The Neighboring Village by Gregory Spears

The Virginia Chorale performs The Neighboring Village by Gregory Spears. The piece was commissioned by The Virginia Chorale for its 40th Anniversary Season and
In Honor of Artistic Director Charles Woodward.
The Neighboring Village received its premiere performance on April 20th, 2024 at Galilee Episcopal Church in Virginia Beach, VA.
Conducted by Charles Woodward
Recorders: Bianca Hall and Michael Bjorklund
Audio Recording: Aaron Dunn
Audio Mix: Rick Jacobsohn
Text:
Franz Kafka, trans. Alexander Rehding (used with permission)
The neighboring village.
My grandfather used to say: “Life is astoundingly short. Now, in recollection, it appears so compressed that I
barely fathom, for instance, how a young person can decide to ride to the neighboring village without being
afraid that - setting aside unfortunate accidents - even the timespan of an ordinary, happily unfolding life is nowhere near enough for such a journey.”
Program Notes by Gregory Spears:
THE NEIGHBORING VILLAGE consists of three-and-a-half settings of a two-sentence short story by Franz Kafka, and a musical enactment of the telescoping of time that the story describes. The first setting is one minute in length. Setting two is twice as long at two minutes. Setting three is twice as long as that at four minutes. Setting four is slower still. It would be eight minutes if allowed to continue at the pace set, but ends mid-sentence, only half-way through the text.
As the narrative becomes less taut in each setting, the story’s meaning is expressed more purely through form - the short journey/story becomes, in these settings, increasingly eternal - the destination of the village receding farther and farther into the distance. The final setting is just partial, as at that point we can imagine the process of telescoping continuing into infinity.
The story’s riddle makes me think of the classic nightmare of walking down a hall that keeps stretching, making it impossible to reach the end. Or perhaps a less fraught parallel could be drawn to the idea of the Mise en abyme where an image is embedded within itself, like a fun house mirror extending into infinity. I’ve always been intrigued how all these ideas could translate into music and language. A process of repetition and telescoping is hinted at by Kafka in the sentence structure of the little story. Sentence one is the narrative in its most concise form: “Life is astoundingly short.” Then in sentence two, the story is retold, expanded and extended by a bunch of clauses into a thicket of grammatical eddies. The language becomes more difficult to follow as the sentence structure meanders. It reminds me of Thoreau or Proust, where sentences demonstrate something about the mysteries of life through their structure as much as through the words themselves.
As a great admirer of Kafka, I would dare to suggest that this story is a warm up to his novel The Castle - which, in my fanciful reading, can be understood as another (massively expanded) telling of this tiny little story. In the novel “K." spends a lifetime trying to travel an even shorter distance, from a village gate to the castle at its center. Pretty soon we realize the protagonist will never reach the center of town. In fact, the longer the story continues the further away the conclusion seems, like the endlessly deferred dinner in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or like Zeno’s tortoise and hare paradox. The Castle just stops mid-sentence, like the final setting described above.
Perhaps most importantly, I find the story strangely moving and I want to communicate that in music. In my reading, Kafka seems to offer us two linked perspectives: While we can hope to achieve almost nothing in life (there’s both not enough time and endless digressions to face), in the end everything we could want - perhaps even total abundance, timelessness - lies in the expanding distance between here and the very next village.
Publisher: Schott Helicon Music Corporation