>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. >> Anne McLean: Good evening. I'm Anne McLean. I'd like to welcome all of you on behalf of the Library of Congress Concert Office and also the Poetry and Literature Center. Tonight we're delighted to be presenting the world premier performance of a work by Michael Hersch, performed by members of the Atos Trio, titled "Carrion-Miles to Purgatory: 13 Pieces After Texts of Robert Lowell". His composition for violin and piano -- sorry, violin and cello, is a commission from the Library's Hans Kindler Foundation Trust Fund. We're very pleased to have Michael with us tonight, and fortunate to be able to present him as a speaker in conversation with psychologist and author Kay Redfield Jamison. This premier is an important feature in our rich and very diverse 2015-16 lineup. A wonderful season that celebrates our 90 years as a vibrant concert presenter on the world stage. For the music division, it's a great pleasure to see this commission came into being. Michael Hersch is internationally admired as the distinguished and thoughtful composer and pianist. In our program tonight you can read several comments about his career and there are wealth of statements that you can find online and in the literature by critics and commentators that attest to his stature. The Financial Times of London states that he is considered "one of the most fertile and musical minds to emerge in the U.S. over the past generation." And The Baltimore Sun talks about music of "stark, settling, seemingly implausible beauty." I won't mention the prizes and awards, but you can see them in tonight's program and it's an impressive list. I would also like to acknowledge three guests that we are very delighted to welcome this evening Dr. Ronald Daniels, President of The Johns Hopkins University, and his wife, Joanne Rosen, and Dean Frederick Bronstein from Peabody Conservatory. It's unusual to find the leading research institution of global repute with the rare attribute of being home to one of the world's leading conservatories. Tonight's free concert presentation definitively points up the commitment of these institutions to a philosophy of creative and provocative interdisciplinary ventures. In especially resonant confluence for our own institution, Dr. Jamison and Michael Hersch will be talking about work of Robert Lowell, who was the Library's Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 1947 and 1948. Kay Jamison is the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders, Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center. She's an acknowledged international authority on depressive illnesses. Also, she is a good friend to the Library of Congress, convening in 2008 a very successful Music and the Brain Speaker Series, which is still very much in circulation online. Dr. Jamison is also a Robert Lowell scholar and will shortly be publishing a book about the poet. Afterwards, she will be in the lobby. You can great her and I wanted to say that we are -- we have for sale copies of her book "Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament". Please welcome Kay Redfield Jamison. [ Applause ] >> Kay Redfield Jamison: Thank you. It's wonderful to be back at the Library of Congress, a great, great place, and an honor to be on the same platform as Michael Hersch. Robert Lowell was born into a prominent New England family in 1917. He was a poet of great originality and huge influence in American poetry and Western poetry in general. He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and, as Anne said, in 1947 and 1948 he was a Consultant in Poetry here at the Library of Congress. That was the early title for Poet Laureate of United States. Lowell suffered throughout his life from manic-depressive or bipolar illness, from a particularly terrible form of it and was hospitalized for mania nearly 20 times. He died in 1977, at the age of 60. So, I'm gonna talk just for a little while, for a few minutes about Robert Lowell and his poetry, and then a little bit about some of the overlapping similarities between Robert Lowell and Michael Hersch. Not the mental illness side of things, but the genius side of things. And then, Michael and I are going to talk, not so long, because we'd like to leave it open for a lot of questions. "Darkness honestly lived through is a place of wonder and life," Robert Lowell wrote. "So much has come from there." It was October 1957, and he was 40 years old, writing poetry like a house on fire, and taking darkness into a new country. It was, he said, the best writing he had ever done. His new work became the heart of life studies, described by one critic as "the most influential book of poetry since T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land.'" The poems, most written well and in few months time, left their mark. "They have made a conquest," wrote The Reviewer. "They have won a major expansion of the territory of the poetry." In December 1957, after a summer and fall blaze of writing, Lowell was admitted to psychiatric hospital in Boston. He was psychotic, manic, insane. It was his fifth psychiatric hospitalization in 8 years. These were long hospitalizations, not like our modern hospitalizations where people get admitted and leave almost as soon as they get admitted. Oh, these were hospitalizations of many months. These were severe manias, where he would be put in straight jacket, taken in hospital by six or seven Boston police officers. Lowell told the doctor who admitted him that the preceding months had been some of the most productive months of his writing poetry. It was a pattern he had come to know well - first the weeks of intense, fiery writing, then the spike in the mania, and finally, as night follows day, the dusts in the blood of depression. The psychiatrist wrote in Lowell's medical chart what many of his doctors were to observe. "The patient's had a series of breaks," she wrote, "all in light of unusual literary output." Much had come from the darkness, but not without a cost. Mania and imagination many times come together to help create great art. But disciplining character makes art from inborn gift. "Poetry may come from a unhappy and disordered life," Lowell once wrote, "but a huge amount of health has to go into the misery." Without question, Lowell's attacks of mania splurged some of his finest works. They also brought great pain to him and to those he loved. Things he had done, when he was manic, haunted him when he was well. He was mortified and ashamed. So too did his terror that he would become psychotic again. Yet, Lowell came back from madness time and time and time again, re-entered the fray and kept intact his friendships. He kept his wit, he kept his capacity to love, he went back to work. This faculty for regeneration is not a common one, nor is the courage to face and to rate from the certainty of impending madness. Courage is unusual. So too is creating poetry that expands the territory. Lowell's poetic imagination was tethered to an unstable, but fiercely disciplined mind. It forged his work and it branded his life. "When I'm dead," Lowell once told a friend, "I don't care what you write about me. All I ask is that it be serious." Lowell's seriousness of purpose was matched by a vaulting ambition, that had been his since childhood. It was a desire and a capacity for rashness, ambition, the great sweep of great ideas. It was something he admired in other writers. "Melville and Hawthorne he loved," Lowell once wrote, "pour out more than the measure will hold. What wonderful dangers, errors, condescensions and breathless abundance." Lowell, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman -- all like Coleridge were habituated to the vast. They swung for the fences. They wrote to change the game. Many of Lowell's early poems, including several of those chosen as texts for this evening's music by Michael Hersch, are dominated by themes of moral decay, of pain, suffering, a fallen New England, retribution, and the unforgiving puritanism of his ancestors. He wrote of the complex burden of heritage and of the dark, ambiguous grace of God. The battle that raged between Calvinism, his native tongue, the New England protestantism that he had known longest and breathed most deeply, and the catholicism that he had as an adult taken to heart and mind, and then quit, was one that was reflected in part in his mental wars. It was a clash that entered into his work violently and unforgettably, in his early poems, work that the most influential critic of the time said would be read as long as men remember English. These were poems of ambition, elegy and blood, coiled and unstable in force and fury, and crafted with brilliance. Lowell's great poem "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket," which Michael Hersh has drawn from this evening, in part, was a debt to Melville and The Old Testament, to Thoreau, to Hopkins. It is Homeric in force, mythic in scale and spelled by the violence of God in Lowell's home North Atlantic waters. It is the battleground for the contrasting forces that defined his mind as a young poet. The poem, as Seamus Heaney said, is one where "the percussion and brass section of the language orchestra is driven hard" and "the string section hardly gets a look-in." Michael Hersch has essential things in common with Robert Lowell. He's an unrelenting way serious artist. His work is rooted in a profound knowledge of grief and death and life of the human condition, in art, literature and in music. He has, like Lowell, a restless, tectonic imagination and the courage of his beliefs. He takes risks. Lowell, it is always said, and there is somebody who is writing a book about him, it is the first thing if anybody has actually heard of Lowell, the first thing that people say is, "He is a really difficult poet." Lowell is a difficult poet. It's part of what makes him great. So too is Michael a difficult composer. His work is complex, unpredictable, dark, and wonderful. It is beautiful. It is piercingly human. And I am honored to be here with him tonight. [ Applause ] >> Kay Redfield Jamison: Please just sit. We're going to just keep this very informal. So, why Lowell? >> Michael Hersch: You know, when -- I've always been drawn, especially since I got out of school, I tend to find much more inspiration and more friendship, if you will, and camaraderie and company in text, whether it's literary or poetical. There's very little of it that jumps out and grabs hold of me in that way, I think, that all artists are looking for on some level, where we react very strongly to when we see something of ourselves somewhere else. I don't make any presuppositions or suppositions about what Lowell meant, felt, any of these things. But it doesn't change the fact that in a lot of his work I saw something of myself. Then, again, I understand that's one to zero correspondance, it's all in my own mind, in my own sensibility or sensitivity. But when I started combing through his work, sometimes it's just a word. It's often not more than a word or a pair of words or trio or quartet of words, or maybe a phrase. Very rarely will it be an entire tract of poetry. These are the things that ignite something in me. It's incredibly exciting, it's a feel like there's someone who saw the world through similar eyes, even though the experiences couldn't be more different. And in a way, it doesn't really matter to me what it is that he saw. It's how I perceive it on the page, what's real and what's in front of me - an abstract biography. And so, like all the arts and literature and poetry and music that I respond to, there was something there that just touched to the merrow of what it is that I'm looking for in art. And then in turn it has an impact in one way or another on things that I attempt to make myself. >> Kay Redfield Jamison: So, of all of his poetry, which is huge and collected verse of his, you focus on the early poems? Was that because there was such a long collection of poetry to read through or was it -- >> Michael Hersch: No, I think there was something actually in what I do. If anybody ever went through all of my books, you might take a book of the shelf that contains some of the most consequential material in terms of material that I've somehow had a conversation with, in service of literature or poetry, through music. But often times, if someone looked at one of those books, they wouldn't notice anything in it. They have to look very carefully, because it would be two words on this page, and then 60 pages later there may be a sentence here and another 45 pages later something else. It's incredibly specific to me and there is oftentimes no real method or obvious methodology to how I'm engaging with these texts. So that was really notable and, in Lowell's case, that terrain of the expression that I was feeling myself, looking for companionship and certain text fragments came to mind. So, when I was writing this music, I started the music before I went to the Lowell, but certain text fragments of Lowell came to mind. Maybe one of the first was a line in poem; it's just something as simple as "Canaries beat their bars and scream", and that just popped into my mind. Or, another image of two angels fighting over the soul of the man with billhooks. These kinds of images that were just incredibly searing images and I would just be writing and then they would come to mind and then I would go and try to track down where did I remember that from? And sometimes there would be musical allusions to leave talk -- there is a rhyme where he talks about hell being burned out and heaven's harps-strings going slack. And then somehow these all start to tie together, to tailor together and ultimately it makes sense - they were from the same collection. But that surprised me, because usually people are trying to make sense of what the relationships are between different text fragments. But in this case it was very clean that way. But that just speaks to the consistency of rendering of his own imagination at that time. >> Kay Redfield Jamison: Right, anything that would have exist very clear and fascinating about Lowell is he's one of these writers, rather like Beethoven, who just moved from effort. He just moved and changed and went on and recreated, and so that Lord Weary's Castle, which is made of mostly fragments, is completely different from so much of the work he did after that. So, very, very different. >> Michael Hersch: Yes, and there's no real explanation as to -- the interesting thing -- really, it's not so interesting -- is that I'm not looking for something that is trying to capture a sort of emotional or psychological -- there's something that's going to click with a feeling, with that feeling. I'm not after an image and I think that's one of the complicating factors in a piece like this. I'm certainly not the first person to engage with text this way, but a lot of times people like the idea. It's a very clean idea to take an image that's laid out in words that we all understand and then the idea of composer taking that and trying to render that or transform that into sound. That's too fastle. I don't know if that's the right use of the word. It's more nuance than that. These images are a byproduct of something that's a feeling, a state of mind, a state of being. I think that one of the things that's extraordinary about Lowell is that he's able to take something as simple as an image, though, and capture that. That's a very hard thing to do. I found that for me, what was different about these texts versus others is how visual they are, or to me they are visual. >> Kay Redfield Jamison: He described capturing experience in talks, you know, and you would look at them. I think one of his famous images was meat-hooked -- words "meat-hooked from the living steer." I mean, it's that incredibly graphic imagery that, you know, you have to have a heart of stone to remain unresponsive to, I think. >> Michael Hersch: Yeah, yeah. No, I -- >> Kay Redfield Jamison: Do you see anything kind of intrinsically musical about Lowell's work? I mean, by definition poetry is musical, but is there anything that sets him apart in that? >> Michael Hersch: You know, for me what's interesting is most of the texts that I've ended up connecting really strongly with me over my life - they tend to be texts written in non-English languages and they're translated. Sometimes I can handle the original languages, but in the end I'm the product of English and the admiration that I have and the gratitude that I have for great translators can't be overstated. Of course, Lowell translated as well. So, what was interesting was along with just a few other people here was some writing in English. So there's just something inherently musical to me about seeing these thoughts, these feelings, these recollections, these terrors, these premonitions, whatever you might call them, in English. They were originally conceived in English and, because that's my language, that's the language I'm most comfortable with, there's something inherently musical to me. That's not answering your question exactly, but yes, I do find there's something particularly musical about these words and the way that they are laid out on page. But, of course, in this case I'm not setting any of these words. I just told someone earlier that I've written a lot of music that has relationships with text in one way or another. Just like this piece - it accompanies the piece in a certain way, but it's comunication more between me and the writer. But I think this piece, more than any other that I've done, I do feel it's, if not necessary, than important for people, when they're listening to the music, to read the accompanying text. Again, in the past I would have felt that there had not been -- the texts certainly don't need my music and I would hope that the music doesn't need any text that may have accompanied me personally on the journey of writing. But in this case, I think that they are very unified in a way that's much more pronounced and so, in this case I encourage people to read and listen. >> Kay Redfield Jamison: I think that Lord Weary's Castle is just so marked by movement and energy and force and madness, it just moves. There's something, there's a velocity to Lord Weary's Castle that is not unlike his subsequent work, but it's much much more pronounced. >> Michael Hersch: Yes, I would agree there's an immediacy to it that it compels itself, I'd say even in small fragments it does that. I think for me in all art, whether it's a building, a sculpture, a painting, a poem, a novel - something for me that's important is a sense of momentum. You can achieve momentum in absolute stasis and never have anything other than absolute stasis, and there still can be a shocking momentum to it. I think he achieves that, he definitively achieves that kind of momentum, whatever he's doing, when he's at his best. >> Kay Redfield Jamison: I think it's sure and I think one of the things is striking in his work is this change over time. But that incredible rhythm, particularly in the early works - it's the sea over and over again, or it's a turmoil of people over and over again, but it's in waves, unremitting. >> Michael Hersch: One thing I thought was interesting was when I realized how relatively young he was when he wrote, as I was becoming very not relatively young anymore. It always struck me as a bit odd that I was drawn to be where he was, in his light. There's that period in all of our lives, whatever is happening, that's always a bit tempestuous and on some level I was puzzled by this. But what's interesting is that for him that was his life, at the time. For me, life -- for all of us as we get older -- becomes defined more and more by advance and actions and things that have boundaries. Sometimes these boundaries become unclear or broken and then they spill. But it was interesting how something that very clearly for him was all-encompassing, a sort of his state of mind over a period of years, applied so nicely to something where I was put in this state of mind of something very specific that does recapture the sort of generic trauma of being younger. In this case it was real traumas and so I was able to take something that on the surface didn't seem to match so much with where I was in my life. But then taken and put inside, encapsulated in a series of events in my life, it actually worked really nicely. I'm only thinking about this right now, I haven't actually thought too much about that. So, in that sense, the period in his life is not really relevant to me. Many artists have done a lot of great things at that period, it's not such an extraordinary age to do the work. But there's a totality to his state of mind and a sort of all-encompassing-ness to that state of mind that he's able to sustain without seeming like -- he's able to avoid these traps that lot of people, when we're younger, fall into - self-pity or just sort of undefined angst. It just translates so nicely to real world of grown up things that are defined in advance, and in that sense it's that mature level that's quite extraordinary, I think. >> Kay Redfield Jamison: Gee, can you write a chapter for my book? That's very good. That's very true. I think too, with Lowell, as you say, he was 29 when he got Pulitzer Prize for his body of work. By that time he had been through just an incredible series of life-times. I think partly he was born tempestuous and he died tempestuous, but this was a period of time that was just striking for the changes in his emotional being. And then in just a few years time that he would be hospitalized for the first time for mania. But you can feel the mania in the work and certainly in the lines of the works. I think what's also interesting is that, not unlike many people, of course, he had great love for music and he wrote about music. So he wrote a sonnet about [inaudible], a sonnet about the Archduke trio that's being played tonight. He wrote sonnets about Beethoven, Schubert, the two great composers that he most loved. There was something always in the back of his mind that you had the sense was being formed by music, his being classicist by education and training and heart. By other poets, by other writers, by love. I mean, this is hugely broad and not this kind of picky or manicured life that - >> Michael Hersch: You know, he seemed to me looked around him and he had that sense, you know. And, you know, and it's - I knew the -- for me, you know, I feel that all the early years that I was composing, certainly through my late teens and 20s, I didn't feel like I had my head above the clouds, until I got on the far side of 25. I just feel like there was so much I just wasn't seeing and for me it took some time. It took me into, such as read something where someone had this sort of control of his materials and had a sense of what was around them. I don't mean sense of influence, I mean just a sense of the human landscape that surrounded him. I feel like I'm still noticing things. We all of us are going to notice things hopefully always, but what was interesting just looking back from that perspective, to be able to see someone who had figured that out and there was a clarity of thought in a relatively young age. Well, I was sure that I had that clarity of thought then, but it's interesting and a lot of times I've found that writers and poets have that clarity of thought before musicians. I don't know why that may be. I don't know if I have any clarity of thought yet, but there's sense of one's self changes and the sense of being in the dark. But he just had this sort of omniscience that comes through. Whether it was real or not, it is a sort of force of personality also. And I think that's also one of things that characterizes him - the force of his personality just comes through very strongly from very early on. And that's a rare thing. >> Kay Redfield Jamison: You see, he once quoted about John Berryman, who was similarly forceful and manic, that there was no one so loyal as John, but you'd like to have him living in another city. There is that element of pure intensity, but I think it's also true that people who knew him very well and who loved him very much also describe this incredible gentleness. So it's always, he's opposing sort of forces of just incredible gentleness and kindness and talkingness and soft-spokenness. He's a calm, good man. So, what about the writing of it and the words and the music, and then maybe open it up to questions. >> Michael Hersch: I mean, there's really not much to say. The piece, you can read in the notes or everybody has, is in 13 movements and the piece just unfolds on it's own. It is what it needs to be, what I made improvising it a lot in the coming weeks. This particular piece was writing for violin and cello. I've found it difficult, but it was a real sort of metal testing, it was -- the two instruments I feel very close to, but I've never written just for the two of them together. And so there was a lot of -- the Lowell's text provided some of these landscapes that he provided in my own mind, create certain sonorities or certain sounds that -- but all kinds of things are going into writing it, that I don't know how important it is for people to really know. It's like looking at the wiring or the piping of the building. >> Kay Redfield Jamison: Maybe a little bit more than that. >> Michael Hersch: How does that reiterate what I've said before? That more than any other piece that I've written that is engaged with text, where the text is not song. It's essential to this piece. This piece wouldn't have been written had I not been engaging with these texts. As I said before, the fact that so many of them just came to mind in an involuntary sort of way speaks to how important they were to me, or have been, maybe without even knowing it. So, even on some level it may even be OK to refer to these center pieces as a kind of songs without words. Except that the words are there, but they're just not song. >> Kay Redfield Jamison: Thank you. Just open up for questions? Yes? >> What prompted this particular choice of pieces? >> Michael Hersch: That was just simply when the Library approached me. They wanted something that had featured cello, so normal thing would probably be to do a sonata for piano or maybe a solo cello. But after thinking about that -- I had to think about it for a while, and if I hadnt, you know, even with this incredibly generous opportunity, exciting opportunity, I still needed to feel - I have to feel excited about if I'm going to undertake any kind of project. At a bare minimum, I have to be excited about the possibility of writing for whatever the medium is. And so I went to them and I said that it would be a bit unorthodox perhaps, but would they allow me to write something for violin and cello, so they said, "yes." So that's all. >> What did Lowell die of -- what did Lowell die of again? >> Michael Hersch: She wants to know what he died -- how he died. >> Kay Redfield Jamison: This is the composer's daughter, Abby. Abby Hersch. We're delighted you're here. Mr. Lowell died of a lot things, but I would actually turn to my husband, who's a cardiologist and who's doing that side of the work, but he died of? >> He died of a heart attack. >> Kay Redfield Jamison: Yes. After years of 4-5 packs a day of cigarettes, not inconsiderable amount of drinking, and mania, which actually elevated rate for heart disease. So he was under intense stress, so it was a culmination of things. And both of his parents had heart disease, so he was living under shadows of disease. Great question. >> Hi, I'm trying to see if I can put this into words, my question, but as Dr. Jamison said, Lowell was very difficult, just reading this here. And it seems more -- what struck me about it is that it's more a collection of impressions than it does draw on a single visual descriptive kind of thing. So if it is a collection of impressions, I wonder, in reading this it would call to mind either ideas or images, and which of them will help me to better understand the music? >> Michael Hersch: If it's the music -- if I've succeeded in any way in writing what I hoped to write, then you hopefully won't need help, there shouldn't be anything referential that you have to do. So, when I say it's good to have those texts there, it's like having a passing glance. You can read them all at once and not look at them again, you can read -- usually I'm antagonistic towards the idea of reading and listening: I think listening requires all of our faculties and any distraction is not a good thing. So, I guess my expectation would just be that if you listen to it and you have a certain reactions and you read the text, you might just kind of, say -- you would just sort of nod, there would be some sense that there was a rightness to it. And if there wasn't, that can be expected, too. But, again, I just want to reiterate that I hope that the music doesn't need the poetry. I know that those texts don't need my music. That's for sure. I just think that the presence of those texts, perhaps, might heighten or augment the experience of listening to music through their proximity - meaning them being on the tip of your mind if you read. You might just recognize something of each and in each pole, the literary or the poetical or the music, that there's some common ground there. I think, frankly, for people who don't have a lot of experience with musical expression that's beyond, say, the standard repertoire, it provides a way in, for some people. They're hearing sounds that they've never heard before that and that can be jarring. So the words can act as a sort of bridge. I doubt there is anybody who can read those texts and not have an informed feeling about it. For as the music, people might listen and say, "I'm not sure what I've heard." Everybody's experiences are so different with music, but our experience with language is pretty uniform. And our experience with music is uniform, too, but every composer is speaking in different languages and if you have no experience with the language, it's probably not a bad idea to ground oneself into it a little bit. It doesn't mean that you have to be liking it. But, you see, I'm quite inarticulate about these relationships with -- because I have never been asked before. So, it's okay to read those texts, though. >> Kay Redfield Jamison: You might say that there is a certain dark thread that runs through these texts? >> Michael Hersch: I would say that the thread that I perceive through those texts, that is shared with the music, certainly. Mainly what we're dealing with are issues of loss, grief and their appending in the tentacles. So, yes, those are the broad strokes of expressive territory that they share. Again, whether I succeed in communicating that is certainly an open-ended question, but from my standpoint those were the things that I was trying to express. And it seems to me that Lowell was too. But I'm also well aware that the context of a lot of those poems - that if you read them in context, what you take away from these fragments would probably be unrecognizable. So, that's a whole another thing, which is a whole another issue, which is for another day - whether if it's even right for a person to extract things like this. To take these things out of context. I imagine there are a lot of people who have a real problem with one artist, with a composer taking fragments of a poem which was clearly intended to be read in it's entirety. But, that's a risk out there. >> Kay Redfield Jamison: Well, apparently Lowell would not be one of those, because he actually was a great translator to many perspective, but he got huge criticism. He took poems in languages he didn't know, took texts from different language to translate from, and then wrote his own poetry. He saw language as living and he saw language as - you contributed to it. And he would be the first, I think, to say -- >> Michael Hersch: Okay, good, all's good to that. >> Kay Redfield Jamison: Yes. And he actually -- Benjamin Britton wrote music based on Lowell's work and he said it was one of the greatest honors of his life. Hhe liked the idea of being written from. >> Michael Hersch: That's good. >> Michael, can you just say something about the interplay between the text in your composition, as to say -- I understand that you read, there's impressions that you take, there's parts of the poems that moved you and then that inspires composition, but are you composing, re-reading, refining or -- can you say something about your own creative process in the interplay between text and composition? >> Michael Hersch: Yes, now that's the part that is a bit puzzling. It's actually -- I'll be writing and then the words come to mind. So, something I do reminds me of something that Lowell did, in this case. Then that acts as accelerator, somehow. Like it then feeds whatever it was that I was -- so, that's the part that's a little backwards, I think. Maybe more at expected circumstances, where it is a sort of you start with the non-musical object that then inspires something in the composer. The composer then -- so, that's all something like Pictures at an Exhibition of Mussorgsky, that sort of basic idea, right? He's capturing these paintings in music. In this case the process comes from writing and then some of these text writings pop into mind. If that happens, that's very meaningful to me, because there was no reason for me to be thinking about these at all. I'm into writing this piece, not thinking about Lowell at all, but from the outside, somehow, these text fragments start to come to mind and then I have to go back and find them. I stay true to what occurred to me, that's why they are what they exactly need to be for me. So, sometimes all I need is one word, it's a back and forth in real time, sort of. But once I've identified the text, then that is exciting. Then that feeds more, then I'm getting more from that and it might oscillate back and forth. So, it really is exciting, because it's having this living dialogue. He's not there, I'm not talking to him, but through his work it really does feel very much like collaboration, in a strange way. >> Lowell was glad to advise that himself and allow images to coagulate, so to speak? >> Kay Redfield Jamison: Absolutely. >> Michael Hersch: Yes. >> There is one thing in the program that's interesting, they mentioned quarter tones and it seems like in the second movement, which also has the word Purgatory in it, maybe even suggesting some sort of threshold. Is that the only place with quarter tones and although you're speaking in the music, would you want to say anything about that? >> Michael Hersch: Yes, that is one of the only places that I have -- there was no conscious one-to-one correspondence between the idea of Purgatory, but where the quarter tones do appear, they are very frequent in the piece and I just think of the quarter tone, it's just another shade of harmony. So, it doesn't have any specific meaning. Also, just for the record, Purgatory -- I just did a song dealing with a lot of text on Purgatory with texts of Pound and Dante. It's just interesting, for whatever reason - when I was younger, a number of the texts that I initially read of Dante really presented Purgatory in a relatively beautiful and sort of tranquil, sort of at ease, in at ease. That doesn't mean there's not a sort of darkness hovering around these things, but it's interesting that in a lot of Purgatory, a lot of writing about it, the way we use it in our common parlance is much more grim than -- at least in my reading of Dante or specific parts of it. So it's very -- since you bring up that word, it's a very complicated word, I mean, for me. I mean, it has alot -- it's imbued with all kinds of complexities and contradictions. Anyway, but still, the quarter tones are just because that's what the harmony needed in that spot. Anything else? No? Well, thank you very much. It was a -- thank you. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.