Judith - a character study for orchestra

PROGRAM NOTE

For the last fifteen years, I have split my time between singing in clubs and writing music for the concert hall. But increasingly, I’ve tried to treat my work as a single corpus, rather than distinguishing between high or low, folk or classical. So when I was asked to write a piece that would share a program with Mahler 1, I knew that I would draw on my own song materials, just as Mahler drew heavily from his Lieder eines fahrenden gesellen when composing his symphony.

In 2009, I wrote a tune called “Last Dance,” which would later appear on Where are the Arms, my second album as a singer-songwriter. Clocking in at about three-and-a-half minutes, the song is the staging ground for multiple compositional devices: the first verse is heard in a strict canon, my voice echoed by an electric guitar trailing two measures behind the melody. The second verse restates that theme, this time accompanied by a choir of brass instruments and a skittering drum machine. Then, a refrain takes hold: a plaintive fourteen-bar sequence in a 7/8 meter, which repeats half a dozen times, each iteration growing more urgent and ecstatic with the addition of new musical elements—drums, guitars, harmony vocals, trombones.

The lyric, meanwhile, is a character study of a fictional older woman. We learn that she is recently widowed, as she “feels the slight impression / like crushed pillows / hold the shape of a body,” and later, that she “sits across eager men / eager to impress her; they / offer words like ‘your loss / how are you getting on, dear woman?’”

In need of a reprieve, she finds her way to the “ladies lounge all decked in velvet,” where, locking herself in a stall, “she begins to sing”:

How do I deny, do I deny that
I am tired and trembling over evening
When all I want is a face to hold
And love and light and sex and cigarettes?
One final delight, final delight
In all the finer things that I had grown so used to
When all I want is your face
All I want is a last dance?

For Judith, I’ve retained aspects of the formal structure of the original song, while expanding it into a brief set of variations based on that fourteen-bar refrain. But perhaps more importantly, I’ve tried to hold onto the feeling of a character study—now through strictly instrumental music—that is psychologically complex. In these eight minutes, I hope that the listener can sense a woman who, grappling with mortality, remains wholly unwilling to surrender to death. There is contemplation, joy, grief, libido, rage, and delight. Almost fifteen years after creating this character in the song, “Last Dance,” I’ve finally given a name to its protagonist: Judith.

— Gabriel Kahane, November 2022

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Judith - a character study for orchestra

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