From April 18th through July 17th of 2016, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World”—an exhibit showcasing ancient Greek art spanning from the death of Alexander the Great (323 B.C.) to the suicide of Kleopatra VII (30 B.C.)—featured the provocative Sleeping Hermaphrodite, a life-size marble sculpture of the intersex deity on loan from the National Museum of Rome. According to Ovid’s recounting of the myth, Hermaphrodite was once son to Hermes and Aphrodite (thus the name), but, upon merging with the salacious naiad Salmacis, they came to possess a female figure with male genitalia. In the showing’s audio guide, curator of the exhibit Dr. Seán Hemingway speaks to what he thinks is the work’s cultural-historical significance: “In a way,” he says, “the hermaphrodite is a kind of ultimate erotic fantasy for an ancient Roman, because you have the voluptuous female, and you have the male.”1

Modern-day conceptions of effeminacy and androgyny do feature prominently in Greek and Roman depictions of Apollo, Dionysus, and Tiresias, as well as in Plato’s Symposium, wherein Aristophanes’ absurdist cosmogony postulates that heterosexual love originated from the splitting of a hermaphroditic entity, which is made whole again with the discovery of one’s soulmate.

Yet there is a temptation—an ignorant one, I think—to attribute today’s open-mindedness to the ancient Greeks. The New York Times’ Daniel McDermon keenly identifies in his June of 2016 review that Sleeping Hermaphrodite has a particular contemporary charge, but fails to articulate more than a shared preoccupation with identity between ourselves and the Greeks. He ventures that the image of the hermaphrodite “seems little changed,” signaling “a kind of cosmopolitanism, just as it did in the 2nd century.” Prompted by the exhibit’s Curator In Charge Dr. Carlos A. Picón’s final remark that “they had it formulated pretty clear all the way back then,” McDermon ignores Picón’s warnings that “it would be a mistake to interpret the popularity of these works as a sign of ancient tolerance”; that “the birth of intersex people was seen as a bad omen”; that “those born with ambiguous genitals were usually killed.” Instead, McDermon argues that the Greeks and Romans not only tolerated, but embraced gender nonconformity long before such ideas felt new to us.2

(It must be acknowledged that the heretofore mentioned “us” describes a leftist politic with which I identify, and which, though it claims radical inclusivity, more often than not does only that. For thoroughness’ sake, however, consider conservative cultural critic Mary Eberstadt’s op-ed “The Lure of Androgyny,” which posits that the collapse of the nuclear family in the wake of the 1960s sexual revolution is responsible for the recent change in global stylistic preference. Suffice it to say that Eberstadt misconstrues history toward her own ends as heedlessly as McDermon.)

There is a disturbing, long-identified trend of mis-historicizing the ancient Greeks as progressive, even as they might fit into our current political landscape.3 In recent years, many have cited the Hellenistic period as a precursory model to our own society’s acceptance of homosexuality, and thus sexual acceptance as a whole. They fail to acknowledge the basis of ancient Greek homosexuality: an unprecedented, inflexible worship of the male physique through pederasty and ruthless sexism. The same misconstruction occurs with the physical forms of Apollo and Dionysus, which we today perceive as androgynous, but in reality reflected some of the hypermasculine ideals (athleticism, restraint, youth; domination, frenzy, virility) of their time. It must be remembered that cultural ideals need not mutually exclude; do we not prize material success as readily as humility? Honesty as politeness? Conviction as open-mindedness? In this manner, Apollo and Dionysus characterize a portion of the ancient Greek masculine which is made whole by Zeus, Ares, and Hercules, etc.

Sleeping Hermaphrodite is no exception to the rule. Originally conceived as a voyeuristic joke, the 2nd-century Roman noble was supposed to have strolled through his pleasure garden, become allured by its feminine posterior, and upon rounding the corner, been met with the humorous surprise of its uncorrelated nether regions. Rather than the “ultimate erotic fantasy,” as Hemingway claims, the hermaphrodite occupied a similar role to the deceptive, lustful satyr of Classical mythos. Its very depiction—counter to what McDermon would have us believe—did not connote an idealized blurring of the line between male and female; rather, its twisted posture played on the initial attraction of the form, and subverted it to comic effect, in so doing reinforcing a prehistoric, heteronormative gender binarism. So although the Romans might have executed a real-life Hermaphrodite, their sculpture found its aesthetic purpose in the realm of the grotesque. Such are the contradictions of any productive culture: that which art deems worthy of life, the world condemns to death.

In our day and age we too aestheticize the androgyne, while marginalizing (though less extremely) those born, or who identify as, non-binary. Our celebrities perform the avant-garde, sporting high fashion which prods hegemony only for as long as the night’s entertainment endures; similarly, the Dionysian rites of the Bacchae featured temporary gender transgression. Our corporations advertise their products as unisex—to maximize profit—by evoking the moral values most prized at time of sale; just the same, statues of Apollo and Dionysus manifested the ethics of their makers’ communities. I even observe in myself that I have begun to truly cherish those more epicene attributes of my appearance and personality. But lean superficially though I may, I am as yet unwilling to unmoor myself from the docks of manhood; we are allured by the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, but must laugh at its strangeness. Hence the Greeks are no better than us, and we, of course, are no better than the Greeks.

Had I solely ingested the Met’s provided resources on Sleeping Hermaphrodite, I could easily have emerged with my implicit assumptions of ancient Greek liberalism confirmed by the voice of a supposed resident expert. But as I peer over Hermaphrodite’ s figure, I am left with the distinct impression that supremacist rhetoric justifies itself in the convenient crevices of our ignorance. Selective embrace of the past, especially in such bastions of public learning as museums, perpetuates historical amnesia and nostalgia for a civilization whose beliefs and practices were not precedentially ahead of their time. In order to wholly accept in our present day those who do not conceive of themselves in gender binary, we first must swallow that ugly truth—to look upon the off-putting appendage on the shadowed side of Hermaphrodite: that our role models had no sympathy for such outliers we can almost find beautiful. Whether the Greeks despised the androgyne cannot devalue our incipient appreciation of them. To equate ourselves with such obsolete priorities is to tie ourselves to their limits. As of now, we are the Greeks. Let us move swiftly on.

Graciously recorded by Naomi-Jeanne Main, Joe Wang, and Thomas Walter.

Composer’s Note:

“Kosmos Kalos owes a great deal to those astrophiles who heard the harmony of the spheres from terra firma before technological advancement allowed it to be remotely transmitted. Its title and transliteration, which roughly translates to “beautiful universe” from the Greek, pays homage to Béla Bartók's Mikrokosmos and George Crumb's Makrokosmos. Its overall structure and orchestration derive from the information relayed by probes sent into the atmospheres of four celestial bodies—the only four to date which have had their atmospheric acoustic data analyzed—as presented by Professors Andi Petculescu and Richard M. Lueptow of the University of Louisiana and Northwestern University, respectively. Even its content, the very space-time of the work, draws inspiration from such diviners as Paul Hindemith (“Musica Mundana” from Symphonie “Die Harmonie der Welt”), Charles Ives (The Unanswered Question), Aaron Jay Kernis (Musica Celestis), György Ligeti (Atmosphères), Missy Mazzoli (Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)), Einojuhani Rautavaara (Adagio celeste), Terry Riley (“Ascending the Heaven Ladder” from Requiem for Adam), Kaija Saariaho (Asteroid 4179 — Toutatis), Eric Whitacre (Deep Field), and of course the eminent Gustav Holst (“Neptune” from The Planets), to name a few.

The work consists of four movements: 1) “Kosmos-Mars”; 2) “Earth”; 3) “Titan”; and 4) “Venus-Kosmos”, all of which guide its listeners from the stillness of the universe through some of the available soundscapes of our solar system, and back to the void. Its inter- and intra-sectional scheme liberally borrows and adapts from Dr. Robert P. Morgan’s conception of circular form, in order to formally represent not only cycles of the galactic or universal scale, but to extract its macro from the micro, from the spheres which it proposes to describe. To address the matter of tradition, I hoped to emulate György Ligeti’s Musica ricercata in its aspiration towards style ex nihilo, such that each movement contains a ‘folk’ tradition derived mostly from its locus’ specific geological, meteorological, and acoustic phenomena. (I suppose that engaging with frequential data ipso facto may place the work under the ‘Spectralist’ umbrella.)

In order to reference these phenomena in the process of composition, I developed a means of visualizing perceived volume as a function of pitch space in the four atmospheres examined—as affected by atmospheric density and pressure, and chemical composition—which I call attenuated pitch spectrography. This mode of approximate visualization reframes Figure 1(a) from Professors Andi Petculescu and Richard M. Lueptow’s paper from pure frequential documentation toward a new purpose in music. A spectrographic chart of this kind precedes each movement.

Using these charts, I attempted to render each miniature with cultural and sonic sensitivity toward their respective theoretical society. “Mars” (“Kosmos-Mars,” m. 41.3), for one example, correlates to an attenuated pitch spectrograph with much the same contour as that of Earth; thus register served only as a minor compositional constraint. Additionally, Mars remains humanity’s most promising hope for habitation, so in its tone I strove for sentimentality, even romanticism. The same applies for such uniquities as Earth’s seasonal progression, Titan’s view of Saturn, Venus’ turbulent weather (the “Fughetta” [“Venus-Kosmos,” m. 1] is written so as to emerge from its winds), and their orchestration, etc. I have also included a (necessarily, as it remains impossible to hear a reading of the piece in this way as of the current year) crude reorchestration of each miniature which counteracts the difference in attenuation for its specific object, for the intention of performance upon it. I call these collected versions extraterrestrial, and the original suite terrestrial, accordingly. I encourage, should the work have such a privileged longevity, the adjustment of the extraterrestrial versions, which have been included more as prototypes than for any other purpose.

The open instrumentation of the work hopes to cater to any instrumental developments in coming times. Perhaps this ‘future-proofing’ of the work stems from the composer’s preoccupation with the unforeseeable offing.”

Intro:

Midroll Bed:

Outro:

Postroll:

Setting of Isabel Menon’s poem “Meditation on Monday Honey,” Volume 56, No. 4:

I always wondered—perhaps naively—why my great-grandfather Elia never told my Grandpop about his trauma; why Grandpop was constantly ridiculed for his quiet disposition by his wife, Sydelle (Bubby), [REDACTED], why I find it simultaneously necessary and extremely difficult to associate with Judaism, religiously and ethnically, to the point where I wear a necklace around my neck, but identify as atheist. I found part of an answer in a surprising text: Christine J. Walley’s Exit 0: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago, which contextualizes silence both as a means of escaping one’s own trauma and as a means of rebellion against its effects on one’s children, neither of which are effective. Walley’s ethnography follows a community of steel-workers—her own family included—in the wake of the deindustrialization of Southeast Chicago's steel mills. Walley depicts the good, bad, and ugly of various generations of her family, as far back as her immigrant Swedish ancestor through to herself (and eventually her hopes for her adopted son). She attests to the challenges of raising a family, considering the inevitable failures her own father, Charles, faced in his time and his influence on her. She notes how her “father’s bitterness at how his life had turned out, his lack of confidence that a place still existed for him in the world, emerged in small expressions of anger that surfaced on a regular basis” (Walley, 74).

Yet Charles Walley maintained a certain pride, too, in having worked in the steel mills, in a collective upward mobility, the ultimate failure of which conflicted with his internalized dominant narrative, or as Christine Walley puts it, “assumption taken as gospel” “that the future would necessarily be one of progress and increasingly common prosperity” (Walley, 158). Walley even notes that, just as a “web of ties” binds her to “Southeast Chicago, … to the relatives in Sweden from which [her] great-grandfather emigrated, … to the farms and coal mines in southern Illinois where [her] Little Grandpa was raised, and to the factories of Bohemia in Central Europe from which [her] father’s mother’s family hailed,” so too her “son will be similarly bound by a web of connections that lead outward across time and place” (Walley, 162-3). By concretizing intergenerational and inherited trauma through narrative, Walley allowed me to process my own confusion with all parts of family and community, and to understand that, while I am in control of myself, my own tendencies are not merely quirks of my personality, or the nurturing of my household, but are necessarily and intrinsically tied to the silence of Elia Zilberman and every other member of my family. Indeed, as Walley claims, Irwin’s college degree and subsequent economic success—which fit the dominant narrative—is intertwined with the story of Elia’s migration and tragic end, which does not. In my specific case, Dr. Rachel Yehuda’s fantastic paper “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation” seems to support this claim that the “severe psychophysiological effects” of the Holocaust have “intergenerational effects” as demonstrated in the epigenetic traces in FKBP5 Methylation (Yehuda, Conclusions).

But how do these vague “effects” manifest physically and behaviorally? In my family, my mother and aunt often scrunch their upper lip to their noses during stressful situations, while my and my Grandpop’s shoulders rise unconsciously. Each member of my family has different bodily responses, as we all undergo different variations of formally diagnosed and undiagnosed anxiety and depression. But only after reading the bodily approach toward trauma theory and social justice contained in Resmaa Menakem’s revolutionary New York Times Bestseller My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies did I begin to connect these characteristics with their origins through Menakem’s exercises in recognition and relaxation. Menakem slowly eases the reader into his conception of a network of generational and violent propulsion originating in the executions of the Middle Ages that he calls “white-body supremacy” (an alternative to white supremacy, which ignores the physicality of the inequality) while positing a solution in the “clean pain” of personal and communal growth (as opposed to the “dirty pain” of ignoring responsibility) (Menakem, 19-20). He cites “humming, rocking, rhythmic clapping, drumming, singing, grounding touch, wailing circles, and call and response” as common body-based responses which settle Black communities, and theorizes that other communities most likely utilize other methods (Menakem, 15).

That Menakem’s “white-body supremacy” originates from white-on-white violence in the Middle Ages is crucial to an analysis of post-Holocaust body analysis, which mirrors the racialized body analysis of his original premise in My Grandmother’s Hands. I theorize that Elia Zilberman carried his own “dirty pain” with which I both deeply empathize due to the atrocities he must have faced, and which I can simultaneously rationalize as impossible to “dispose of,” leaving inevitable psychological marks of damage on his descendants. I do not blame Elia Zilberman for his taciturnity; rather, with the help of Menakem, I am able to acknowledge that I have inherited a part of his story in the very fibers of my being. When I play Bach’s famous Chaconne on my pant leg in an anxious moment, or isolate myself claiming “introversion” as its own root cause, somehow still yearning for connection through music composition, I feel Elia’s hardships run through me. My very obsession with classical music itself, Dr. Sander L. Gilman claims in his groundbreaking article “Are Jews Musical? Historical Notes on the Question of Jewish Musical Modernism and Nationalism,” may stem from a post-Holocaust “generation of Western Jews that defined their place suspended between Western Bildung and Jewish identity in terms of the trope of music” (Gilman, 256). And so, perhaps selfishly, I like to think my unchosen bodily practice, a mere one response to my own trauma and that of my ancestors, is a beautiful voice of connection and healing in trying times that can be teased away from its supremacist roots.

This, of course, brings me to the practice of the modern-day. What kinds of actions can we take to address or counter our inherited trauma and the society we are bequeathed? [REDACTED]. Perhaps this signifies some kind of new rejection of Irwin’s conservative tendencies, doubtless sprung from his own careful, self-made narrative—yet my mother has found herself able to disagree with Irwin without entirely dismantling the institution of her family. For that, I wholeheartedly admire her. So for my next book recommendation to her, I plan to gift her a copy of Imani Perry’s More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Addressing the ever-daunting question above, Perry (a graduate of my high school!) uncompromisingly grounds her autoethnography in a commitment to common good that transcends both narrative and bodily inheritance. She counters two common misconceptions of the racialized process in America: that it is an unconscious engine running in the background of everyday life, or alternatively, that each member of a racist society must be considered a moral hypocrite. Perry refuses to split the difference, rather taking a radical “post-intentional” approach in which “small, deliberate, courageous, and dedicated movement can lead to big change.” She encourages active engagement in matters of justice despite the fact that “in a society and world with past and present experiences of ethnic conflict and oppression, we cannot think of something like racial justice as having an end point after which we can stop thinking about it.” She further insists that the ideal of American equal opportunity can only come about if all members of a just society cultivate “a commitment that is consistently engaged and regularly retooled to meet the needs of the moment” (Perry, 184).

Elia Zilberman, never having read Perry’s work, made a “courageous movement” towards equality, one I would never have seen without Menakem, Walley, and Perry’s joined hands. Most likely his silence was only semi-conscious, somewhere apart from the “unconscious engine” and “moral hypocrite” extremities, in that Eli knew he could never fully prevent the pain of the Holocaust from reaching his children, his children’s children, and theirs. But he made some part of a choice, which did not wholly break Irwin’s heart, nor fully allow for an ideal father-son relationship. In doing so, Eli submitted himself to the tragedy of his son, and the anger of his granddaughter, and the inherited grief of his great-grandchild. I choose to believe that Elia Zilberman elected action in an impossible situation, in the same way that all people of this flawed planet must, according to Perry, despite the inherited narrative and bodily dysfunction highlighted by Walley and Menakem respectively. This is not to vouch for centrism in any sense; in its stead this essay advocates for Elia’s chosen methodology, which strives to do the least harm possible moving forward in time. Every person—I, cannot succumb to nor ignore the past. I am a human being altered by history and the history of my ancestors, a dialectical and dialectic being, and must make choices to outdo harm wherever I encounter it. Perhaps Elia deserves more credit than I have given him. And perhaps, in that moment of Irwin’s grief, if I were to go back, I would write a new narrative of love and connection, instead of sitting on that stool, silent, grieving too. If I could now, perhaps, I would embrace Irwin, fostering the family he never had, making the “courageous choice.”

Works Cited

“Database of Holocaust Survivor and Victim Names.” USHMM.org, 2018, www.ushmm.org/remember/resources-holocaust-survivors-victims/database-of-holocaust-survivor-and-victim-names.

Gilman, S. L. “Are Jews Musical? Historical Notes on the Question of Jewish Musical Modernism and Nationalism.” Modern Judaism, vol. 28, no. 3, 15 Sept. 2008, pp. 239–256, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/kjn009. Accessed 24 Apr. 2022.

Menakem, Resmaa. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas, Central Recovery Press, 2017.

Perry, Imani. More Beautiful and More Terrible. NYU Press, 28 Feb. 2011.

Walley, Christine J. Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago. Chicago ; London, The University Of Chicago Press, 2013.

Yehuda, Rachel, et al. “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation.” Biological Psychiatry, vol. 80, no. 5, 12 Aug. 2015, pp. 372–380, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006322315006526, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.08.005.

Graciously performed by members of the Yale Undergraduate Chamber Orchestra, composed as part of a collaboration with the Yale University Art Gallery.

Additionally contributed sprites and animations. Most tracks are meant to continuously loop:

Petrarch’s sonnets 47, 134,2 and 123— which Liszt initially set as a collection of lieder, Tre sonetti del Petrarca, S.270— comprise three of seven pieces from the original suite: 4) “Sonetto 47 del Petrarca;” 5) “Sonetto 104 del Petrarca;” 6) “Sonetto 123 del Petrarca” (numbered according to Liszt’s ordering of Deuxième année: Italie). An archetypal Romantic, Liszt was enamored with Petrarch’s humanist poetry, and integrated the sublime into his compositional structure, as is especially lucid in “Sonetto 104 del Petrarca” in E Major. Breitkopf & Härtel’s 1922 transcription of the sonnet reads:3

Pace non trovo, e non ho da far guerra,
E temo, e spero, ed ardo, e son un ghiaccio:
E volo sopra 'l cielo, e giaccio in terra;
E nulla stringo, e tutto il mondo abbraccio.

Tal m'ha in priggion, che non m'apre, nè serra,
Nè per suo mi ritien, nè scioglie il laccio
E non m'ancide Amor, e non mi sferra;
Nè mi vuol vivo, nè mi trahe d'impaccio.

Veggio senz'occhi; e non ho lingua e grido;
E bramo di perir, e chiegio aita;
Ed ho in odio me stesso, ed amo altrui.

Pascomi di dolor, piangendo io rido,
Egualmente mi spiace morte e vita,
In questo stato son, Donna, per Voi.

Liszt set the text for “Pace non trovo” (one of the aforementioned lieder), thus allowing for retrograde analysis of the musical devices in “Sonetto 104 del Petrarca” by way of its genesis in Tre sonetti del Petrarca. Measure 51 of “Sonetto 104 del Petrarca” contains an unconventional D♮/D♯ simultaneous cross-relation between melody and harmony (below). The descending three-note melodic figure (D♮, C♮, B) seems to pang with its accent mark’s violent attack and tenuto's tempered release; similar figures occur in measures 8, 12, 22, 26, 39, 43, 47, 49, 66, 69, 71, and 73. Only twice the figure and corresponding harmony outline consonant triads, in measures 47 and 73; the remaining ten produce augmented sonorities, or reproduce measure 51’s effect, as in measure 66. The figure microcosmically depicts Petrarch’s self-loathing, as confirmed by measure 51’s corresponding libretto: “et ò in odio me stesso,” or “and hold myself in hate”; the first half of measure 66, too, elicits Petrarchian misery: “in questo stato,” or “in this state.”

Music theorists often define a piece of music by its signature sound, e.g. the “Tristan chord,” the “Mystic chord,” the “Rite of Spring chord,” or (a personal favorite) the “Voces Intimae chord” of Sibelius’ String Quartet in d minor, Op. 56.4 Measures 51 and 66 might be considered the “Sonetto 104 del Petrarca chord,” though no designation is quite as persuasive as the moments’ poetic significance. One method of analysis might deem measure 51 a combination case of a B Major triad with b natural minor accessory tones. Another might note the wedge-like descending ♭7 ⇒ ♭6 ⇒ 5 and ascending ♮7 ⇒ 1 motions of tendency tones towards members of the e minor tonic triad of measure 52, and label the sound a simultaneity of b natural and melodic minor, respectively. Polytonalists might call the clash a split-third chord, jazz musicians a dom 7 ♭9.

In this case, however, an interpretive reading pays dividends. Petrarch’s sonnet sees pairs of two forces— peace and war, love and hate, life and death— butt heads. Liszt too implements opposing emotional apparatuses—minor and Major—in a chordal simultaneous cross-relation, b minor/B Major. Measure 51’s unyielding D♯ instantiates Liszt’s faithful translation from sonnet to “Sonetto 104 del Petrarca,” as the sonnet swerves from Hate to Love: “Ed ho in odio me stesso, ed amo altrui,” or “and hold myself in hate, and love another.” The first half of measure 66 also incorporates a minor/Major simultaneous chordal cross-relation of g# minor/G# Major, though unlike measure 51, neither seems to triumph. In turn, measure 66’s libretto mirrors its tonal ambiguity: “Egualmente mi spiace morte e vita, / In questo stato son,” or “death and life displease me equally: and I am in this state.” The “Sonetto 104 del Petrarca chord” is not so much a result of tendency vectors or a sound of its own as a clash of established binaries.

The end of “Sonetto 104 del Petrarca” departs from Petrarch’s chosen somberness, from the rub of the “Sonetto 104 del Petrarca chord,” and arrives at poetically licensed, deserved release— at sublimity. Liszt, exhausted by purgatory, finally appeals to God with a hymnal, life-affirming plagal cadence in the tonic E Major… until, with masterful finesse, the penultimate bar shocks with augmented tension! The traveler finds beauty in deviating from his idol, but cannot abandon the fight of good and evil. So of course, good must remain: E Major.

Version for wind quintet (arranged and recorded at Interlochen’s Composition Summer Program for High School Students):

How come absence defines form? 
Our rock is nothing more; we chisel at masterless stone, expecting David to emerge and carry us
to the Promised Land on marble shoulders.

Yet it is I, the Philistine
Peering through my dear Goliath’s detached skull
Ever-dripping with relentless spittle, that weeps
A mother’s tears—O David!
Embrace me in your gentle fist, that I might spasm at your whim!

Found on GitHub or PyPI.

Additionally contributed all sprites and animations. Most tracks are meant to continuously loop: