Carla Kihlstedt was a child when she first encountered The Gashlycrumb Tinies. The book, first published in 1963, was Edward Gorey’s drolly macabre version of an abecedarium, or alphabet book. Each letter in the book produces the name of a tot, and the means of their untimely demise: “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs; B is for Basil assaulted by bears…” From this grisly premise — working with clever rhyming couplets and his evocative illustrations — Gorey created a wry classic of children’s literature and a cultural touchstone for goths of all ages.
Kihlstedt, a violinist and singer-songwriter now in her mid-50s, has also used the book as scaffolding for 26 Little Deaths, which she describes as “a 60-minute set of 26 miniatures for singing violinist and chamber orchestra.” Commissioned by Present Music in Milwaukee, where it had its premiere in 2022, the piece has since been performed just a handful of times, notably at the PIVOT Festival in San Francisco and the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, where I saw it last year.
Network for New Music is now about to present the work in the Philadelphia area, on Friday at the Germantown branch of Settlement Music School, and next Monday at Haverford College’s Jaharis Hall. The organization is promoting these concerts under the aegis of “Dark Whimsy: Edward Gorey at 100.” (Gorey was born on Feb. 22, 1925, which means this Sunday will actually be his 101st.)
Kihlstedt grew up in Lancaster, Pa., and now lives and works in Cape Cod, Mass. She spoke from her home studio there last week. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Nate Chinen: The Gashlycrumb Tinies is ostensibly a children's book, and your relationship with it goes back to childhood — but it feels like the additional layer of parenthood really informs how you conceived this piece.
Carla Kihlstedt: When you say it's ostensibly for kids, I just want to go on record and say that it wears its dual sense of darkness and humor on its sleeve. I am baffled by how much of what is created for our kids to consume is dark and violent in a way that doesn't add nuance, or invite philosophy and curiosity. How many of the movies and shows and games our kids are lured into watching are actually way darker and more sinister and cynical than this? With The Gashlycrumb Tinies, because a kid dies on every page, it’s kind of easy to say, “Oh, I can't believe it's for kids.” I feel like it actually really is for kids, of all ages.
That phrase, “dark whimsy,” which this is being presented under, feels apropos — it’s both the darkness and the whimsy.
Exactly. So my first introduction to this book was as a kid, but diving back into it now really braided together my own memories of being a kid, and then also being the adult in the room. There are some really specific things that are inspired by my kids. Like in the Gorey book: “S is for Susan who perished of fits.” That song in 26 Little Deaths is called “Stupid Fort.” It is a literal transcription, in lyrics and melody and rhythm, of an actual temper tantrum that my son threw when he was 7. He had wanted to build a fort in our backyard out of bamboo, and I was like, “Hell yeah, let's go!” And by the time I got the saw out, and got everyone a snack, and got ready to go outside and chop some bamboo from our overgrown yard, he had decided it was time to watch a TV show instead. So we had this ridiculous backwards fight where I was fighting to make the fort, and he was fighting to get the remotes for the TV. I have very tenacious children, so this fit went on for an unspeakable amount of time, and about halfway through it — like, 20 minutes in — I went into National Geographic mode. I surreptitiously recorded it, and years later, when I was writing this piece, was like, “Wait a minute. I have a fit.” So that’s the most obvious one that was informed by my experience as a parent.
I remember this disclosure from your performance at Big Ears last year, and how appreciative the audience was going into the piece.
There are some other, subtler ways that my experience as a parent is woven through this. Like, as a parent, you can't believe the things you have to say out loud sometimes. Like: “No, don't eat that. Why would you even try to eat that?” So there’s one piece called “Pica,” which is based on “L is for Leo, who swallowed some tacks.” It’s about the phenomenon of being drawn to eat things that are inedible — but from Leo's perspective, like, “Oh god, I shouldn't have done that.”
Let’s talk about the musical form of this piece, which is complex: there are many layers, it changes from letter to letter, and you enlisted a handful of collaborators to orchestrate some of them. How did this all come about for you?
It started deep in COVID, with just a little off-the-cuff project to keep myself entertained and creatively active. I returned to the format that got me into songwriting, just voice and violin. It's the two things I'm comfortable with. The first time I really ever wrote an album's worth of material and dug into my voice as a composer in a deeper way was the album I first released on John Zorn's label, Two Foot Yard. Those were also miniatures. This was kind of looping back around to that format of writing things for me to play and sing, period. So I got up to Letter G or so, and received an email from Present Music in Milwaukee, saying, “Our 40th anniversary celebration is coming up, and we're going to commission four pieces, and we'd love you to write something.” We had some conversations about what that could be, and instrumentation, and what things I was working on. So all of a sudden, I had the opportunity to adapt this idea for an ensemble where I have 12 other instruments to bring a huge amount of variety to the instrumentation and the orchestration. So I reverse-engineered the first bunch, and set the voice and violin parts, and expanded them for the ensemble. Then I wrote the rest of
them knowing that I had a giant palette to work with.
Right.
In general, a composer has to think mostly about coherence with something, and I feel like that wasn't the case here, because the coherence was already baked into it because of the way the book is organized, because of our knowledge of the alphabet. It was such a strong container that in a way, I felt like the challenge was actually the opposite. The challenge was to find variety.
In the finished result, there are moments when the possibilities of orchestration actually deliver the message. I'm thinking of a piece like “Sucker,” which opens with a sonic version of a sight gag.
Yeah, it's almost like the leech is a tiny Jaws. Yes.
Especially when it's accompanied by the image on a projection, it's uncomfortable in a very delicious way; everyone squirms a little bit.
Yeah, I really laid into the discomfort on that particular one.
The timbre and orchestration not only provide variety, but also give you another set of possibilities for narrative enhancement.
Absolutely. Like with “Ida and the Undines,” the shimmering of the lake happens before you even know who she is or where you are.
Gorey's book is so wonderful, because it hardly gives you anything. It makes you do the work of figuring out the who, why, what — like, what on earth was the kid thinking? What was happening that they didn't know was happening? He doesn't give you any nuance, he just says “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs.” Period. So I kind of stepped through the picture and asked myself every question I could think of.
Right.
Like, “Train of Thought” is based on “V is for Victor squashed under a train,” and the word “train” became a pivot — like, the train of thought as opposed to the train that's actually gonna squish him. So a lot of the songs are not actually about the moment of death at all. That one's really about his sense of wonder. I made him into a small Midwestern boy who lives by the train tracks, and is just constantly in awe of the fact that this train implies the breadth of the world that he's never seen. So it's really about his wondering at how small he is and how huge the world is.
That imaginative bridging, or stretching — there are so many examples in this piece. Another one that jumps out to me is “G is for George, smothered under a rug,” and in the image, there's really no context aside from this kid climbing under a rug.
I just asked the question, “Why on earth would a kid climb under a rug?” Of course, he's playing hide-and-seek, right? I had just gone on a trip with my family, and we stayed in a hotel in Western Mass. It was winter, it was really snowing, we were stuck at the hotel for a moment, and the kids, out of desperation, started playing a game of hide-and-seek in a tiny hotel room. They didn't hide under the rug, but they did hide above the cabinet and behind the curtain. So actually, a lot of the hiding spots in that song were from a game of hide-and-seek played in a single hotel room.
That's amazing. Now, the premiere of this piece with Present Music was in 2022. Has its meaning or expression evolved for you, over the last four years?
Well, the opportunities to play it are only occasional at this moment, because it's such a huge piece to program. The process with Present Music was so protracted, because of how long it took to write the piece, and it was much more involved and expensive than any of us could possibly have known in that first conversation. So I really owe that whole community a debt of gratitude for sticking with the piece to help bring it to fruition in a big way. I think the main thing that's happened since then is that it's felt easier and easier. Now the thing has its instruction manual that I just have to follow well, and so now it feels like I can just focus on the rigors of what the performance needs.
Yeah.
The other thing is that as I was writing the program notes the first time — literally as I was sitting down to write the notes — news of the Uvalde shooting came through. Because of how much violence there is in our country, and violence involving children, I have a moment where I think, “Oh gosh, I don't want to have that association with this piece.” Then I have to remember that there is one image that is truly violent in the book, but really, violence is not the point. It's actually important to not respond to that with a Puritan kind of “see no evil, hear no evil, do no evil” approach. I feel like I've gotten more comfortable really understanding the power of being able to do something that has this darkness, but that actually brings it to a transformational and positive place. So because of its proximity to those ideas, even though it's not born of those ideas, there's some kind of therapeutic transformation that I can lean into.
What a beautiful answer, thank you. This will sound like a dumb follow-up — but there are 26 of these miniatures, and I wonder if you can play favorites. Which would you single out as a particular joy to perform?
Can I give you three? In a way, the ones that are my favorites are the ones where it felt like they just fell into my lap, almost fully formed, and I don't even know where they came from, and I don't feel responsible for them. “The Problem of the Tower and the Clouds” is one of those, for sure. I'm not a pianist, but I use a piano to write, and I really can't even tell you how I wrote that one. I wrote it at the piano, I know that — but the way that I just started with this additive chord at the piano, and it just literally unfolded in front of me, and I don't know how that happens. I still think it's magic.
That's also wonderful because it's the penultimate piece. We've traveled this whole expanse to get there.
Yeah. Another one that I love, just because the way that I put it together is really ridiculous, is: “Ennui.” And as for Neville, who died of ennui, the concept was one of those things where I kind of thought to myself, “Maybe I could do this…” So Neville is staring out the window, and all you see is his eyes. Then he dies of ennui, obviously, because he never leaves the house. He only sees this little window's worth of the world, and he doesn't realize that the world is changing massively outside, because he only is looking at this much of it. So I wrote one melody in the voice of Neville, saying “Everything's the same, it never changes.” And every time it repeats, I added, a repetition of the day before, and the day before, and the day before. And then I sent it to five different friends of mine, and it was like a parlor game, where no one heard what was coming before or after, but they kind of just knew, “Well, here's the melody, and I'm gonna do what I do on it.” Ben Goldberg is in there, and Andy Jaffe, a lovely colleague of mine who I teach with, and my friend Jeremy Flower. Aruán Ortiz is in there, this great Cuban-American pianist; and a student of mine, Ari Chais, did the last one, and he just runs off the page with it. So that one just makes me very happy, because I hear all their voices in it.
The socialness and the generosity of that process almost feels like a parental rejoinder, too. Like, the kid is saying, “There's nothing to doooo!”
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And you're like, “Oh, really? Well, have you thought about this, and this, and this, and this?”
Totally. I also think that the impulse to pull other people in comes from my decades spent in bands, as opposed to the classical world, which tends to be more territorial, and more the oeuvre of the composers. When you're in rock bands, you don't even give yourself a name. Like, with Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, I wouldn't want to call something out as being mine. It's the band's. So I think that impulse is deeply embedded in the way that I approach music.
Alright, you said three songs. Do you have one more?
“Frisson” is one of my favorites, because Maud is the one of these kids that I actually relate to most. And it was arranged by my friend Jeremy Flower. I wrote the melody and chords and the basic structure and sent it to him and described what I was after. In the book, M is for Maud who was swept out to sea — Maud is standing on a 2x4 out in the open ocean, on what looks to be the waters of Cape Cod, which is where I am. It's literally a plank of wood. And she's out there, and she's got her arms up, and it's impossible to tell whether she's surfing with joy or screaming in terror. And I just chose to believe that it was both, but maybe more the surfing with joy. Like, she did this to herself, and she doesn't regret it, because it's also her spiritual awakening. She's never felt so expansive, and so excited, and so much a part of the earth and the world, as this moment. Even though she might not survive it, she wouldn't take it back. I love that twist; it's kind of the spiritual center of the piece, in a way.
Network for New Music presents Dark Whimsy: Edward Gorey at 100 on Friday at Settlement Music School in Germantown, and next Monday at Haverford College.
