Usually, I write reviews about music composed by other musicians. This time, though, I’ll be writing about my own music—not a review, of course, but rather a guide on how to listen to Elegy Sonata.
The main trigger for composing this sonata was the passing of my father. But I don’t want to paint a romanticized picture where I receive a phone call about his death, sit behind the piano, and immediately compose a piece. No, it was a process. It took time to complete the sonata, and the idea behind it goes back long before that moment.
The core of Elegy Sonata is death—not in a horrifying or even purely mournful way, but from an existential perspective. It’s a pondering on the fact that death is what gives life meaning. It defines life, setting its boundaries, shaping our perception of existence. Whether it’s our own mortality or the loss of a loved one, death forces us to see things in perspective. We may not constantly think about it, but it lingers in the background—an inevitable part of life. Consciously or subconsciously, we are all aware of it. Throughout history, countless works of art have explored death. For me, Gustav Mahler’s symphonies stand as some of the most profound musical reflections on death and existentialism. And in Elegy Sonata, I, too, took it as my central theme.
The idea of nonexistence is tied to the concept of nothingness—something our minds are incapable of fully grasping. As a child, I remember trying to imagine nothingness, to think of “nothing.” My trick was to picture a TV screen displaying white noise. I would focus on the screen and then mentally turn off the TV, letting the sound and image fade away, hoping to reach a state of pure emptiness. But I knew it wasn’t truly nothing. I was still thinking about nothingness, still trying to capture it in my mind.
Miyamoto Musashi in his masterpiece "The Book of the Five Rings" says:
The void is nothingness. By knowing what exists you can come to know what does not exist. That is the void.
That does not mean one should learn all which exist, that is just impossible. But it's more about the personal void, meaning that my nothingness is different from you and yours is different from others. Our nothingness, our void, is defined by the things we know, by the border of our knowledge of existence. And to my mind, since the void is not limited, if one knows more about what exists, that does not make their nothingness smaller, but on the contrary, the more you know what exist, the more nothingness you have.
These ideas lingered in my conscious and subconscious for years, resurfacing in different ways, until tragedy struck. Losing my father brought the concept of nothingness back to the surface. A man was here, and now he is no more. He crossed the border beyond the reach of the living. This loss gave rise to mourning, regret, pain, fear, and numbness.
Few things make us feel as powerless as death. In many situations—political struggles, social injustices—we may feel unheard, yet there’s always hope that our voices, however small, might trigger a ripple effect. But death? Death is absolute. There is no fighting it, no changing it. I am writing these words now, but in some years, someone may read them while I am already gone. Mahler wrote symphonies thinking about death and now we listen to them knowing he has been consumed by death as well.
For thousands of years, we have tried to make sense of death by creating gods, afterlives, and alternate realms of existence. For many, these stories provide answers, offering solace and certainty. But for others, like myself, the search for meaning continues. And so, when I finally started putting the sonata together, one question dominated my thoughts: How does nothingness sound? What is the sound of death?
Of course, this is impossible to answer. Even if I were to compose absolute silence—like John Cage’s 4'33"—there would still be sound: the ambient noise of the concert hall, the shifting of seats, the pianist's movements. No matter how much silence I create, it is still something. It is still silence, not nothingness, not death.
So, like the composers and artists before me, I chose to capture the feeling of death instead—the emotions it evokes, rather than its essence.
The sonata begins with Epilogue. If there is one thing I know about nothingness, it is that time does not function the same way there as it does in our world. So, beginning with an epilogue rather than an ending felt natural—just as natural as anything else in nothingness. The first movement is heavily influenced by Chopin’s Prelude in E minor, a short and deceptively simple piece that contains everything necessary for perfection. I often use it in my classes as an example of how to compose music. In its simplicity lies immense depth; in its short span, we are constantly drawn toward E, our home, yet never quite arriving—until, at last, the final chord resolves. It is a journey.
The day my father passed away, I sat behind my piano and played. I let my emotions guide me, and what emerged eventually became Lament, the second movement of the sonata.
Remnant, the third movement, attempts to capture the melancholy of facing nothingness. It is a paradox: death makes perfect sense, yet it does not. It is the most natural thing in life, yet it remains inexplicable. It feels like it should be simple to understand, yet it is impossible to truly grasp.
Finally, the fourth movement, Tempest, embodies the inevitable anger and fear that arise from helplessness in the face of death. But this is not anger in the conventional sense—it is sorrowful, it is dark, it is neither a storm nor a rage; it is tempest.
I used the Piano Poem form as a conceptual framework for creating this sonata, meaning that the music is narrative—I’m telling a story. It is bound with drama, yet because the story exists in nothingness, the order of the movements is interchangeable. Unlike a classical narrative, where the story follows a fixed sequence, here the main melody binds the movements together without anchoring them in a specific order. In this story, time does not exist, and events can be perceived from any perspective. And what is the story I’m telling? Well, much like Gustav Mahler and his symphonies, I’m not presenting a literal story but rather an abstract interpretation—one that invites you to listen and form your own perception.
In the end, what can I say about Elegy Sonata? To me, it feels more like a diary entry, a personal log of emotion. It is not meant to be a definitive statement on death, nor a fully formed philosophy, but rather an intimate glimpse into my thoughts on mortality. Elegy is not my first exploration of existential themes, nor will it be my last. But ultimately, I hope that you—the listener—will find something meaningful in the music.
Remember not to take it literally. That is the beauty of music. What I felt about death might evoke a sense of life in someone else. Trust your emotions. Let the music wrap around you. Listen, and simply be.
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