For score and parts, contact Jay directly

When I Look Back: Theme and Variations (2017)

Song cycle for 8 male voices. 24 minutes. Text from interviews conducted by the composer with people with lived experience of mental illness. Commissioned by Renaissance Men and National Alliance on Mental Illness Massachusetts.

When I Look Back is featured on a forthcoming album by Renaissance Men alongside Mussorgsky, Brian Wilson, Ives, Tchaikovsky, and Nirvana, to name a few — find more info here!

When Renaissance Men artistic director Eric Christopher Perry first asked me to write for this concert, the project looked very different. I had ideas for theatrical stylings, extended techniques, maybe even some staging and lighting design, and a few musical gestures, but no text.

Initially, after toying around with a few truly horrible ideas (including having people write or call in anonymously to record their moments of psychological crisis — which, fortunately, I eventually realized was effectively setting up a hotline with no support system), and after some grueling talks with my mother regarding my own motivations for tackling the subject, we stumbled on the idea of crowdsourcing the texts I would use via mental health support groups. I got in touch with everyone I could think of, including the Multi-Service Eating Disorders Association (MEDA), addiction recovery centers, and several branches and peer groups of NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness). There are histories of mental illness among my family and friends, so I turned there too.

It was only about three interviews in that I realized what I'd been saying the whole time: I feel like people ought to be approached at face value, as humans, rather than through labels (say, "bipolar," or "addict") — but I hadn't conceived the piece that way until I started really talking to people. I had been afraid people would misread my intentions as dismissive or, in fact, steeped in stigma. What I definitely did not want to do was write the classical-music stereotype of mental illness: the mad scene, the "other," the spooky. No, I wanted human. It all became obvious — quilting, hiking, lovers: these WERE the stories. If I wanted the audience to hear these people, to humanize them, I would present them, flawed but beautiful, relatable, in exactly their own words.

So where the piece ended up is the words of the speakers, as they spoke them to me. There are stories about manic episodes, periods of anxiety, shock treatments, and so on — but there is also the moral ambiguity of the recovering drug addict who still prides himself on hustling but just tries to be nice; there is the story of the man who is dogged by his own self-conception; there is the redemptive message of the recovering alcoholic who has journeyed long and arrived at self-acceptance. This is the story of people who have been hurt and healed, who have lost and loved. This is the human story.