Genre: Chamber jazz

I am here,
more than that I do not know,
further than that I cannot go.
My ship has no rudder,
and it is driven by the wind
that blows in the undermost regions of death.
—from ”The Hunter Gracchus” by Franz Kafka

In 2011 I had the opportunity to hone my compositional skills again in an advanced composition class taught by Tyler Gilmore and sponsored by The Gift of Jazz. The assignment for this session was to compose a piece for string quartet, to which I added parts for tenor sax and piano.

The inspiration for my composition came from my reading of Franz Kafka. What most commonly comes to mind at the mention of Kafka’s name is his well-known novella “Metamorphosis” (1915), the story of Gregor Samsa’s overnight transformation into a cockroach. One of my personal favorites, however, is his short story, “The Hunter Gracchus” (1917). It’s the tale of a 25-year old hunter, who is pursuing antelope in the Black Forest in Germany in the 4th century. While trailing a particular chamois, he falls down a precipice, cracks open his head on the rocks and dies. The boatsman, who is sent to ferry him to the next world, misses a critical turn, which leaves Gracchus adrift in the same boat for 1,500 years, half dead and half alive (a characteristically dark, Kafkaesque scenario).

As abstruse as Kafka’s writing appears to be, his insights were probably the most canny of any writer of the times. He observed the carnage of World War I that would eventually see the dissolution of several empires, including the Austrian Empire where he lived. As a Jew living in the Czech capital of Prague, he was doubly outcast: a linguistic “foreigner” to the Czechs by virtue of the German language in which he wrote, and an ethnic minority subject to the anti-Semitism of Germans and Czechs alike. He was, like the Hunter Gracchus, adrift and straddling several worlds.

Kafka’s troubled personal biography and his early demise was an eerie harbinger of the horrors of the 20th century yet to come. The themes that reappear in much of his work—of a nameless protagonist caught in an inscrutable bureaucracy—seemed to presage the machinery of death that enveloped Europe under the Nazis (and later the Soviets). It was almost as if Kafka had his finger on the pulse of those future times, a literary “canary in the coal mine.” That he never lived to see the worst of the atrocities—he died at age 40 of tuberculosis—may have been the most merciful of gifts. All three of Kafka’s beloved sisters—Ottla (Ottilie), Gabriele (Ellie), and Valeria (Valli)—later died in the Holocaust.

My piece imagines that the Hunter Gracchus, like Kafka himself, had a “premonition” of his own death.

This is the closest I have come to writing a “programmatic” piece, meant to track Gracchus’s twisted, purgatorial journey to the next world.

The work premiered at Dazzle in Denver on Sunday, April 17, 2011, played magnificently by the Penumbra String Quartet: Chris Jusell (1st violin), Chris Short (2nd violin), Megan Tipton (viola) and David Short (cello). Tenor saxophonist Peter Sommer brought the main melodies to life and beautifully interpreted the improvised portions of the work. (Sommer is now professor of saxophone and jazz studies and Director of Music at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.) Check out the video of this live performance on my YouTube channel.

All my album art and logos are self-designed. For this track, I decided to experiment with the new AI technology. The “painting” for the cover art was generated by Open AI’s DALL-E 2 and is characteristically (and I hope, appropriately) surrealistic.