Decomposition Poem by gershon hepner

Losing themselves as in slow movements
great performers must be lost
attempting to define the moment,
composers must become compost,
when bringing life to music that
lay dormant in their heads until,
recycled like dead pussycats,
it finds a new role to fulfill.

The good die young, but compost lives,
and dead composers, too, survive,
like dead performers’ music glyphs
that on CD’s may come alive.
How different lovemaking appears
to be, its end, decomposition,
that, fertilized by bitter tears,
does not bring new love to fruition.


Terry Teachout writes in the WSJ about the pianist William Kapell who died in a plane crash in 1953 at the age of 34 (“After the Good Die Young: Remembering the Pianist William Kapell, Too Long Forgotten”) :

Music was his ruling passion, and his playing, for all its explosive virtuosity, was self-effacing rather than self-indulgent. “The greatest moments people have are those at which time their identities become involved in someone or something else, ” he once remarked. “The only moments have when I play, that are worth anything to m, are when I can blissfully ignore the people I’m supposed to be entertaining and be able to lose all of myself in a slow movement…No me, no silly public to amuse; only the heart and the soul, the world, the birds, storms, dreams, sadness, heavenly serenity. Then I am an artist worthy of the name.” So he was—but the public at large has always had a way of preferring bad boys to family men.

5/27/08