You can view the entire score and purchase a copy at the link below.

Sonata for Bassoon and Piano | Kurt Knecht | MusicSpoke

Many thanks for Dr. Leigh Munoz from the UMKC Conservatory for helping me bring this piece to life.

People always ask me questions like, “What inspired this work?” I never know quite how to answer that question, but in this case, I know some of the answers. One of the things that inspires composers is solving compositional problems. In this case, I wanted to explore a sonata form with highly contrasting themes. The exposition of the form presents those themes. After that, there is a section called the “development.” In the development, normally both of the themes are explored in adventurous ways until a recapitulation happens.

For this sonata, I was asking the question, “Is it possible to write a sonata where the development is a fugue?” Speaking of Hindemith, the harmonic language of this movement came out pretty Hindemithy.

I’ve been thinking about Harold Bloom lately. I like him very much. He was undoubtedly a genius. I don’t always agree with him, but consider this passage:

“I continue to be surprised that so many literary scholars refuse to see that every stance in regard to texts, however professedly humble or literal or prosaic or ‘scientific’ or ‘historical’ or ‘linguistic’ is always a poetic stance, always part of the rhetoric of rhetoric.

A strong poem, which alone can become canonical for more than a single generation, can be defined as a text that must engender strong misreadings, both as other poems and as literary criticism. Texts that have single, reductive, simplistic meanings are themselves already necessarily weak misreadings of anterior texts. When a strong misreading has demonstrated its fecundity by producing other strong misreadings across several generations, we can and must accept its canonical status.

American pragmatism, as [Richard] Rorty advises, always asks of text: what is it good for, what can I do with it, what can it do for me, what can I make it mean? I confess that I like these questions, and they are what I think strong reading is all about, because strong misreading doesn’t ever ask: Am I getting this poem right? Strong reading knows that what it does to the poem is right, because it knows what Emerson, its American inventor, taught it, which is that the true ship is the shipbuilder. If you don’t believe in your reading, then don’t bother anyone else with it, but if you do, then don’t care also whether anyone else agrees with it or not.”

Now, we can agree or disagree with Bloom and his sort of Freudian hermeneutical project, but what really interests me as a musician is the idea that for a work to become canonical, it has to produce strong misreadings over multiple generations. So for Bloom, Bach can fit this category, and we can easily suggest multiple strong misreadings. Mendelssohn, Glen Gould, Wendy Carlos, and Ton Koopman seem vastly different projects. If you prefer, compare the Chopin of Cortot to that of Rubenstein or Pollini. These composers and their music have produced strong misreadings over generations. The HIP movement is a corrective and rejection of the “over-Romanticizing” of Baroque music. The HIP movement doesn’t agree with Bloom that it is simply a new generation of misreaders (which is what it actually is). It believes it is “getting the poem right.”

For Bloom (and I think he is right about this), a true creative work becomes a springboard for other creative works. Here, Bloom is very similar to Martin Buber who says, “Die einzige wahre Antwort auf ein Kunstwerk ist ein Kunstwerk.” [The single true answer to a work of art is a work of art.] For Bloom, the canonical work produces misreadings “both as other poems and as literary criticism.” The response to a poem is a poem — or some other work. It is a strong misreading precisely by its rejection of a previous generation’s reading of a text.

Once again, I find myself a little stunned that what is de rigeuer in literary theory has never found its way into modern music education in any broad sense. That is, we broadly attempt to teach young musicians to perform various pieces of music in a way that is “correct" or “in the proper style for the period.” I never had a piano teacher say, “OK, for this Chopin Nocturne, here is the way Rubenstein did it, and here is the way Fleisher did it. Your job is to come up with a new way to do it for your generation.” In contrast, almost all of my composition teachers said something exactly like that, and I think we would be more honest and the better for it to bring some of that attitude into our performance training.

During the pandemic, I started a little project called “Gigging Stories” where I asked musicians to tell funny stories from things that happened on gigs. The whole show was too uneven, but there are still some fans out there. A few have asked me where to find episodes recently. They are all here under the Gigging Stories section of this blog. If I ever have time, I’ll bring something like it back again, but make it better. I’d recommend starting with the first episode which you can click on below.

When I was coddiwompling around the National Mall, I ran into a totem pole in a museum. I still find it an odd thing to take an object of religious and cultural meaning from the Pacific Northwest and place it in a museum as an object of aesthetic contemplation. Of course, this is the same thing we are doing when we do a St. Matthew’s Passion in a concert hall or when we sing a Negro Spiritual in a concert. We take an object that was originally conceived for use in worship, and we say, “OK, set the religious stuff aside for a minute. Just consider this for its artistic value.”

There is a lot going on in that ask. In worst case scenarios, I’ve seen musicians program and “explain” a Negro Spiritual as if the Spiritual’s primary value was as a cultural artifact and not as something of musical value in and of itself. It’s a sort of avuncular condescension that says, “We do this because it’s an important expression of black history — even though the music isn’t on the same level as Bach.” I don’t want to spend time unpacking the manifold problems of that attitude in this essay. I’m just saying that I’ve seen it happen.

Of late, what has interested me is how clearly some of the participants in this aestheticization of religious objects are so clearly ignoring the unspoken rules of the game. Id est: in the scope of a “secular” concert where religious music is being performed primarily for aesthetic consideration, I have religious friends who are quite clearly and consciously singing to Jesus. That is, they are worshipping in the middle of a concert that is purportedly a secular occasion.

My suspicion is that this has always been the case in the history of music — even in the other direction. Religious musicians have always been sneaking in a little worship in what is supposedly a secular context, and non-religious musicians have always been simply admiring the music for its aesthetic value even when they are playing it in the context of a service of worship.

In the past few years, a lot of work has been done to assail the formal categories of the sacred/secular, natural/supernatural, etc. The blame for the distinction is sometimes laid at the feet of the manual Thomist school of thought and sometimes at the feet of Cartesian Enlightenment thought. The basic idea is that once you conceive of “nature” as a purely mechanical process, in order to explain things that don’t fit the system (consciousness being one of the primary examples), you need to add a ghost in the machine to account for the spooky bits. This conception of spirituality as something added on to a more base and neutral reality results in dichotomies like “natural and supernatural.” (As David Bentley Hart has pointed out, this is still essentially what is happening in the pan-psychism of Christoph Koch and Phillip Goff even though they have been mashing it down to the sub-atomic level. It’s still starting from the mechanical and adding in the spiritual as something extra on top.) In musical terms, it’s suggesting that the aesthetic is the base level, and you can (or not) add in the spiritual element. You can have your brat with mustard or without. You can even put ketchup on it if you’re some sort of animal or Evangelical Christian that likes extra cheese in your spiritual life.

But, what if it’s not like that at all? What if there is no way to understand the St. Matthew Passion apart from actually participating in the spiritual element? What if there isn’t any big distinction between what is happening when “religious” and “non-religious” musicians play music? What if there isn’t a “super”-natural at all? What if the part we refer to as “above” or “beyond” the natural is actually all just mixed in together with it? (I wouldn’t mean that in exactly the same way that the pan-psychists do because I would tend more toward the Platonic side of things and suggest that the physical is originating from mind and not the other way around.) Another way of saying it might be: there isn’t a neutral space where you aren’t already making metaphysical claims of one sort or another. So if we are all already making metaphysical assertions, why do we pretend that we aren’t?

In any case, I’m suggesting that the categories of sacred/secular and natural/supernatural are like Hebrew vowels or training wheels on a bicycle. They help you frame some things and talk about them when you’re a beginner, but by the time you’re in third grade, you remove them.

I think it’s time to graduate to third grade and take off the training wheels and drop the vowels. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but I’m ready to start dreaming of a space where we all acknowledge that we are bringing metaphysical claims to our projects. We just need to learn how to get along when we disagree about those claims.

(This image is actually a small flock of black skimmers and not gulls.)

On my morning walk, I reached the part of the beach where the black skimmers were nesting, and a few gulls were lolling about in the shallow waves. There was a one-legged laughing-gull hopping along with the others. He was involved in the juvenile antics that make up the busy mornings of young gulls: pestering each other, splashing in and out of the surf, and all the while mewing and laughing. The entire time, he was unaware that he had only one leg. He also didn’t have any memory of how he came to only have one leg where his mates had two. He just had some vague notion that life was somehow easier at some point, but he couldn’t quite articulate how. And what did it matter when the chill morning air was so briny with expectancy and possibility?

At our choral soirée at St. Paul’s Episcopal KCMO, our octet sang my setting of Rilke’s poem “Lösch mir die augen aus.” The poem is from his Stundenbuch collection which are love poems to God written from the perspective of a monk. This poem in particular was originally written for a woman that Rilke was interested in, but when the relationship failed, the poem went to the Stundenbuch collection.

Here’s my translation:

Put out my eyes, I can see you. Throw away my ears, I can hear you. And without feet, can I go to you. And without mouth, I can still evoke you. Break off my arms, I hold you with my heart as with a hand. Stop my heart and my brain will beat. And if you throw fire in my brain, I will carry you in my blood.

You can follow along with the score here. There are some tricky sevenths for the sopranos because of the tessitura. The singers from the St. Paul’s octet are the best, and they took no prisoners. Unfortunately, the levels clipped a couple of times, but the performance is still stunning.

There was thunderous applause.

We did the encore.

Music and politics has made it back into the news again. If you haven’t been following the controversy, the brief version is: a high school band director in Wisconsin decided to do a piece celebrating a leader at Stonewall. He allowed students the option to opt out if they wanted to. The school board came down and said, “You can’t do the piece.” The music community went up in arms about it (well, to be fair, they got up in arms about it in the way that the musical community does which basically means a lot of social media posts.) At the same time that this was happening, I was made aware of a colleague in the choral community who was threatened by a parent because of “political programming” that was perceived as agenda driven and one sided.

I certainly don’t want to get into the weeds on political matters on this blog, but I think it would be good to clarify a few things in the discussion so that as you make your own conclusions, you can see how very complicated an issue it is. Here are my pseudo-Bloomian ratios for your consideration. (They aren’t really that, but I couldn’t think of a better name.)

1. Music is always political. Until relatively recently, all music was written by people. People are political. Sometimes music is overtly political like Judas Macabeus or the Eroica symphony. It has a specific political agenda to promote. Sometimes, it is not so overt, but something like the Byrd Masses had to have Elizabeth and not Edward in charge to happen. The point is, composers are people. People express their politics as well as other things in their writing. There isn’t some neutral, apolitical place where composers sit to write their music. All music and creative activity is political in some sense.

2. A composer’s intention is not the defining meaning for a political agenda. Without rehearsing the entirety of the intentional fallacy here, it’s helpful to remember that Berlioz sometimes did the Symphony Fantastique without providing the audience with the program. That is, the program is not a “key” that allows you access to the “true” meaning. In addition, just because a composer had a specific agenda doesn’t mean that the piece is later used in service of that agenda. Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man may have had socialist intentions, but people don’t always hear Marxism when a trumpet plays a B flat any more than hearing Judas Mac makes me patriotic for Britain in the Battle of Culloden. Carmina Burana may or may not be Nazi music depending on how you read it, but few people see it as Nazi music today — even though at one time it was most certainly seen as exactly that. That reputation was only helped by the pusillanimousness and fetid moral character of its composer. I used to play for a conductor who primarily associated the Carmina with Ozzy Osborne because of a concert he attended with his teenage son. So a composer’s intention and the compositions later use may be at odds.

3. We shouldn’t pretend that we aren’t doing something controversial when we program controversial music. There are many choir directors that program a lot of what I like to call “ACDA music.” The American Choral Directors Association, as an organization, tends to like music that is left leaning on social issues and somewhere to the right of Attilla the Hun on harmonic vocabulary. I don’t think it does anyone a service to pretend that there isn’t an actual agenda there. If you program a band piece celebrating Stonewall, you are making a statement. It’s best to own up to it and take a stand on your convictions. ACDA music really is left leaning in text and ultra-conservative musically. Band music that celebrates Stonewall really is making a statement. To pretend that a school board is overreacting is to assert that you really aren’t saying something important. That’s why most people shy away from controversy and offer milquetoast programming. It’s easier. So if you’re going to make a statement, own up to it.

4. While offering students the opportunity to opt out is a noble gesture to the importance of personal conscience, it’s not easy for a kid to do. In the same way that doing a piece about Stonewall really is making a statement about your convictions, offering a kid an opportunity to opt out is asking that kid to make a statement about their convictions in front of their peers. We are in the arts after all. It’s not like their Math teacher offers them the opportunity to opt out of polynomials. We are dealing with real stuff. I think kids should have an environment to develop and express their convictions, but that’s where it gets challenging because they will often express opinions that don’t align with your own. That band teacher placed kids (some of whom were likely 14 or 15) in a spot where they might be negotiating a narrow pathway between parents, teachers, and peers. That’s a lot to ask of a young person. I don’t personally have a problem with it, but it takes a very gifted teacher to make all students feel included when some of them are “opting” out because their parents made them opt out. That’s an awkward position for a young person, and we shouldn’t take it lightly.

5. School boards and administrators are almost universally dumb. In the recent Wisconsin case, one of the school board members said that political violence shouldn’t be celebrated in music and song. This is a typical comment from someone who doesn’t have any business commenting on the subject. Obviously, taken literally this would exclude any ensemble performing the National Anthem, the Wellington Overture, the Hallelujah from Judas Maccabeus, the 1812 Overture, any number of Te Deums, likely Pomp and Circumstance, Jupiter from the Planets, and I’d throw in Copland 3 just for fun. As for Shosty and Prokofiev, a lot of their music would be right out as well. I obviously don’t advocate political violence, but we don’t deal with the past by ignoring it in its complexity. We confront it head on and disagree with it and talk about it — the same way we do with Mark Twain’s use of the N word, the same as we do with the anti-semitism in The Merchant of Venice, the same way we do with Abraham Lincoln’s vacillating positions of slavery, and the same way we do with our own fathers and mothers and grandparents. We love them. We honor them, and we disagree with them.

6. Music offers ample opportunities in its own sphere to confront these issues. I’m off topic a little here (and repeating myself), but music under an expert director is about finding out a way to be yourself and make room for others that are different than you. Whenever you are in an ensemble, you have to negotiate issues of rhythm, pitch, and tone with other people that aren’t you. One way people deal with it is by hiding who they are. They withhold part of themselves in order to fit in better. That’s not real music making. You have to be yourself in order to make music. You also have to make room for others. Another way people deal with the problem is by taking up too much space and attempting to buffalo those around them. That’s not real music making either. You have to be yourself AND you have to make room for others to be themselves. All of that happens just in the attempt to tune a single chord. The conclusions you draw from that interaction have an enormous effect on how you relate to the world around you. There are a million political lessons you can learn just from tuning a chord in an ensemble.

I would never ask a musician to suppress their political beliefs, and I’m not expressing my opinion on the cases mentioned above. I don’t know those kids in Wisconsin or their situation, and I can easily imagine a scenario where doing something controversial was necessary. I can also easily imagine a scenario where doing something controversial was attention seeking. I really feel like that isn’t any of my business. They have to take their stands in their situation just like I have to take my stands in mine. I’m just offering frameworks for thinking about the problem.

As always, many thanks to Deanna Ray Eberhart for her performance.

Here’s the link to the first song.

Here’s the link to the second song.

Here’s the link to the third song.

Here’s the link to the fourth song.

Here is the text along with my translation:

Du siehst, ich will viel.

Vielleicht will ich alles:

das Dunkel jedes unendlichen Falles

und jedes Steigens lichtzitterndes Spiel.

Es leben so viele und wollen nichts

und sind durch ihres leichten Gerichts

glatte Gefühle gefürstet.

Aber du freust dich jedes Gesichts,

das dient und dürstet.

Du freust dich aller, die dich gebrauchen

wie ein Gerät.

Noch bist du nicht kalt, und es ist nicht zu spät,

in deine werdenden Tiefen zu tauchen,

wo sich das Leben ruhig verrät.

You see, I want much.

Perhaps I want everything:

the Dark each unending instance

and each ascent/climb light-shaking play.

So many live and desire nothing

and are through their easy judgments

Are led by slippery feelings.

But you rejoice yourself in each face

that serves and thirsts.

You rejoice in all, that use you

as a piece of equipment.

Yet you are not cold, and it is not too late

To plunge in your increasing deep,

where Life peacefully reveals itself.

It is my wont, on a normal day, after my prayers and ablutions are accomplished to begin with a Bach Chorale. I sketch out a Roman Numeral analysis. I sing the bass line while playing the soprano, alto, and tenor part. Then, I sing the tenor part while playing the soprano, alto, and bass. I continue the process mutatis mutandis, and then I sing the chorale vertically. That is, I compact the chords into an octave, and sing them beginning with the bass note. I find that this discipline gives me plenty of musical thoughts to contemplate during the day. I completed all 371 Bach harmonizations in the Riemenschneider, and the book (with my accompanying notes and analysis) were lost in a fire. I was still teaching in the summer at the time, and my grad students bought me a new copy of the Riemenschneider, and I’ve been working through the book again.

There is a curious phenomenon that occurs when I contemplate #198/307 Christus, der uns selig macht. When I first hear it, I make the assumption that the opening chord is a tonic chord. In fact, if you’ve spent enough time with the Bach chorales, you will recognize this opening as a trope in his harmonizations. There are many chorales that start with a similar pattern on a Roman Numeral I chord. If that is the case, then my ear hears the second half of beat two as V7/IV. Beat three is then a iv chord.

This is the first point of disorientation. While not completely out of the question, a borrowed iv from the minor seems anachronistic and something I would be more likely to find in the harmonies from 100 years later than this music. By the downbeat of the second measure I hear something that doesn’t make sense at all (V65/bIII?), and something truly remarkable happens.

While the music is still happening, I somehow reorient myself and reinterpret everything I’ve just heard. That is, while I’m hearing different chords, I somehow go back in time and recalculate what the previous chords meant. This happens to such a degree that on a subsequent trip through the music, I find it difficult to hear the first chord as anything but a V. This sort of mental time travel where I am hearing one chord and somehow imagining another one is very difficult to articulate.

To be sure, I could accept some sort of Smithian functional extravagance and allow a multiplicity of Roman numerals. You can argue that it is a sort of I - iv | V - i happening simultaneously. You can teach yourself how to flip back and forth between the two readings like the famous wife/mother-in-law optical illusion above, but that’s not really my experience of the music. The experience really is something more like what happens when you read that old linguistic saw, “The old man the boat.” At first you can’t find the verb, so you have to go back and reinterpret it in a way that makes sense. An adjective becomes a noun. What was a noun becomes a verb, and the boat sails off into the accusative case. The difference is, with the sentence, all the re-parsing happens after the fact. With the music, it somehow happens that I retroactively “re-hear” the music in the midst of the process.

My analysis above attempts to communicate that lack of simultaneity. The part in red all happens during the first two beats of the second measure. Something like this happens in the other direction when you improvise. You are playing one chord and imagining another one. How exactly this is possible is something I can’t really articulate. I’m not sure that I could actually audiate the chord in solfegge while I am hearing or playing a different chord. It is much more like imagining a mood or a certain degree of tension that is slightly different than the one that you’re in.

Whatever it is, this musical “time travel” and reorientation isn’t quite audiation or maybe it is. I’m not really sure what it is, but it is fascinating and unique aspect of musicking.

As always, many thanks to Deanna Ray Eberhart for her performance.

Here’s the link to the first song.

Here’s the link to the second song.

Here’s the link to the third song.

Here is the text along with my translation:

Ich bin auf der Welt zu allein und doch nicht allein

genug,

um jede Stunde zu weihn.

Ich bin auf der Welt zu gering und doch nicht klein

genug,

um vor dir zu sein wie ein Ding,

dunkel und klug.

Ich will meinen Willen und will meinen Willen

begleiten

die Wege zur Tat;

und will in stillen, irgendwie zögernden Zeiten,

wenn etwas naht,

unter den Wissenden sein

oder allein.

Ich will dich immer spiegeln in ganzer Gestalt

und will niemals blind sein oder zu alt,

um dein schweres schwankendes Bild zu halten.

Ich will mich entfalten.

Nirgends will ich gebogen bleiben,

denn dort bin ich gelogen, wo ich gebogen bin.

Und ich will meinen Sinn

wahr vor dir. Ich will mich beschreiben

wie ein Bild, das ich sah

lange und nah,

wie ein Wort, das ich begriff,

wie meinen täglichen Krug,

wie meiner Mutter Gesicht,

wie ein Schiff,

das mich trug

durch den tödlichsten Sturm.

I am too alone in the world and yet not alone

enough,

to hallow each hour.

I am too little in the world and yet not small

enough,

to be before you as a thing,

dark and clever.

I want my will and want my will to accompany

the way to the act;

and want in stillness, sometimes hesitant times,

when something nears,

to be among the wise

or alone.

I want always to mirror you in your complete form

and want never to be blind or to old,

to hold to your difficult, fluctuating picture.

I will unfold myself.

Nowhere will I remain bent,

for where I am bent, there I am lying.

And I want my meaning/mind/sense

true before you. I want to describe myself

as a picture, that I saw

for a long time and near,

as a word, that I apprehend,

as my daily pitcher of water,

as my mothers face,

as a ship

that carries me

through a deadly storm.

Like some desiccated, vegetal Ozymandias, a shattered visage is all that remains. What was once an eccentric event from a mysterious and unknown mandolin slicer is now a faded daguerreotype. Whatever moisture remained in the original is now a papery, flaky remnant. A certain dryness has set in that can only be the harbinger of its eventual and certain vanishing, but even now this brittle exoskeleton stands as a rebellious testimony of a cucumbery life that well exceeded any normal bounds.

It is now more than five months since my original post on the cucumber. When even our fragile viscosity has passed, what does it mean? When the “sneer of cold command” has absquatulated into desuetude, and all that remains is the stretched out sands, how do we come to terms with the vestiges of our wonder at the oddities of cucumbers sticking to windows?

All of which is to say, it will soon only live within my memory, and its significance will be present for me in a way in which it will not be to others. However “cool as a” it was in its corporeal existence, its relative temperature under pressure will now only exist in my memory.

I can look on this motion from reality to memory as the tragedy of existence, but it’s not the only way to tell the story. Anitya might be a perfect way to describe my cucumber in the sublunar realm, but, sub specie aeternitas, I like to think that its eternal presence and presentness in my memory can be a foretaste of some other form of existence where nothing is ever lost.

“These things do I within, in that vast court of my memory. For there are present with me, heaven, earth, sea, and whatever I could think on therein, besides what I have forgotten. There also meet I with myself, and recall myself, and when, where, and what I have done, and under what feelings. There be all which I remember, either on my own experience, or other’s credit. Out of the same store do I myself with the past continually combine fresh and fresh likenesses of things which I have experienced, or, from what I have experienced, have believed: and thence again infer future actions, events and hopes, and all these again I reflect on, as present. “I will do this or that,” say I to myself, in that great receptacle of my mind, stored with the images of things so many and so great, “and this or that will follow.” “O that this or that might be!” “God avert this or that!” So speak I to myself: and when I speak, the images of all I speak of are present, out of the same treasury of memory; nor would I speak of any thereof, were the images wanting.” - St. Augustine’s Confessions

As always, many thanks to Deanna Ray Eberhart for her performance.

Here’s the link to the first song.

Here’s the link to the second song.

Here is the text along with my translation:

Ich glaube an Alles noch nie Gesagte.

Ich will meine frömmsten Gefühle befrein.

Was noch keiner zu wollen wagte,

wird mir einmal unwillkürlich sein.

Ist das vermessen, mein Gott, vergieb.

Aber ich will dir damit nur sagen:

Meine beste Kraft soll sein wie ein Trieb,

so ohne Zürnen und ohne Zagen;

so haben dich ja die Kinder lieb.

Mit diesem Hinfluten, mit diesem Münden

in breiten Armen ins offene Meer,

mit dieser wachsenden Wiederkehr

will ich dich bekennen, will ich dich verkünden

wie keiner vorher.

I believe in everything that has never been said.

I will set free my faithful feelings.

What no one has yet been willing to risk,

Will at once become automatic for me.

Is that presumptuous, my God, forgive me

But I want to say something to you by it:

My best powers will be a driving force,

without anger and without hesitation

The way children love you.

With these floods, with these flowings,

in the wide arms of the open sea,

with these growing repetitions

i will confess you, i will make you known

like no one before.

Here is the text and my translation.

Du, Nachbar Gott, wenn ich dich manches Mal

in langer Nacht mit hartem Klopfen störe - -

so ists, weil ich dich selten atmen höre

und weiß: Du bist allein in Saal.

Und wenn du etwas brauchst, ist keiner da,

um deinem Tasten einen Trank zu reichen:

ich horche immer. Gib ein kleines Zeichen.

Ich bin ganz nah.

Nur eine schmale Wand ist zwischen uns,

durch Zufall; denn es könnte sein:

ein Rufen deines oder meines Mund - -

und sie bricht ein

ganz ohne Lärm und Laut

You, neighbor God, if/when I sometimes disturb

you

in the long night with hard knocks

it is because I rarely hear you breathe

and I know: You are alone in the hall.

And if you need something, there is no one there,

to satifsy your groping with a drink.

I always hear. Give a small sign.

I am always near.

Only a narrow wall is between us,

through chance; for it can be:

a call from your or my mouth --

and it breaks in

completely without noise and racket