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about

And I Always Thought (2015) is a musical trope based on two poems of Bertolt Brecht - "And I Always Thought" and "Legend of the Unknown Soldier Beneath the Triumphal Arch." Though this composition consists only of "poems without words" it is the hope of the composer that an attentive listener might sense and follow its lyric trajectory.

The Brecht poems:
And I Always Thought
And I always thought: the simplest words
Must be enough. When I say how things are
Everyone’s hearts must be torn to shreds.
That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up,
Surely you see that.

First Report on the Unknown Soldier under the Triumphal Arch
We came
from the mountains
and the oceans,
To strike him dead.
We caught him with ropes, strung
From Moscow to the city of Marseille
And aimed cannon, so as to reach him
At any point
to where he should flee,
When he saw us.

We gathered for four years,
Laid down our work
and were
In the ruined cities,
calling to each other in many languages,
From the mountains to the oceans,
Where he was.
So we killed him in the fourth year.

It was to be
That he was born to see
Standing before him at the time of his death:
All of us.
And there was the woman who bore him
And who was silent when we got him.
Let her womb be ripped out.
Amen!

And when we had killed him,
We turned on him so that he lost his face
Through the traces
of our fists.
So we made him unrecognizable,
That he was no man's son, anymore.

And dug him out
from under the steel,
Carried him home
to our city and
Buried him under the stone,
and indeed under an arch,
called the
Arch of Triumph,
Which weighed a thousand tons, so that
The unknown soldier
Under no circumstances
should rise on Judgment Day
and, unrecognizable,
Walk before God,
Yet again in the light
And call us, the knowable,
To justice.

And I Always Thought was commissioned by and is dedicated to the Australian trio "Plexus" - Philip Arkinstall, clarinet, Monica Curro, violin, and Stefan Cassemenos, piano.

credits

from And I Always Thought, released March 30, 2022
Martin Bresnick composer
Graeme Steele Johnson clarinet
Elly Toyoda violin
Lisa Moore piano

Recorded at Firehouse 12 New Haven CT Nov 7, 2021
Audio Engineer Greg DiCrosta
Audio Editor/Mixer by Nick Lloyd

Video (and track art photo) Mateusz Zechowski
Video Editor Elly Toyoda

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Martin Bresnick New Haven, Connecticut

From the Bronx, New York City, Bresnick delights in reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable, bringing together repetitive gestures derived from minimalism with a harmonic palette that encompasses both highly chromatic sounds and more open, consonant harmonies and a raw power reminiscent of rock. At times his musical ideas spring from hardscrabble sources, often with a very real political import. ... more

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