Judah E. Adashi, Composer

WORK DETAILS

Meditation: Three Episodes from William Styron's Darkness Visible (2000)

Instrumentation: solo guitar
Duration: 10'
Premiere: Andrew Dickenson (guitar)
Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD (December 2001)
Recording: Daniel Lippel, Resonance (New Focus Recordings 101)

I. Requiem: For Fallen Artists
II. Paris: Wanderjahr Revisited
III. The Stranger: Cosmic Loneliness

excerpt from mvt. I Requiem: For Fallen Artists

excerpt from mvt. II Paris: Wanderjahr Revisited

excerpt from mvt. III Stranger: Cosmic Loneliness

Daniel Lippel, Resonance (New Focus Recordings 101)

Meditation loosely represents the first three chapters of William Styron's memoir, Darkness Visible (the title is taken from Milton's Paradise Lost), which chronicles the author's struggle with clinical depression. The narrative – not reproduced here in its original sequence – begins with the American writer returning in 1985 to Paris, the site of his 1952 wanderjahr, to receive a prestigious literary prize. It is there that he becomes painfully aware of the rising desperation within, evidenced by his diminishing lucidity and a “despair beyond despair.” In the second chapter, Styron invokes the writings of Albert Camus, a literary idol also afflicted with depression, whose Myth of Sisyphus asserts that “judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to the fundamental question of philosophy.” After considering Camus' depression and eventual suicide, Styron devotes the third chapter to a catalogue of artists who were victimized by depression, and, ultimately, destroyed by it. While the music does not end on a sanguine note, Styron's struggle does. After enduring a decisive confrontation with suicide, the author's narrative culminates in his survival. The guitar was chosen to capture the lyricism of Styron's prose, while also reflecting the highly introspective nature of his subject.

Meditation was recorded by Daniel Lippel on his 2005 CD, Resonance
(New Focus Recordings 101).

purchase CD online

Resonance is also available on

“I particularly liked Adashi's Meditation: Three Episodes from William Styron's Darkness Visible. This is a very sensitive, tonal work in three short movements. The guitar writing may lack the bravura found in several other pieces on the album, but in its place Adashi gives Lippel the chance to sing out beautiful, delicate melodic lines. The chromatic inflections to the relatively traditional harmony are well felt and never sound cheap. Also welcome were the luxurious silences: these gave some well-deserved moments of reflection to what is a pretty intense CD.”
– David Salvage, February 2005, www.sequenza21.com

“In Judah E Adashi's Meditation, loosely based on the first three chapters of William Styron's [Darkness Visible], the silences between notes sometimes seem just as important as the notes. People of today are very often unfamiliar with silence but to me it seems that the moments of afterthought occur in the silences.”
– Göran Forsling, Music Web International, May 2005