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The Bucket Rider / BE JUST!

by: Martin Bresnick

The Bucket Rider was written in 1995 and is the seventh piece from a group of twelve called Opere della Musica Povera, which means "works of a poor music." The pieces have very different orchestrations and instrumentations, but the titles all refer to kinds of poverty--poverty of means, of wit, of spirit. And the music, too, is spare. The movements follow a single principle of formal organization, although each is worked out in its own somewhat complicated way. The Bucket Rider is the title of a Kafka story about a man who is so poor and wasted away he can ride on his empty bucket to the coal dealer to beg for coal.

In Kafka's story, "In the Penal Colony," an explorer goes to a prison camp that has an exquisite, aging apparatus that imprints on the flesh of a condemned man, by means of thousands of needles, whatever rule or commandment he has disobeyed. In this way, though the prisoner is ignorant of his sentence, he will learn it bodily. The officer in charge (who is also the judge) tells the explorer, "Guilt is never to be doubted," and places the prisoner into the machine. The explorer is unimpressed. Infuriated, the officer changes the original sentence from 'HONOR THY SUPERIORS!' to 'BE JUST!' and climbs into the apparatus himself. Kafka had a very complex sense of the political. He was also a pretty weird guy, and I wanted to get some of that weirdness into the music. I give myself permission to do anything in my work so long as I have a palpable, structural integrity that grants the various musical utterances plausibility. That's been my goal, to get as free as I can about the means and genres in which I write, while holding them together with an internal coherence.

These Opere della Musica Povera pieces reflect a politics of "witness," a kind of personal report on my state and the nation's. There's a bit of the Three Penny Opera in them, "an opera written with the splendor that only a beggar could imagine," as Brecht said. That's part of it--to create something out of very little material and make it seem splendid: an invitation to the necessary pleasures of austerity.

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